Old Yorker

  • I Confess

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Alfred Hitchcock (1953)

    Late one night, in the confessional of a Catholic church in Quebec, a priest hears the church caretaker admit to killing a man whose nearby house he was attempting to rob.  Father Michael Logan, devout and conscientious, is bound by the seal of confession not to disclose what he hears from the other side of the grille. Otto Keller, the killer, is unscrupulous in trying to implicate Logan.  The priest, suffering in necessary silence, goes on trial for murder.  Alfred Hitchcock and Montgomery Clift, the star of I Confess, got on badly.  The tensions between their very different creative approaches, in combination with Hitchcock’s Catholicism, make for an uneven but a fascinating drama.

    Hitchcock’s notorious dictum that ‘actors should be treated like cattle’ (made early in his Hollywood career) was no doubt designed to provoke but a tongue-in-cheek remark often reflects something of the speaker’s underlying view, and this one surely did.  James Mason, who got on well enough with Hitchcock to make three films with him (two more than Montgomery Clift did), felt that he regarded actors as ‘animated props’.  In a 1967 interview with Bryan Forbes at the National Film Theatre (as it then was), Hitchcock recalled the Method actor who told him that ‘We’re taught using improvisation.  We are given an idea and then we are turned loose to develop in any way we want to’.  Hitchcock’s rejoinder was ‘That’s not acting – that’s writing’.  Although that exchange doesn’t refer specifically to Clift and I Confess, Hitchcock’s response to Forbes’s next question does:

    ‘I was doing a film with Montgomery Clift.  He turned up with the scene completely rewritten.  I said to him, “Has it occurred to you that there is another actress in the scene?”  I wouldn’t let him do it.’

    Clift, as well as being the first high-profile Method actor to play a Hitchcock lead, already had form when it came to rewriting dialogue.  It was a habit he kept up throughout his career:  he’d done it on The Search (1948) and would do it for his small but memorable role in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), and both films benefited.  Hitchcock’s words imply that Clift was interested in changing only his own lines in I Confess, regardless of Anne Baxter, who played the main female role, though that hadn’t been the case with the dialogue he originated for The Search.  Even so, I Confess wasn’t the best film in which to try to improve the script.  Clift understandably wanted the piece to be a character study but the material, despite the moral dilemma that drives the plot, is a rough-hewn crime melodrama.

    The source material is a 1902 French stage play, Nos deux consciences, by Paul Anthelme (which Hitchcock had seen performed in the 1930s) but George Tabori’s screenplay sets the action in the present day and I Confess, shot in black-and-white by Robert Burks, has a more decidedly noir visual atmosphere than most Hitchcocks.  Otto Keller (O E Hasse) and his wife Alma (Dolly Haas), who is Father Logan’s housekeeper, are German immigrant refugees.  Logan fought in World War II before becoming a priest.  In his pre-War life he had a romance with Ruth (Anne Baxter), whom he’d known since childhood.  After he joined a Canadian infantry regiment, they wrote to each other until Michael stopped returning Ruth’s letters; she married Pierre Grandfort (Roger Dann), a member of the Quebec legislature for whom she’d been working as a secretary.  Ruth and Michael met up as soon as he returned to Quebec but, throughout the twenty-four hours they spent together then, she didn’t tell him she was married.  They were walking near a country estate when a storm broke out and forced them to shelter overnight in a summerhouse in the grounds of the estate.  They were found there next morning by Villette (Ovila Légaré), the owner of the place and the man who, years later, is killed by Otto Keller.  Police investigations, led by Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), reveal that Villette had been blackmailing Ruth, threatening to reveal to her husband what Villette saw and (wrongly) assumes went on in the summerhouse.  After that night, Ruth didn’t see Logan again ‘until the day Michael was ordained’; even then, it seems they had no contact with each other.  That changed, as Larrue discovers, after Ruth, in desperation, phoned Logan to tell him she was being blackmailed, and they met up on the night of Villette’s murder.

    The script repeatedly fails to clarify motive.  Keller, as well as being church caretaker, is Villette’s gardener.  When he kills his employer, Keller is dressed as a priest – whether purely for purposes of disguise or because he’s already intending to frame Logan remains unclear.  If Keller really meant only to steal from Villette and works for him anyway, it’s surprising there weren’t easier ways of carrying out the theft than turning up at his house at dead of night in clerical garb.  Keller is Catholic enough to feel compelled to beg Logan to hear his confession to murder immediately, even though, in the meantime, he has planted a bloodstained cassock among the priest’s belongings.  Why does Michael stop replying to Ruth’s letters while he’s on active service?  And why, since she didn’t tell him she was married, do they break off contact after the summerhouse episode?

