Made a couple of years before his masterpiece “The Third Man”, Carol Reed's “The Fallen Idol” for most of its running time is a beguiling fairy tale of childhood magic and angst. The film covers a few days in the life of the privileged nine year old Phillipe who is the son of a foreign ambassador based in London. He’s a lonely child, spending most of his time by himself in the huge Embassy while his father is either busy or away. His mother who is never seen has been away for months being treated for an untold illness, and Phillipe's only two friends are his small pet garden snake McGregor and his beloved Baines the majestic butler played by the great Ralph Richardson. There is terror and danger in the young boy’s life mostly caused by the housekeeper and wife Of Baines who is straight out of a Grimm fairytale. Mrs. Baine played with rich nasty gusto by Sonia Dresdel is always on her husband or Phillipe's case running the beautiful embassy like a Nazi storm trooper. The story hinges on an affair that Richardson is having with the light, lovely and beautiful Julie a secretary at the embassy played by the very beautiful and appealing Michèle Morgan. One day Phile (that is what he is called) sees the couple in a tea shop having a romantic rendezvous and soon the deception and deceit is upon them and even though we know no good can come from this, we still hold out hope that our fairy tale will have a happy ending, (it actually does). Phile adores Baines and Baines adores Julie and they all hate Mrs. Baines, who of course finds out about the affair. There are two superb sequences in the film that I love, one is a beautiful nighttime game of hide and seek, played after a day at the zoo among the white sheet covered furniture in the temporary closed embassy that Phile, Baines and Julie play while the dreaded wife is supposedly away for a few days taking care of a sick relative. This game of our childhood is scary and threatening anyway and in this sequence we hold our breath because we know the evil that lurks. The other great sequence which follows the hide and seek scene is a brilliantly filmed nighttime escape by Phile in his pajamas and bare feet through the glistering cold London night. Reed shoots the sequence like a nightmare (and indeed that's what it feels like) as the young boy is finally rescued by a policeman and brought to the station where he is befriended by the local kind prostitute who seems to spend a lot of time there. This is the only comical and very British scene in the film. The cast of course is great, and special mention should be made of Bobby Henrey the young unprofessional child who plays the pivotal role of Phile, who is both charming and annoying and who by all accounts drove the director crazy during the filming. Filling out the cast is a bevy of wonderful British actors, Jack Hawkins Denis O Dea, Torin Thatcher and Bernard Lee as members of the police force who arrive late in the film. My only problem with this marvelous film is that it ends too abruptly and seems a little rushed. The screenplay which is tight and minimal is by Graham Greene who based it on his short story. With beautiful cinematography by the great Georges Périnal. Also of note is the elaborate embassy set designed by Vincent Korda.
Made a couple of years before his masterpiece “The Third Man”, Carol Reed's “The Fallen Idol” for most of its running time is a beguiling fairy tale of childhood magic and angst. The film covers a few days in the life of the privileged nine year old Phillipe who is the son of a foreign ambassador based in London. He’s a lonely child, spending most of his time by himself in the huge Embassy while his father is either busy or away. His mother who is never seen has been away for months being treated for an untold illness, and Phillipe's only two friends are his small pet garden snake McGregor and his beloved Baines the majestic butler played by the great Ralph Richardson. There is terror and danger in the young boy’s life mostly caused by the housekeeper and wife Of Baines who is straight out of a Grimm fairytale. Mrs. Baine played with rich nasty gusto by Sonia Dresdel is always on her husband or Phillipe's case running the beautiful embassy like a Nazi storm trooper. The story hinges on an affair that Richardson is having with the light, lovely and beautiful Julie a secretary at the embassy played by the very beautiful and appealing Michèle Morgan. One day Phile (that is what he is called) sees the couple in a tea shop having a romantic rendezvous and soon the deception and deceit is upon them and even though we know no good can come from this, we still hold out hope that our fairy tale will have a happy ending, (it actually does). Phile adores Baines and Baines adores Julie and they all hate Mrs. Baines, who of course finds out about the affair. There are two superb sequences in the film that I love, one is a beautiful nighttime game of hide and seek, played after a day at the zoo among the white sheet covered furniture in the temporary closed embassy that Phile, Baines and Julie play while the dreaded wife is supposedly away for a few days taking care of a sick relative. This game of our childhood is scary and threatening anyway and in this sequence we hold our breath because we know the evil that lurks. The other great sequence which follows the hide and seek scene is a brilliantly filmed nighttime escape by Phile in his pajamas and bare feet through the glistering cold London night. Reed shoots the sequence like a nightmare (and indeed that's what it feels like) as the young boy is finally rescued by a policeman and brought to the station where he is befriended by the local kind prostitute who seems to spend a lot of time there. This is the only comical and very British scene in the film. The cast of course is great, and special mention should be made of Bobby Henrey the young unprofessional child who plays the pivotal role of Phile, who is both charming and annoying and who by all accounts drove the director crazy during the filming. Filling out the cast is a bevy of wonderful British actors, Jack Hawkins Denis O Dea, Torin Thatcher and Bernard Lee as members of the police force who arrive late in the film. My only problem with this marvelous film is that it ends too abruptly and seems a little rushed. The screenplay which is tight and minimal is by Graham Greene who based it on his short story. With beautiful cinematography by the great Georges Périnal. Also of note is the elaborate embassy set designed by Vincent Korda. 
