The Fallen Idol

Having written about one of my favourite films yesterday, I have turned up this fascinating article which the Guardian printed in December 2001.

David Hare shows he is on the side of the angels after all with these two quotations about The Fallen Idol:

"It's a great, overlooked masterpiece of the British cinema. The more you read about Reed, the more you realise that he is our William Wyler - the director who seems able effortlessly to go to the heart of his subject, without ever drawing attention to himself. He just knows where the story should go, and that's the rarest gift of all in cinema."

and

"the scene between the lovers in the tea shop is the most painful image of repressed love in the British cinema - the way they fiddle with the cakes and stare into each other's eyes is infinitely more moving than anything in Brief Encounter. Richardson's desperate vulnerability and his desire not to let himself down in the child's eyes is very profound."

The author Claire Armitstead also interviewed Bobby Henrey, the child star of the film:

He went on to make one other "attrocious" (sic.) film, Karl Hartl's The Wonder Kid, before being sent off to boarding school.

His only subsequent brush with showbusiness was when, as a student at Oxford, he was invited to appear on [Dora] Bryan's This Is Your Life. He spent his career as an accountant in America, before retiring to work as a hospital chaplain in Greenwich Village,