Classic 'Fallen Idol' views suspense through child's eyes

Graham Greene wrote aching morality tales for grown-ups, and how ingenious he was to tell one of them from the point of view of a child.

''The Fallen Idol," the 1948 drama written by Greene (based on his 1935 short story, ''The Basement Room") and directed by Carol Reed, seems in many ways a warm-up for the classic ''The Third Man," the thriller the two made the following year. ''Idol" is gripping and troubling enough on its own, though: a Hitchcockian thriller with human conundrums to go with the suspense. It opens in a new 35mm print at the Kendall Square today; attendance is mandatory.

Instead of Joseph Cotton's credulous American writer in ''The Third Man," the central figure in ''Idol" is an actual child: a 9-year-old boy named Philippe (Bobby Henrey) whose father is an ambassador from a French-speaking country. The boy lives in the London embassy and spends much of his time on his own; mother's in the hospital and father's preoccupied with business. In this void, Philippe comes to idolize Baines (Ralph Richardson), the embassy butler, and we quickly see why: the dapper, friendly servant provides entertainment, grand stories of world adventure, and, most crucially, attention.

Phil, as Baines calls him, keeps a small pet snake behind a loose brick on a second-floor balcony, but there are larger snakes about, morally and metaphorically. Baines is married to a neurotic bully of a wife (Sonia Dresdel), who takes her anger out on the boy as well as her husband. Escaping her wrath one day, Phil skips down the fire escape and wanders the neighborhood, coming upon Baines and Julie (Michele Morgan), a pretty young embassy secretary, in a cafe. They're holding hands and whispering to each other tearfully, but the boy doesn't notice, as long as Baines buys him a sweet.

So Phil is inaugurated into the hushed world of grown-up secrets, which he understands literally and not too well. As Baines says to his wife, ''Some lies are kindness," and the drama in the movie's first half is in watching an unprepared boy coming to grips with subterfuge. He's terrible at it, of course, and this makes things worse, so much so that when a falling bobby pin awakens Phil from his slumber one night, he looks up to see the crazed face of Mrs. Baines hissing, ''Where are they?" It's one of the great freakout shots in British cinema.

At this point, ''The Fallen Idol" starts playing by more familiar movie rules. There's a death, followed by the appearance of a raft of Scotland Yard detectives (among them such familiar faces as Jack Hawkins and Bernard Lee, ''Q" from the James Bond films). There's also a delicious bit of suspense that Hitch might have envied: an incriminating note folded into a child's paper airplane that sails slowly down the embassy staircase to land at the feet of the chief inspector. (Those stairs are pleasingly but schematically symbolic, as are the checkerboard tiles of the grand entryway.)

Poor Phil: To whom does he owe the truth? His beloved Baines, even if he thinks the butler did it? The police? The corpse? The truth keeps switching sides, as does whatever it is the grown-ups expect of him. There's so much that sails over his head like that airplane, including a maternally inclined prostitute in a police station who, on learning the runaway boy's identity, coos, ''Oh, I know your daddy!" ''The Fallen Idol" is cruel in the way it confronts Phil's small mind with the endless mysteries of adult responsibility -- but it hints that a child's naiveté can be a lethal weapon on its own.

Formally, the movie's a lasting pleasure: Reed's incisive direction; Greene's easy yet weighted dialogue; the farseeing deep-focus photography of Georges Perinal; Vincent Korda's luxuriant sets. Sir Ralph, in one of his very few starring roles in a movie, gives Baines the weary sharpness of a man who's smarter than his social betters yet knows enough never to show it.

Baines gets shunted to the side in the final minutes of the movie, though, as he and we wait with held breath to see what Phil is going to tell the police. The look on the boy's abjectly confused face says it all: Welcome to Greene-land.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.