I Confess (1953) - film review

Father Michael Logan is a devout Catholic priest in a Quebec church.  One evening, his caretaker, Otto Kellar, insists that he hears his confession – to the murder of a man named Villette. The next day, the body of the dead man is discovered and Inspector Larrue begins to suspect that Logan may be the killer.  Logan’s former lover Ruth Grandfort comes forward with an alibi for the priest.  This merely worsens the situation, since it is revealed that Ruth was being blackmailed by Villette in order to keep her affair with Logan a secret.   Since exposing the true killer would cause him to break his vows, the priest can do nothing but put his faith in God...

It’s a sad fact that Alfred Hitchcock’s least commercially successful films are technically and artistically among his best.  I Confess is one of the director’s least known films but it is unquestionably one of his finest, vastly superior in its emotional depth and visual impact to his more popular films.   It is also one of his darkest and most serious films, bearing many similarities with his later film noir masterpiece The Wrong Man (1956).

The plot of I Confess revolves around the transfer of guilt idea which features in many of Hitchcock’s films.   A Catholic priest takes on the burden of guilt for a murder when he hears a confession from the real killer, who then feels absolved from the crime.  The story was taken from the French play Nos Deux Consciences by Paul Anthelme, which Hitchcock saw in the 1930s and which had a considerable impact on him as a filmmaker.  Significantly, this was one of Hitchcock’s first films to make extensive use of real locations – here in Quebec City, the capital of French Canada.

The film’s extraordinary dramatic intensity derives from a remarkable introspective performance from Montgomery Clift  and some striking noir cinematography.  Clift was one of Hollywood’s first great method actors, whose tragically short career was marred by terrible personal crises arising from his sexuality and ill health.  Here, he gives possibly his finest performance, utterly convincing as the young priest who is trapped in a moral dilemma with a potentially fatal outcome by his devotion to his religion.  The expressionist lighting and photography lend the film a bleak, almost Kafkaesque dimension, which vividly underscores the inner torment of the main protagonist and makes this one of Hitchcock’s most intensely poetic and spiritual films.

© James Travers 2008

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