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
