All of which is by way of preface to my highlighting my favorite aspect of Carol Reed's and Graham Greene's generally excellent The Fallen Idol (which they made just one year before The Third Man). That is the treatment of space, which perhaps owes something to Orson Welles's example in The Magnificent Ambersons. Welles, of course, is often credited with a hand in the direction of The Third Man, which I think is unfair to Reed. Everyone involved acknowledged what Welles did bring to that party -- an aura of legend and some inspired contributions to his own dialogue (the cuckoo clock comment in the Ferris wheel scene, memorably).
Reed was a terrific director in his own right. That he had learned from Welles seems certain -- no director then or now could be exposed to Citizen Kane and Ambersons without learning something. One lesson Reed may have learned in part from Welles is how, through inspired mise-en-scene and editing, to construct a very solid-seeming and memorable building from scraps of film.
Both Fallen Idol and Ambersons center on a house with a monumental staircase. Welles uses the staircase and landings of the Amberson mansion for effects reminiscent of Shakespearean theater:
Welles also has Stanley Cortez's camera "prowl" the mansion, both in crowded (the famous ball) and empty states. (The latter shots were largely excised by the studio during their infamous butchering of the movie, although we have stills to show what Welles and Cortez were getting at.)
Reed's interiors are brightly lit compared to Welles's. Much of the action of The Fallen Idol (including the crucial plot event) takes place around the staircase. We are often put in the position of looking down to the vivid checkerboard floor below:
To an unusual extent, characters in The Fallen Idol are observed from above and from behind, often as they are in movement from one point to another. This has the effect of familiarizing us with the spaces they inhabit, so that we develop an acute sense of where the rooms in the ambassador's home are in relation to one another and how one gets from here to there. As in Ambersons, the interior architecture becomes something of a "character" in its own right; certainly one comes away from both films with more of a precise spatial impression than most other movies provide.
POSTSCRIPT: Among my less favorite elements of The Fallen Idol is, unfortunately, the central performance by child actor Bobby Henrey as the Francophone ambassador's son, who idolizes the butler Baines (Ralph Richardson, quite wonderful). Henrey was well-coached by Reed, and his performance doesn't drive me as crazy as John Adames's little boy in John Cassavetes's Gloria, but I find it grating in a somewhat similar way. Child performances are really hit or miss. Imagine Jack Clayton's The Innocents or Stanley Kubrick's The Shining with poorly cast children; they would be much lesser films. (A moment of intense interrogation of Henrey in The Fallen Idol looks forward to a similar scene with the much better Martin Stephens in The Innocents.)
I do understand that Reed utilizes Henrey's obnoxious quality purposefully -- especially in the final scene, where little Phile, having taken an adult's instruction a little too literally, runs around trying to get everyone's attention after matters are "resolved." I may never be able to get the way he wails "Baines!!" out of my skull.
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