I Confess

Movie Review: I Confess

Year of Release: 1953
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Cast: Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne, O.E. Hasse

Plot outline: Refusing to give into police investigators' questions of suspicion, due to the seal of confession, a Catholic priest becomes the prime suspect in a murder (IMDb).

It’s a sad fact that Hitchcock’s least commercially successful movies are technically and artistically among his best. I Confess is one of his least known movies but it is unquestionably one of his finest, vastly superior in its emotional depth and visual impact to his more popular movies. It is also one of his darkest and most serious movies, bearing many similarities with his later film noir masterpiece The Wrong Man. The plot of I Confess revolves around the transfer of guilt idea which features in many of Hitchcock’s movies. 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 movies to make extensive use of real locations - here in Quebec City, the capital of French Canada. The movie’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 movie a bleak which vividly underscores the inner torment of the main protagonist and makes this one of Hitchcock’s most intensely poetic and spiritual movies. (JT)

My judgement: *** out of 4 stars