When Baines' wife is found murdered and Baines is implicated, Philippe, an impressionable young boy idolizes Baines, tries everything to point the investigation away from Baines but incriminates him instead in what was, in fact, an accidental death.
The Fallen Idol stands as one of the great films about looking, about perspective, about the way we watch and interpret not just film plots but each other.
... one of the great films of innocence lost and a powerful portrait of the powerlessness of children in the adult world, where they are so often ignored or discounted.
As a portrait of the sometime destructiveness of innocence and as a sharp fresco of post-war Britain, this movie is a little masterpiece, an idol that has never fallen.
Chris Vognar
Dallas Morning News
June 29, 2006
It's a masterful and unsentimental child's-eye view of the cold, hard adult world.