    Montgomery Clift could hardly be blamed for trying to probe Father Logan more than the script does and although he hit a brick wall in Hitchcock, he still gives a fine performance:  in Clift’s hands – and face – the pressure of Logan’s tormenting secret is gripping.  What’s more, a dual conflict on Hitchcock’s part makes I Confess genuinely distinctive in his oeuvre.  The first conflict is between his conception of the actor’s function and his appreciation of acting talent.  Clift’s Methodology vexed Hitchcock but you get the sense that he was intrigued by the resulting portrait – not least because he respected the priestly calling and was disinclined to diminish the gravity of Logan’s plight.  There’s also a conflict, though, between Hitchcock’s religious background and his film-making instincts.  Much of the direction of I Confess is, like its protagonist, soberly controlled.  This works well in the trial scenes, where the defendant’s reticence in the witness box is dramatically eloquent.  Thought-provoking, too:  would a priest (as the whole set-up of the story requires) really violate the sacramental seal if he disclosed that, and when, he heard a named individual’s confession – without revealing details of what was confessed?

    In the end, though, Hitchcock the cinematic entertainer can’t keep his impulses in check quite as well as Logan does.  The film might be more powerful if it ended in the courtroom albeit the climax to the trial is pretty bizarre.  In answer to ‘How say you – is Michael William Logan guilty or not guilty of murder?’ the foreman of the jury first explains their verdict:

    ‘While we attach grave suspicion to the accused, we cannot find sufficient evidence to prove that he actually wielded the weapon that killed Monsieur Villette.  Therefore, our verdict is not guilty.’

    Discharging Logan, the judge chips in to record his ‘personal disagreement’ with the verdict.   These damning remarks pave the way for Logan to be mobbed by an angry crowd as he leaves the courthouse; for the distraught Alma Keller, who knows the truth, loudly to protest that the priest is innocent; for Otto Keller, fearing what she’ll say next, to shoot his wife dead; for Larrue suddenly to cotton on; and for a melodramatic chase sequence through Quebec’s historic Château Frontenac hotel, which culminates in a stand-off between Keller and police marksmen.  En route to the (otherwise deserted) ballroom where this takes place, Keller shoots a hotel kitchen employee.  Cornered in the ballroom, he accuses Logan, who tries to reason with him, of breaking the seal of confession and shoots at him too.  As he does so, Keller takes a bullet from a marksman.  He asks for forgiveness as he dies in Logan’s arms.  It’s as if the siren call of Dmitri Tiomkin’s garish, hyper score finally got the better of Hitchcock.  The concluding action comes so thick and fast there’s barely time to register the post-trial shootings as fatal consequences of Logan’s noble silence.

    I Confess also devotes too much time to flashbacks of Logan’s romance with Ruth and their tortured, furtive meetings in the immediate aftermath of the murder.  Anne Baxter’s acting is limited and predictable compared with Clift’s though far preferable to the crude overplaying of the murderer and his victim (especially Ovila Légaré – just as well he’s not on screen for long).  Brian Aherne (as the Crown Prosecutor) and Roger Dann are easier to take.  Karl Malden isn’t at his best but Larrue, to be fair, isn’t much of a role.  Although there’s little coverage of Logan’s relationship with the two other priests with whom he lives, Father Millars (Charles André) and Father Benoît (Gilles Pelletier), the latter’s bicycle is a better running gag than might be expected.  The bike is kept in the house, to Millars’s exasperation; it’s an effective moment when it noisily topples over as the domestic atmosphere reaches a peak of tension through Logan’s predicament.  Another good detail, late on, is the woman eating an apple in the crowd outside the courtroom.  The hint of someone enjoying her day out nicely counterpoints the hyperactive hotel chase to come.

