CriterionCast

Walter Parkes To Remake Carol Reed’s The Fallen Idol

One of the filmmakers that I have on a ‘no touch’ list when it comes to remakes, happens to be getting that very treatment.

According to Deadline (via /Film), Men In Black 3 producer Walter Parkes is working on a new remake of The Fallen Idol, the first pairing of filmmaker Carol Reed and writer Graham Greene. The film was followed up by their brilliant film, The Third Man, and follows a young man who accidently witnesses the death of his family’s butler’s wife, and automatically considers it a murder.

Fallen Idol is a 1948 film, and based off of a short story entitled The Basement Room, written by Greene himself, and will see a modern take thanks to Parkes and David Farr, the writer behind Joe Wright’s upcoming film, Hanna.

The film will be updated to present day India, and showing the happenings through the eyes of an 11 year old American boy. Other than that, most plot points will stay the same. Personally, while Carol Reed is a favorite filmmaker of mine, and I’m not at all interested in seeing this film modernized, I do really dig the screenplay that Farr crafted for Hanna, which plays on the written page like one hell of an action packed thriller, so this may be pretty interesting.

If you can find it, the film got a Criterion release a while back, but is now out of print, so you may have to hunt it down, but it’s a Criterion release, so it’s worth a purchase without a doubt.

Source: Deadline / /Film

Joshua Brunsting

Josh is a critic, a member of the Online Film Critics Society, a wrestling nerd, a hip-hop head, a father, a cinephile and a man looking to make his stamp on the world, one word at a time.