Graham Greene in Boston

This month, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts is hosting the series Words in Motion: Graham Greene as a Screenwriter, celebrating the British author’s important contribution to the medium. On offer tonight is Carol Reed’s 1948 film The Fallen Idol, which marked the first collaboration between the author and the director—who would later work together again on The Third Man and Our Man in Havana. Greene adapted the screenplay from his short story “The Basement Room,” about a precocious young boy and his butler who find themselves embroiled in a murder investigation after the butler’s wife falls to her death. The film, one of the great works of British cinema, examines the vulnerability and isolation of being a child amid the harsh realities of adulthood. If you’re in Boston, you can see The Fallen Idol tonight on 35 mm; if not, learn more about it by reading an essay by Geoffrey O’Brien, written for our release of the film, and watch the trailer below.