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A truly wonderful film in every department, acting, music and photography, and one of my all time favourites superbly directed by Carol Reed. Eight years old Bobby Henrey’s debut performance as Phillipe is truly outstanding – even to this day, its naturalism remains unparalleled. As one film critic so rightly observed, it is the great unpolished child performance of all time. The scene where Phillipe desperately tries to get the police to listen to him in the hope that by telling the truth, he can save his beloved Baines from the gallows and the police completely ignore him as if he isn’t there is almost too heartbreaking to watch and to listen to. “Oh, please listen to me! You must listen to me! It will only take a moment and it will put everything right!”, Phillipe pleads with them. It makes me feel so concerned for this desperate little boy, who still loves Baines even after he’s discovered that all Baines’ stories about his past heroics in Africa were lies. No film made before it had featured such a scene involving a young boy and it hasn’t been done since, either. It’s unique in the history of the cinema. “The Fallen Idol” was nominated for two Academy Awards, for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay and won the BAFTA award for Best British Film of 1948, as well as major awards at the New York Film Critics Circle and the Venice Film Festival.
Bobby Henrey was born in France in June, 1939, and was brought up in both France and England and so was not only bi-lingual, but spoke English with a French accent. This was soon to stand him in good stead at the age eight in 1947, when Carol Reed was looking for the right boy to play Phillipe in his new film, tentatively entitled “The Lost Illusion”. By chance, Sir Alexander Korda, head of London Films, based at Shepperton Studios, where the film was to be made, had seen a photo of Bobby on the dust jacket of a book entitled “A Village in Piccadilly”, written by Bobby’s parents, Robert and Madeleine Henrey, and showed the photo to Carol Reed, who said that the boy looked exactly how he imagined Phillipe to be. He contacted Bobby’s parents and arranged with them for Bobby to take a screen test. But there was a problem. Bobby was in France, spending his summer school holidays on his maternal grandmother’s farm in a remote part of Normandy. However, Korda arranged for a private plane to take Madeleine Henrey to Normandy to pick up her son. The pair would then be flown back to London where Bobby would do the screen test and then be flown back to Normandy the same day. All went as planned and both Korda and Reed were impressed with the result. Bobby was just what Reed had been looking for. He didn’t want a professional child actor who had been to stage school and picked up bad acting habits there, he wanted a boy who had never acted before and whom he could coax into giving a completely natural performance.
All the exterior location scenes were filmed first. The first scene to be filmed, on Wednesday, September 17th, 1947, was Bobby running across the road outside the embassy in Belgrave Square as he runs after Baines. The filming took an incredible eight months…a long time by the standards of the day…and eventually cost a staggering (at that time) £400,000…during which Carol, a man of infinite patience with children and child actors, persevered with Bobby to the extent that he coaxed out of him the truly amazing and wonderful performance you see on the film.
Unlike many child stars, Bobby Henrey made a success of his adult life. He went to Eton College and Oxford University and later married and had a family and, when he was 25, they moved to America, where he became an accountant and is presently a chaplain to a hospital in Greenwich, Connecticut. To this day, 64 years later, he can’t explain how he came to give such a wonderful performance in the film and puts it all down to Carol Reed’s highly professional direction of him.
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