The Fallen Idol
Director: Carol Reed
Year Released: 1948
Rating: 3.0
A precocious boy befriends the seemingly demure house butler (Ralph Richardson), only to discover that the butler is carrying on an affair with another woman behind his (nasty) wife's back; when the wife ends up dead at the bottom of the stairwell, it seems a lot like murder. It's so well-filmed and so well-performed it's hard to find fault with it; two of my minor quibbles are with the annoyingness of the kid, and the other is the lack of dimension granted the 'malevolent' wife's character, who, we're only to presume, dies because she's so very miserable.
