(1953)

Starring Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden; dir: Alfred Hitchcock

How very Hitchcock that the master should draw upon his lifelong obsession with guilt in order to extend our knowledge of it.

The key insight here – that just knowing of someone’s guilt affects others’ actions in ways that can spread and compound that guilt – comes early in I Confess. We see this in the priest’s initial trip to the crime scene which only occurs because of what he’s heard in the confessional by the actual killer, Keller. It’s equally true of Keller, who ‘pretends’ to go to work at the victim’s house even though he knows what awaits discovery within, because an innocent man wouldn’t know, and so must act accordingly. Thus are these two men locked in a dance of death from which only one can emerge.  

Is this yet another Hitchcockian duality, like the two Charlies in Shadow of a Doubt (1943)? I Confess centres eponymously on the contradictions inherent in Church mores. If it is a duality, what does Keller bring to the equation? The answer is cynicism, expedience and ruthlessness, all enabled by the practices and dogma of the Church. It’s a damning portrait.

But what of the priest, played here with appropriately ingrained masochism by Montgomery Clift? In his excellent study, The Dark Side Of Genius: The Life Of Alfred Hitchcock, Donald Spoto picks up on the similarity between this film and Strangers On A Train (1951), where the killer similarly does ‘somebody else’s’ murder (the victim here being a blackmailer). But the difference is that in I Confess the transference is inadvertent, thus obviating the beneficiary – Clift’s priest – from needing to feel any guilt; in I Confess the good guys’ hats are pure white.

It’s similarly important to note that, despite some wishful thinking among critics, I Confess is not an example of film noir fatalism. The protagonist here holds in his hands at all times the power to ‘save’ (here, clearly an ambiguous concept) himself. Rather than the hysterically overreacting moral panic of film noir’s view of the outside world, here the demons are found within. Hitchcock was cut from different cloth.

The ending of I Confess is extremely Hitch. Its crowd scene recalls Foreign Correspondent’s overhead shot of umbrellas parting during a corresponding murder sequence, after which Keller is framed in the proscenium arches of a stage, echoing The 39 Steps, just as the climactic chase through a large public space presages the remake of The Man Who Knew Too Much. If all these elements combining in a steadily interlocking climax seem like a montage of vintage Hitch, perhaps it’s because the film reflects a clear focus on two of his greatest obsessions: Catholicism and the police.

Embodying the latter, Karl Malden is excellent – passionate, sly, physically threatening, yet believing in the rightness of his manoeuvring. He’s never been better, nor even this good!  Anne Baxter, almost unrecognisably blonde, is very Claire Trevor, in a long-suffering role which could have been tailor-made – and better cast - for that actress.

The French critics loved I Confess, whereas Americans were cool in their reception. It’s no wonder, and not just for the beautifully Gothic exteriors of Quebec. When Clift’s priest goes for an extended urban walkabout en route to surrendering to police, there’s a telling moment when he stares at a poster of Bogey’s hardboiled The Enforcer in a two-shot indicating a mirror image. It’s a clear foreshadowing of the similar pose Belmondo would strike before a Bogey poster (The Harder They Fall) in Godard’s A Bout de Souffle in 1959. Neither of these Francophone protagonists were going to be noir victims.

And if, as some observers have suggested, there is a lingering Nazism in Keller’s ruthlessness, well that couldn’t have hurt with the French either!