The New Pictures

The Fallen Idol (Korda; S.R.O.), when Sir Alexander Korda released it last year in London, was a tremendous hit. Most of the enthusiastic raves were for a nine-year-old, towheaded actor named Bobby Henrey. The rest of the praise went to Author Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter), who supplied a fascinating story, and to Director Carol Reed (Night Train), who for sheer virtuosity outdid himself. Most of the uproar, it turns out, was solidly justified.

The idol who takes a tumble in the story is Baines (Ralph Richardson), an embassy butler in London. Baines is detested by his tight-lipped wife, idolized by the ambassador's young son Felipe (Bobby Henrey), and loved by an embassy typist (Michele Morgan) whom he in turn loves. Out of this emotional tangle, Author Greene has built a clever, suspenseful tale. Borrowing Henry James's trick of using the eyes of children as peepholes into adult passions, Greene centered the story on little Felipe.

Director Reed has brilliantly followed suit. As the emotional tensions mount, it is Felipe who hears, half hears, guesses at and finally misunderstands their meaning. When Mrs. Baines accidentally falls to her death, Felipe is certain that Baines has killed her; his lies to protect his friend all but cost Baines his neck. Ironically, Baines is saved by a piece of evidence that only Felipe knows is worthless.

Idol has many achievements to its credit: handsome, visually exciting sets, carefully pitched performances by Richardson and Michele Morgan, and assorted humorous bits of British character acting. But its outstanding achievement is Director Reed's handling of Bobby Henrey. To establish the child's-eye view of the story, he has turned his cameras loose in Felipe's own waist-high world, bounded by embassy balustrades and the butler's well-creased pants. To sharpen the effect, the sound track, like a child's half-focused attention, sometimes catches only half the adult talk. The rest is lost in half-heard mumblings.

Director Reed also does well with his interpretation of the physical Bobby Henrey. For once, a child movie actor is made to act with all the awkward, sham-Dling, sleepwalking unawareness that normal children have when they are not caught in the glare of klieglights or an adult eye. The result is a subtle, absorbing drama of natural child behavior. A brilliant tour de force as entertainment, Idol could also be a useful object lesson on how to restore he Hollywood child to childhood.

Portrait of Jenny (Selznick), originally a wispy, sentimental fantasy by Robert Nathan, has become in Hollywood's hands a piece of purest fustian. The yarn it spins oncerns a young painter (Joseph Cotten) who falls in love with a twelve-year-old sprite of a girl named Jenny (Jennifer Jones). Though she has been dead for years, Jenny goes right on popping in & out of Cotten's life. What is more confusing, she is a few years older every time she appears and soon reaches an age where it is respectable for Gotten, who is aging only normally, to make love to her.

Bemused and befuddled, the young painter begins a portrait of Jenny which eventually wins him fame. He is just about to propose marriage when his attractive bundle of ectoplasm rushes off to relive her original doom: death by drowning in a New England hurricane. Gotten follows her, and in a pat repetition of the hurricane holds Jenny in his arms for a last few minutes on the storm-lashed rocks before ending up flat on his back in a Cape Cod fourposter.

Producer David O. Selznick and Director William Dieterle have spent a lot of time, money and talent on Portrait--most of it in the wrong places. They have tugged and hauled at its slender story with heavy-handed insistence, and puffed up its whimsical metaphysics with outsized pretensions. The photography, equally pretentious, compounds the error. Trickily lighted, and strained through even trickier scrims and niters, Jenny is, for the most part, merely confusing. Most startling trick: the hurricane sequence, drenched in an overlay of deep sea-green, suddenly jumps to an enlarged screen and a ferociously noisy sound track, and then subsides into a reddish sepia fadeout.

The principals, caught in the midst of such studio stunting, appear pallid and unreal. Miss Jones--what can be seen of her through the gauze and murky lighting--gives a softly modulated and monotonous performance; Mr. Gotten gives a tarely competent one. Some of the bit parts--notably David Wayne, Felix Bressart and Albert Sharpe--come brightly to life momentarily before they are lost again in the cotton batting.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.