LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Carol Reed: Fallen Idol
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After they had completed The Fallen Idol (1948), director Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene dined with Alexander Korda, who was anxious for them to work on a new film together. Although they agreed on a setting - post-war Vienna - they were stuck for a story until Greene produced an old envelope on which years before he had written a single sentence:
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Children see the darndest things in British director Carol Reed’s playful 1948 thriller The Fallen Idol, currently in rerelease for the first time since its 1949 American debut. The child in question is Phillipe (squeaky Bobby Henrey), the short-pants and sweater-vested son to a London-based ambassador who has the run of the embassy one weekend while his father is away picking up Phillipe’s mum. Phillipe is a precocious, playful towhead who clamors about the three-story estate, fetching his pet snake McGregor from a balcony and sneaking down to the servants-quarters basement to chat with his pal, the butler Baines (Ralph Richardson, in yet another of his wonderfully subdued performances). Phillipe may be young, but he sees enough to know something is amiss between Baines and his stern wife (Sonia Dresdel). And while not old enough to understand the word "affair," Phillipe senses something dodgy going on between Baines and embassy typist Julie (the right handsome Michèle Morgan).
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The 1948 drama The Fallen Idol is the third film that I’ve seen by British filmmaker Carol Reed. I’d previously watched the dreadful Oscar-winning musical Oliver! (1968), the stolid Charlton Heston biopic of Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy (1965), and now this. True, I’ve ... seen The Third Man, the 1949 thriller attributed to Reed, though I’ve always hedged upon taking the stance that it was Reed’s film alone and not an Orson Welles film merely bearded by Reed.
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Fallen Idol