The Grahame Greene penned, Carol Reed directed 1948 film The Fallen Idol is being remade. The original starred Ralph Richardson as the family butler who develops a father and son relationship with his employer’s son. The film was made one year before the duo filmed the classic The Third Man.

The Fallen Idol is an intriguing look into the view of a six year old boy who thinks he’s witnessed a murder. The murder he thinks he’s witnessed is committed by family butler Baines, who the boy idolizes. To complicate matters the boy has also seen Baines with a young woman. Baines says the woman is his niece but we know she’s his refuge from his shrew of a wife, the family’s housekeeper. In trying to keep the butler’s secrets, the boy, Phillipe, makes everything more complicated.

Walter Parkes and his partner Francis McDonald will be remaking the film, changing the setting from post war London to present day India. The boy will be an American living in a colonial mansion. A colonial mansion? Are there many American families living in colonial mansions in India? Am I out of touch with some new trend?

The boy will now be eleven instead of six. Parkes says their aim in making the boy eleven is to make his sexual awakening more potent. My response to that is basically WTF?! The boy doesn’t have a sexual awakening in the original and really the sexual awakening of an eleven year old?!  Honestly, I’m not seeing the point of adding an eleven year old boy’s sexual awakening to the story. And I don’t even want to find out how he’s awakened.

At the end of the day we have a really good classic film that probably isn’t crying out to be remade. But hey, maybe it will be better than it sounds.