USA
3*
Director:
Alfred Hitchcock
Screenwriters:
George Tabori
William Archibald
Director of Photography:
Robert Burks
Running time: 95 minutes
In I Confess, Alfred Hitchcock tries to pull the wool of one problem over our eyes so we are blinded to the easy resolution of another. He suggests the problem of a priest who would rather risk hell on earth than hell in the afterlife is perfectly credible and would inject a valid fear in the viewers of his film. He is only about half-right.
Father Logan, a very handsome priest (it’s Montgomery Clift, after all) in Quebec City, is visited by a German refugee, Otto Keller, late one night. Keller is distressed, and the previous scene had shown us the reason: Keller has murdered a lawyer named Villette and unburdens himself in the confessional to Father Logan. Relieved of this weight around his neck, Keller keeps working at the rectory, where he runs into Father Logan every day, and so does his wife Alma, who also knows about her husband’s dark secret. But Father Logan can’t tell anybody about this confession because in his capacity as priest, he is bound by the confessional privilege, in the same way as a doctor, to respect the confidence his interlocutor places in him.
Of course, this secrecy is bound to become an issue, and this process has a few sides to it. Father Logan becomes complicit in keeping very important information from the police. Now, he has the training to do this with legion personal secrets which his parishioners confide in him, so Hitchcock turns the screws by, firstly, having Keller commit the murder wearing a cassock, so as to avoid suspicion, and secondly, having Logan keep his own secret, which is revealed halfway through. This personal secret puts him in a lot of trouble because it could easily result in his reputation being tarnished and therefore his credibility undermined, even though we know, from the very first scenes, that he is not the one who committed the murder.
This theme of guilt would play well with a 1950s Catholic audience, but when seeing it today, most viewers would be puzzled, if not outraged, by the main character’s decision to keep a secret (about a mortal sin, no less) rather than protect himself by telling the truth. Rather than honourable, this just seems weak. It is a situation whose gravity and absurdity is compounded by the disgust Keller evokes in us by constantly hovering around Logan, making him more and more uncomfortable. Keller clearly has no regard for the actions taken by Logan to protect him and instead tries to pin the murder on Father Logan — his patron and the man who saved him and his wife from misery by providing them with jobs at the church.
The beauty of Quebec City isn’t fully utilized either, and many street scenes could have taken place anywhere. The famous Château Frontenac does appear now and again, and the first glimpse we have of this magnificent building, during the opening credits, has it under dark clouds, a perfect visual metaphor for the film’s plot, and, unfortunately, its execution. One very smart visual move is the stitching on Father Logan’s cope: in one of his first scenes, with his back turned to us, we see a big cross across his back — evidently, the one that he prepares to bear for the rest of the film.
Clift is as good as he always is, which is to say in a class of his own, but he seems a bit too stable, too certain of himself: While he conveys some distress when he clasps his face, his voice never wavers, even under the immense strain of his seemingly hopeless situation.
I Confess is a failed film for Hitchcock, since there is very of the little dark humour that otherwise made many of his films so enjoyable. The murder takes place before the start of the film, which admittedly happens in other Hitchcock films as well, but the notion of our hero being framed for a crime he didn’t commit is something Hitchcock does not successfully exploit. Instead, he opts for flashbacks in soft focus (!) and a love story that, despite its considerable running time in flashback, never lives up to much in the present. And although they have picked a priest as their prime suspect in the case, has it not occurred to anybody that his silence in many key scenes — most significantly his testimony in court, when, with the ridiculous flourish of a fade-out, an important part is done away with by means of an ellipse — is the result of his duty as a priest to keep matters of confession in the confessional?