It’s a dark night in Quebec City. We move in, slowly, on one building in particular, gliding in through the window to find a man dead on a carpet. The beaded curtain that hangs over the door to the room is still moving, his killer having departed mere moments earlier. On the street, a man in a cassock emerges from the dead man’s house and moves up the street, slowly, until he enters Ste. Marie’s church. The killer, Otto Keller (O. E. Hasse), begs Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) to take his confession, and the young priest does so. Otto begins with an expression of his gratitude to Father Logan, who helped him and his wife Alma (Dolly Haas) find work and lodging in the rectory, before he admits that he accidentally killed local dirtbag lawyer Villette (Ovila Légaré), whom he initially only intended to rob so that Alma wouldn’t have to work so hard. Father Logan confirms that his confession is held in confidence and that he will not involve the law, but that Keller must return the money and turn himself in. The following morning, Father Logan makes his way to Villette’s house, where he meets primary investigator Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), who tells him that Otto discovered the body. Larrue observes Father Logan speaking to a woman outside and becomes suspicious, even though he doesn’t hear her say the words “Villette is dead? Then we’re saved!” to the priest. The woman turns out to be Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), the wife of local legislator Pierre Grandfort, who is close friends with Crown Prosecutor Willy Robertson (Brian Aherne), but her and Father Michael’s friendship goes back even further, and is deeper.
I Confess! gets off to a marvelous start, but then it ends up spinning its wheels for far too long, even for a film that clocks in at a mere 95 minutes. The story feels like it’s headed toward a conclusion at about the halfway mark, and by the time we reached the final third, I kept checking the time and finding myself startled to discover that only a minute or two had passed since I had last checked. The ending is sufficiently strong that the last twelve minutes were at least engaging, but it wasn’t enough to come back from the slump. Conceptually, it’s pure Hitchcock: the wrongfully accused man who must prove his innocence but for some reason cannot, the blonde who loves him, and a crew of police investigators who are at turns both foolish and malicious. As a narrative device, having a character who can’t defend himself against false allegations because he’s bound by the sanctity of the confessional is also a fresh idea, and complicating matters further by having the victim be a blackmailer extorting the priest’s ex-girlfriend in a way that potentially implicates the priest himself is a fun place to take that concept. Unfortunately, Clift is dreadfully dull in this role, Hasse’s turn as the villainous Keller is similarly underwhelming, and the apathy that Hitchcock allegedly had for this project comes through in the workmanlike nature of the cinematography.
When I told my mother that I had recently watched this one, she asked if it had been released before or after Montgomery Clift’s infamous car accident, noting that he might have been stiff because of the resulting physical and psychological scars (and the addictions that came in attempting to medicate the latter). That didn’t happen until 1956, and I Confess was released only a couple of years after A Place in the Sun, in which I seem to remember finding him very convincing. I don’t know where the blame for his stilted performance here comes from, and I can say the same thing about Hesse. Keller seems to reflect the era’s general antipathy to German immigrants, and taken as a sole piece of evidence in a vacuum, one would think that Hitchcock thought that all Germans who asked only for the opportunity to work and bemoaned their lot in life as “[men] without a country” were simply lying in wait for the opportunity to turn on their supposed benefactors, lie about their motives, steal, frame clergymen, and kill their own wives for trying to see justice done. He’s a factor in the plot, but he’s not a character, and the film is much worse off for letting us know who the manslaughterer is from the start but not making that person interesting. Baxter ends up the MVP here, and the best part of the film comes after Father Michael has been arrested and she decides she has to explain everything to the police at the cost of her social standing and dignity: years before, Michael went off to fight in the war and told Ruth not to wait for him; when he came back, she had already married Pierre. When their innocent reunion is interrupted by a thunderstorm, the two are forced to take shelter in a gazebo, where the blackmailer/victim discovered them the next morning and inferred they had slept together, which would be enough to ruin Ruth’s marriage, embroil her husband in a scandal, and (even though he wasn’t yet ordained) defrock Michael. When her testimony ends up doing more harm than good, as the hours she spent with Michael the night of the murder fall before the time of death but her explanation finally provides the police with a potential motive for Michael, she’s distraught, and Baxter sells it tremendously. It’s just not enough to save it.
The film almost does something interesting near its conclusion, when the jury finds that there simply isn’t enough evidence to convict Michael and he’s released. Although he’s not culpable in the eyes of the law, his verdict in the court of public opinion is much heavier, and it would have been interesting to spend a little more time with this narrative thread. Can he return to the church? How has his downfall affected the faith of his parishioners? Will some forgive but never forget? None of these questions get the chance to be answered, or even a moment’s breathing room, as Michael barely makes it down the steps before Mrs. Keller attempts to tell Larrue that her husband was the true killer, only for Keller himself to shoot her (so much for the whole motive of his theft being to spare her a life of servitude, I suppose). Oh well. A necessity really only for Hitchcock or Clift completists, I’d say skip this one.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
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