Carol Reed film, with a screenplay by Graham Greene, about an unobtrusive servant (a beautifully nuanced Ralph Richardson) in the French embassy in London, who has a special bond with the ambassador's mischievous little boy and a hush-hush extramarital link with a French typist (the too glamorous Michèle Morgan) and suddenly, suspiciously, a dead wife. The film fits between Reed's more flamboyant, better-known, but not by any means better Odd Man Out and The Third Man (perhaps it ought to have been renamed The Fallen Man), and the cooler emotional climate seems to agree with him, although the hawk-eyed, hovering wife approaches the stature of a fairy-tale Wicked Witch, and the boy's nocturnal flight in his pj's into glistening wet Expressionistic streets gives him a momentary kinship with the fugitive Odd Man and Third Man, and the fake-Hitchcock suspense-building of the final half-hour tends to be more exasperating than exciting. Some, however, of the subjective camera angles from the boy's point of view, all throughout, are fully worthy of Hitchcock. With Bobby Henrey, Sonia Dresdel, Jack Hawkins, Bernard Lee, Dora Bryan. (1948) — Duncan Shepherd