Word: filming
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Fallen Idol," an English production based on a short story by Graham Greone, was chosen as England's best film of 1948, and has been collecting rave reviews here. Most of the praise is deserved. The photography is subtle and brilliant, a fresh realistic idiom for the moviegoer lulled by the stylized American technique, that, together with masterful directing, (by Carol Reed, director of Odd Man Out), and superb acting, raise a weaker plot to excellent drama...
...scene is set at the French embassy in London. The ambassador is away, and his seven-year-old son Felipe is living there in care of the butler, Baines, and his wife. Thanks to the skillful acting and directing, one sees the whole first part of the film from Felipe's point of view: his idolization of Baines and their comradeship, the ceaseless tension between Baines and his paranoid wife, Baines' subsequent affair with one of the secretaries at the embassy...
What saves the film is the production-even the "thriller" section is handled with subtlety and fine acting. More important, the film was done with a skillful sense of humor. The dialogue is bright and witty, the comic relief sophisticated and highly effective. Throughout the tenseness of the investigation, one of the policemen persists in talking to the embassy in lumbering French, although they always reply in perfect English. And the come logic of a child's mind is played for its full charm. Bobby Henrey as Felipe gives the top performance of a well-acted movie. There is none...
Last summer, when British Movie Director Michael Powell and Producer Emeric Pressburger set up their cameras in Britain's green Shropshire to film Gone to Earth, starring Jennifer Jones, the horsy set at the market town of Much Wenlock (pop. 14,149) were only too delighted to get into the act. Most of them had been too busy hunting all these years to read novels; they did not know much about the book's antihunting message or its sad ending in which the rapacious foxhounds chew up the heroine as she tries to save her pet fox from...
There is a proper way to see this film: forget the plot, its inconsistencies and implausibilities, and condemn the few points where farce takes over. Just sit back and savor the conversation of a lot of very amusing people...