    20 April 2022

  • Saraband (TV)

    Old YorkerTV review

    Ingmar Bergman (2003)

    As this website’s home page admits, amnesia is a main reason for keeping a record of the films I’ve seen and I first saw Saraband before I was writing reviews regularly (not to say anally).  I shouldn’t be surprised to have remembered very little of the film – Liv Ullmann startled by a chiming cuckoo clock early on, Erland Josephson’s dead-of-night panic attack near the end, and next to nothing in between.  I was surprised, though – this is Bergman, after all – and that revisiting Scenes from a Marriage earlier this month didn’t trigger further memories of the older versions of Ullmann’s and Josephson’s characters, Marianne and Johan, in this belated sequel.  The only other thing I recalled about Saraband was thinking it wasn’t much good.  Watching it again has done more than confirm that view:  I’ve a good idea now of why Bergman’s swansong didn’t leave a stronger impression first time around[1].  It’s a fallacy to suppose that it’s about the same two people whose relationship made Scenes from a Marriage, despite its faults, so absorbing.

    The lack of connection between the two pieces is reflected in three ways.  First, Saraband isn’t, as its supposed predecessor was, a virtual two-hander:  Marianne and Johan have hardly more screen time than two of the other characters in the story.  Second, Bergman is less concerned with the relationship between the former married couple than with Johan’s relationships with these two other characters, and, eventually, the effect of those relationships on Marianne’s feelings about one of her children.  Third, Johan is biographically not the man he was.  A couple of important things have changed for Marianne, too.

    In the magazine interview they give at the start of Scenes from a Marriage, the husband and wife disclose their ages as forty-two and thirty-five respectively.  They tell the interviewer that they got together after Marianne’s first, short-lived marriage and loss of a baby, and the end of Johan’s affair with a pop singer.  In Saraband, meeting again for the first time in decades, they have to remind each other how old they now are.  Fair enough but he says he’s eighty-six, while she says she’s sixty-three.  It’s possible that Johan is expressing how old he feels but just as likely that Bergman means the characters now to be closer than they previously were to the ages of the actors playing them.  (Although the seven-year difference in the earlier film didn’t seem implausible, Erland Josephson was actually fifteen years older than Liv Ullmann.)  What’s more, Johan has a son, Henrik (Börje Ahlstedt), who’s nearly the same age as Marianne and of whom no mention was made in Scenes from a Marriage, and a nineteen-year-old granddaughter, Karin (Julia Dufvenius).  Karin was the name of one of Marianne’s and Johan’s two daughters in Scenes; the other was Eva.  They’ve now turned into Sarah and Martha.  Johan is still their father though he acknowledges he knows nothing about what they’ve been doing for the last three decades.

    These factual discrepancies might have served to signal how people and relationships change – or how much a long-estranged couple might forget about their former life – if Bergman had continued to focus on Marianne and Johan. Since he doesn’t, you’re left wondering why he didn’t just reunite Ullmann and Josephson to play a different once-married pair.  In monologues addressed to camera at both ends of the film, Marianne sits alone at a table piled with photographs – that is, with memories – but she and Johan say hardly anything about their past together.  Although Marianne still practises family law, her role in one-to-one conversations with Johan, Henrik and Karin brings to mind, rather, the psychiatrist that Liv Ullmann played so memorably in Bergman’s Face to Face (1976).  Johan’s Scenes from a Marriage life is pretty well expunged by the legacy that Marianne explains in the film’s opening words:

    ‘Johan became a multi-millionaire in his old age.  An old Danish aunt who had been a renowned opera singer left him a fortune.  Once he became financially independent, he left the university.   He bought his grandparents’ summer house – a run-down chalet in an isolated area near Orsa.’

    It’s to this summer house (now refurbished) that Marianne comes early in the film after deciding, following the death of her second husband, to renew contact with Johan.  From what they both say on her arrival, the visit is expected to be short.  In the event, Marianne stays for what seems to be a matter of months – until the tensions within Johan’s family tensions have fully played out.

    Johan seems to have inherited from the rich aunt not just money but a passion for classical music, which also governs the lives of his son and granddaughter (who live together nearby).  Henrik, an orchestra conductor and organist, is perennially insolvent.  He begs his father, who detests and despises him (the former feeling at least is mutual), for an advance on his inheritance in order to buy Karin a Fagnola cello ahead of her forthcoming conservatory audition.  While Henrik is away conducting in Uppsala, Johan contacts the cello dealer independently and, for good measure, informs Karin that the head conductor of the St Petersburg orchestra, who happens to be an old friend of Johan’s (!), has proposed that Karin join the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki.  Also during her father’s absence, Karin discovers a letter that Anna, his late wife, wrote Henrik shortly before she died.  In it, she urged him to relax the control he exerts over their daughter, who is also his cello pupil.  Henrik returns from Uppsala having lost his conducting job and tries to persuade Karin to perform a concert of Bach’s Cello Suites with him, including the Sarabande from Suite 5.  Karin in effect thwarts both sides in the power struggle between her father and grandfather when she eventually decides to study in Hamburg.

