I Confess

I Confess (1953) 

Notable cast/crew: Montgomery Clift as Father Michael Logan.  Anne Baxter as Ruth Grandfort.  Karl Malden as Inspector Larrue.  O E Hasse as Otto Keller.

Running time: 94 minutes

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Plot: A man lies dead, struck in the head.  A man in priest's garb exits the building.  He removes his garb in an alley to reveal he's wearing a suit underneath.  He heads to a nearby church.  The man is not a priest.  He asks the real priest to hear his confession.  He is known to the priest, Father Logan, having done work at the rectory.  He is Otto Keller, and he confesses to killing the man we saw lying dead.  He went to rob the man's house but was caught in the act and killed him (he claims accidentally) when he tried to call the police.

I give myself a Vulcan mind meld through
half the movie

Keller returns to the scene as he does work in the house and pretends to discover the body.  He then proceeds to frame Father Logan because he knows Logan cannot reveal the truth that he heard in confession.  Compounding the matter is that before he was a priest, Father Logan had an affair with Ruth Granfort.  The murdered man, Villette, knew of it and had been blackmailing Ruth.  Ruth had been meeting with Logan the night of the murder, and she tells this to the police to give him an alibi.  Instead, the police take it as a motive for the murder when the times don't match up exactly.  Two children saw "a priest" leaving the scene adding to the case against him.

Father Logan cannot provide an alibi, cannot reveal what he heard in confession, nor can he even reveal who the murderer is because of his vows.  Despite all of this, the jury finds that his guilt was not proven, and he is found not guilty and released.  Wracked with guilt, Otto's wife tries to reveal the truth.  Otto shoots her dead in the street in front of the courthouse and flees the crowd.  Cornered, he thinks the priest has ratted him out, and he confesses unintentionally to the police.  He is then gunned down.

MacGuffin: None

Hitchcock cameo: Walking past in a long shot as part of the opening

Hitchcock themes: 

• Man wrongly accused

Verdict: A mediocre film, it has some moments of interest, but the suspense is largely built around the inability of Father Logan to reveal the truth due to his vows.  He comes across as noble if you agree with that stance, but if you don't, the suspense seems contrived and his own fault.  Either way, his refusal to reveal Otto as the killer results in Alma, Otto's wife, and an unnamed bystander to get shot.  It becomes difficult to care for anyone in this movie, and it becomes a boring, drawn out picture even at 94 minutes.  Montgomery Clift drank during the shooting, and his eyes appear glazed during the ferry scene.  It didn't help that most of his performance boiled down to him sitting there with his hand on his temple looking vacant.  O E Hasse is very good as Otto, at times nearly getting you to care for him until you remember he's a murderer, a liar, and will abuse a priest's vow to keep himself free.  He does an excellent job ranging from nervous anxiety to abject terror to conniving treachery.

In the original play, the priest was hanged and later found to be innocent. This scene had to be eliminated and replaced with another scene due to the censor.  This really gutted the film of what would have been a shocking ending, better than the one they had to make do with.  Cognizant of the difficulty non-Catholics would have in understanding the priest's reluctance to expose Keller, Hitchcock said, "We Catholics know that a priest cannot disclose the secret of the confessional, but the Protestants, the atheists, and the agnostics all say, 'Ridiculous! No man would remain silent and sacrifice his life for such a thing'."

Out of five bananas, I give it:

Next review: Dial M for Murder