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From: blp Category: Films Date: 21 August 2006 Time: 12:14 PM Review: Carol Reed's 1948 adaptation of a Graham Greene short story, 'The Basement Room' with Ralph Richardson as Baines, a good natured and urbane butler in the London French ambassadorial residence, watched adoringly as he goes about his duties by the Ambassador's young son Phil. It takes a long time to get going, with little tow-headed Phil meandering lostly about the big house, completely unenthused by the prospect of his frequently absent mother's return, periodically calling out to 'Baines!' and playing with a tiny pet snake he calls MacGregor. Baines and Macregor are apparently his only friends, both relationships hindered as much as possible by Mrs. Baines, housekeeper wife of the above, who's murderous towards MacGregor and sadistically authoritarian towards Phil. She appears incapable of kindness, perpetually casting all Phil's actions as those of a chronically naughty boy and arbitrarily denying him pleasures, apparently out of a distaste for pleasure in general. This sour asceticism may be what's wrecking her marriage, with Baines conducting an illicit affair with a younger, more sweet natured French secretary. Phil catches them in a Brief Encounter type cake-shop tryste, complete with clipped desperation, when he escapes the nursery and Mrs. Baines' prohibition against an afternoon walk by running down the fire escape at the back of the house. The whole thing's a masterclass in plotting, probably still studied by student scriptwriters before they go out and feel lucky to get jobs writing The Bill. Elements fold neatly into the activity only to recur later with new significance. Contingencies converge in a fatal, geometrically perfect pattern. Its tidiness could almost be fatal to the film too, except that it's an armature for some incredibly droll, slow-burn wit and a brilliantly mindbending symposium on the morality of lying. As I say, it's slow to get going, but this is a good thing. It takes its time, waiting until about half way through to put in a joke, then, when it does, during a trip to the zoo, casually delivering a corker. I like films that take their time because they mimic the process of getting to know things in the non-fiction world, being unsure about them at first and gradually getting a clearer picture. This film is like this and it's also explicitly about it, depicting a profound, almost Rashomonlike level of uncertainty. Even if the mystery of its central, enigmatic death is eventually solved, it's largely through luck and flaw, making a garbled nonsense of the characters' attempts to convey a moral method to the increasingly bewildered Phil, with slippery touchstones like 'secret, 'friend' and, er, 'truth' revealing the tenuousness of just about everyone's sense of reality. You worry a little for the hapless kid caught up in this tangle, but he's no sentimentalised innocent suffering undue trauma. In fact, he's pretty amoral, driven largely by loyalty and happy to cover up a murder, and enough of a pain in the arse that you're glad when the detective at the end shuts him up with a cunning implicit threat. At the same time, he is being traumatised and in the same way you were, by the awful, mundane realisation that however much you want to do everything right to please the adults, it will never ever be possible. Brilliant.