    The musical interests he shares with the characters may not be the only element to derive from Bergman’s own preoccupations.  Saraband carries a dedication to ‘Ingrid’, presumably Ingrid von Rosen, his last wife, who died in 1995.  Anna, whose death occurred two years before Marianne’s visit and the events outlined above, appears only as a face in a photograph yet she’s strongly present in the narrative.   She’s just about the only thing on which Johan, Henrik and Karin seem to agree:  all three loved and were distressed to lose her.  From the photo frame, she seems to be reviewing, in sorrow more than anger, the emotional mayhem now raging within the family.

    Perhaps Bergman is also, and not for the first time, soul-searching about his relationships with his own children.  One of Marianne’s daughters is (as far as her mother knows) happily married, living and working in Australia; the other daughter, Martha, as Marianne explains in the prologue, ‘lives in a home, sinking in the isolation of her illness – I visit her now and then but she doesn’t recognise me’.   After she returns from her stay with Johan, Marianne goes to see Martha (Gunnel Fred) in the institution:  unseeing and virtually catatonic, Martha brings to mind the seriously disabled younger daughter neglected by her mother in Autumn Sonata (1978) in favour of a successful career as a classical concert pianist.  Recounting this visit to Martha in what are Saraband‘s closing words, Marianne says that she thought of Anna’s maternal example and felt ‘for the first time in our lives … that I was touching my daughter’.  The words chime with the last line of Through a Glass Darkly (1961):  the son of an emotionally distant father exclaims incredulously that ‘Papa spoke to me!’  (Through a Glass Darkly also features Bach cello music on the soundtrack.)  It’s even possible to see in her father’s determination to control Karin’s artistic destiny echoes of Bergman’s relationships with younger actresses in his films, some of which were also sexual relationships.  If Bergman is blurring these two things in Saraband, the result is troubling, implying as it does incestuous feelings on Henrik’s part.  In one scene, he and his daughter are in bed together; shortly after her departure for Germany, Henrik attempts suicide, though, as with most things in his life, he fails.

    Although she feels sorry for Henrik, Marianne can’t help sharing Johan’s dislike of him, though she doesn’t voice it as his father does.  Liv Ullmann is marvellous in these moments of cold, controlled anger, splendid, too, when warmer emotion rises in her cheeks and eyes as she finally describes her visit to Martha.  At other times, Ullmann isn’t as wholeheartedly truthful as she usually is:  when she first arrives at the summer house or goes into a church where Henrik is playing heavenly organ music, she moves unnaturally slowly and her wondering gaze is uncharacteristically mask-like.  Throughout the film, Erland Josephson is as sharp-eyed and quick-witted a presence is ever.  The contrast between these qualities and the old man’s body they’re now bound up in, is compelling – especially in Johan’s climactic terror.   He struggles with it on the bedroom landing before knocking on the door of Marianne’s room and trying to explain what he’s feeling:

    ‘It’s an anguish from hell.  It’s bigger than me.  It’s trying to make way through every orifice in my body – my eyes, my arse.  It’s like a huge mental diarrhoea … I’m too small for this anxiety.’

    Josephson’s vocal and physical expression of this horror is a brilliant and brave piece of acting from an actual octogenarian.  Johan pulls off his nightshirt, tells Marianne to remove her nightdress and clambers into her bed, where she comforts him.  Here, at last, we truly recognise the protagonists of Scenes from a Marriage, and the reciprocation of Johan’s comforting of Marianne in the bed they ended up sharing in the earlier film’s last episode, ‘In the Middle of the Night in a Dark House Somewhere in the World’.  As will be obvious from most of the above, the chief interest of Saraband comes from finding resonances with earlier and, in every case, stronger Bergman films.

    19 April 2022

    [1] Saraband was originally screened on Swedish television before receiving an international theatrical release.  The film shown in cinemas ran 120 minutes, thirteen minutes longer than the TV version.  The latter was the version screened this month by BFI.  Needless to say, I can’t remember which version I previously saw!

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