It’s a good long time since I last watched The Fallen Idol, the 1948 film directed by Carol Read, based on the short story ‘The Basement Room’ by Graham Greene, who was also one of the writers of the screenplay.
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| Almost unbearable, so not unbearable, so the suspense is actually bearable. |
My memories of course are patchy but I do recall the staircase. Note to self: no good ever comes from living in a house that has a staircase like this.
And I do recall the young lad who’s at the centre of the film wandering around London at night in his pyjamas.
I thought it was pretty good film, but only now however many years after seeing the it, I got around to I reading the Graham Greene short story on which it’s very, very loosely based.
The first thing to note is that everything in the film is much posher than in the book. The house has become an embassy, Baines the butler who’s a bit of a rough diamond in the book has become Ralph Richardson, the little boy Philip has become Philippe and developed a French accent, but the stuff about walking is oddly consistent between book and film.
In the story, Philip ‘wouldn’t go upstairs to get his cap but walked straight out across the shining hall into the street, and again as he looked this way and that, it was life he was in the middle of.’
Then, ‘He was wearing pyjamas and bedroom slippers when he came up into the square but there was no one to see him. He explored the garden: it didn’t take long, a twenty yard square of bushes and plane tress, two iron seats, and a gravel path and a padlocked gate … But he couldn’t stay …’
Then gradually he loses his nerve and becomes frightened. ‘At first he feared that someone would stop him. After an hour he hoped that someone would.’
Finally he sits on a step and cries, and a policeman sees him, takes pity on him and takes him to the police station, though that doesn’t make matters any better at all.
Once when I was a kid, probably about the same age as Philip/Philippe, I got separated from our family group on our day at the seaside, I think it was probably Bridlington. It wasn’t night and I wasn’t in pyjamas, but I’ve never felt so lost and hopeless, and I did start crying, but nobody, least of all a policeman, took pity on me. I simply wandered around hopelessly and eventually spotted a member of the family, my cousin Margaret. Of course she hadn’t even noticed that I’d gone missing.
