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.’

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It took me awhile before I got around to seeing M. Night Shyamaan’s much-disparaged Lady in the Water. Virtually everyone I know who’d seen the film warned me against a viewing. The flick even managed to pick up two ignominious “Razzie” Awards (the opposite of the Oscars, to put it kindly), both of which went to M. Night as “worst director” and “worst supporting actor” of 2006. But how could I not check out the latest from the director of Signs or the underrated masterpiece, Unbreakable?

So see it I did, and (to quote P.G. Wodehouse) I’m not disgruntled, but I’m far from gruntled. Lady in the Water is silly, incoherent, unsatisfying, self-indulgent…and thoroughly watchable. Even entertaining. Because Shyamalan’s movies are distinctively his own, and he believes in his own vision. The man’s self-faith borders on lunacy, but the predominantly bland, marketing-driven world of modern movies could use a few more eccentric visionaries.

Belief is a major theme of Shyamalan’s movies. The question of faith is central to most of his plotlines, as well as its ancillary: the question of each person’s purpose in life. Shyamalan’s self-envisioned purpose is clear: he sees himself as an old-school storyteller. They’re a dying breed, to be sure, and the man who considers himself an heir to Hitchcock and Spielberg earns some slack, in mind, but he can only stretch my goodwill so far.

The movie’s about a likable shlub named Cleveland Heep (who else but the wonderful Paul Giamatti?) whose daily routine as an apartment complex superintendent is interrupted when he fishes a narf out of the swimming pool. A narf? Yes, a narf: an ethereal Bryce Dallas Howard plays the Madame Narf, “Story.” Story? Yes, Story. She needs to get home to “the Blue World,” but there’s a Big Bad Scrunt that wants to eat her. A scrunt? Yes, a scrunt. And we haven’t even touched on the tartutics. 

Funny names aside, the plot of Lady in the Water manages to be both simple and convoluted, as if M. Night decided to turn an earworm jingle into a grand opera. M. Night’s previous movie, The Village, had echoes of Little Red Riding Hood, and as a storyteller he is understandably fascinated by the universal pull of mythology—but even as fairy tales go, Lady in the Water is a load of hooey. To give you one example, the plot hinges on a child being able to read secret codes on the covers of cereal boxes. Suddenly, “I see dead people,” seems the height of plausibility. And in case you’re wondering, Lady in the Water did indeed begin its misbegotten life as a bedtime story M. Night Shyamalan told to his kids.  

That touching tidbit aside, this movie was probably the wrong venue for M. Night to proclaim his genius as a Man of Letters. In a woefully misguided decision, M. Night cast himself in the film as a writer whose words will change the world. Story prophecies of a “great orator” who will one day read his (I mean his character’s) book, and “your book will be the seeds of many of his great thoughts.” Most viewers will consider this offensively hubristic. And so it is, but it’s also strangely endearing. Shyamalan actually wants to change the world. When Cleveland is asked by a hermitic tenant whether he believes mankind is worth saving, he answers “Yes” without batting an eyelash. And in a scene that will either elicit tears or groans from the audience, Cleveland holds a dangerously ill Story in his arms as he prays to his dead wife and child—“I miss your faces. They remind me of God. I’m so lost without you guys.” In an age of tired cynicism and easy skepticism, I appreciate a filmmaker who dares to invest his stories with an almost desperate spirituality. (For the record: Shyamalan is not bad in the part of the writer/genius/prophet—he’s soft-spoken, oddly charming—but like the movie itself, it was just a bad idea to begin with.)

And yet I like the guy, and I can’t help but like his movies. Lady in the Water is so un-cynical, it’s virtually begging for snide remarks. Shyamalan didn’t help himself by trading in his trademark tight storytelling for something sloppy and ill-conceived. M. Night’s follies are on a grand scale—here he aims to make a modern myth and falls precipitously short—but he’s trying, God bless him. The old saying goes: Aim for the stars, land on the barnyard roof. And you know what? The view from the barnyard roof’s not always so shabby.   

USCCB rating: A-II—adults and adolescents. (PG-13)

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reviewed by John Murphy

How Dull the Con of Ron…

I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code. Since about a trillion people have, I suppose I should feel out of the loop. Having just seen the movie, though, I think I’ll stick with Umberto Eco. Enduring Ron Howard’s dull and ponderous adaptation gave me the feeling I’m not missing anything. And though I don’t doubt Howard’s spiritual karma took a hit when he attached his name to this soulless project, he should reserve his most sincere mea culpa for committing the worst cinematic sin of all: boring his audience.

It’s not that the movie is bad. It might have been more entertaining if it was. Instead, DVC has that depressing kind of competency which signals lack of conviction married to bald-faced greed…

Read the rest of John’s review on Godspy. 

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