Directed by Alfred Hitchcock

Starring Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, and Karl Malden

There are Catholic film directors and film directors who happen to be Catholic. Alfred Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense and Auteur Par Excellence, belongs to the latter category—at least superficially. Think of a Hitchcock movie and you’re more likely to think of knife-wielding psychos than incense-wielding priests.

I Confess is an exception in the Hitch canon, a film that deals directly and unambiguously with Catholic characters and themes. Indeed, the whole story hinges on the Seal of the Confessional—the idea that what a priest hears during the sacrament of Reconciliation cannot be revealed to anyone, under any circumstances.

That said, we still have the classic Hitch scenario: an innocent man wrongly accused; an ordinary man in an extraordinary situation.

In Quebec, Canada, arrow signs labeled “Direction” point like the finger of God to an open window where the dead body of a man lies sprawled on the floor. A shadowy figure exits the building. He’s wearing a priest’s cassock.

That same night, Father Logan (Montgomery Clift) finds a man sitting alone in the darkened church. The man is Otto Keller, a German refugee and jack-of-all-trades who works in the rectory. Fr. Logan asks if something is wrong, if he can be of any help. “No one can help me,” Otto says. He has killed a man, committed a mortal sin. He asks Fr. Logan to hear his confession.

The plot thickens when Fr. Logan discovers the man Otto has killed is Monsieur Vilette, a shady lawyer who had previously implicated the priest in a blackmailing scheme involving Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), a married woman who Fr. Logan had loved before he took his vows.

The dogged detective on the case, Inspector Larrue (the rock-solid Karl Malden), begins to connect the dots between Vilette and the young priest. When Larrue learns of Vilette’s blackmail scheme, he becomes convinced Fr. Logan was driven to murder to protect both Ruth and his reputation as a priest.

Will Fr. Logan, who has heard the confession of the true killer, compromise his vows to save his own life? The dramatic situation tests his commitment to his priestly vocation. The Christ parallels become more and more apparent as the movie progresses and the cloud of suspicion over Fr. Logan darkens.

Hitchcock deliberately frames Fr. Logan against symbols of his faith: crucifixes, churches, and statues of Christ. Fr. Logan suffers in Christ’s name, absorbing Keller’s sin as his own, unable to defend himself against false accusations because of the sacred vow he took. “I chose to be what I am,” he tells Ruth, who still loves him after many years, “I believe in what I am.”

Bracketed by two Hitchcock greats, Strangers on a Train in 1952 and Rear Window in 1954, I Confess is an often-overlooked entry in the Master’s catalogue. It must have been a very personal film for Hitchcock, who had never before confronted his own faith so head-on in a movie; nor would he ever again.

That faith is personified by the noble Fr. Logan—played with affecting gravity and sincerity by Montgomery Clift. Most Hitchcock protagonists are “complicated,” to put it nicely, combinations of dark and light: the obsessive Scottie in Vertigo, for example, or the weak and submissive Guy in Strangers on a Train. Fr. Logan, by contrast, is a man of integrity and deep goodness. Clift’s tightly controlled performance conveys the priest’s inner anguish and crisis of conscience, but most especially his abiding faith. For Catholics, I Confess is an inspiring story about a man unwilling to compromise his belief in Christ, or his duty as Christ’s representative on earth.

Beautifully shot on location in Quebec, there is an Old World atmosphere to the setting that suits the Catholic-themed storyline. An overbearing score by Dmitri Tiomkin and an occasionally too-insistent performance from Anne Baxter do not mar the overall technical expertise of the film. The elegant black & white photography propels the story forward in visual terms; Hitchcock is an undisputed master of the formal elements of filmmaking. Here he marries that mastery to a story that is not only suspenseful but suffused with spiritual pathos.

Standing in the church at the beginning of the film, Fr. Logan questions the darkness: “Who’s there?”

A murderer is there. But God is there, too; and Fr. Logan chooses to serve Christ at the risk of his own life. Maybe this isn’t just another ‘ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances.’

Posted by John Murphy on Monday, January 28th, 2008 at 12:16 pm.