Montgomery Clift in a courtroom scene in the 1953 Hitchcock movie, “I Confess”

A PRIEST walks into his church late at night. The parish caretaker is kneeling in a pew and is highly distraught. He asks the priest to hear his confession.

So begins the 1953 Alfred Hitchcock movie, I Confess, which takes place in the 1950s in Quebec City. This is one of the lesser known films of Hitchcock, but it deserves much more acclaim. Here is a very good movie which you may never have seen.

Montgomery Clift plays Father Michael William Logan, who ends up being accused of the crime that has been confessed. Anne Bancroft plays the elegant Ruth Grandfort, who is now married to an attorney and politician, but still loves Logan. The murder victim had been trying to blackmail her and Logan. (The original script apparently involved an illegitimate child, but Hitchcock trashed that detail.) Otto Blank, the caretaker who has committed the crime, is not surprisingly a German and comes across in the performance by OE Hasse as the sort of arch villain common to World War II propaganda.

What really makes this movie is the stellar performance by Clift as a person undergoing a devastating accusation with calm fortitude.

Phillip Otterman wrote in a review for The Guardian:

Lead actors matter in Hitchcock’s films, but mainly because of what they do rather than what’s going on inside them. Here it’s different: it’s almost as if the former Jesuit schoolboy Hitch is caught off-guard, not so much confidently directing as being slowly mesmerised by Father Logan’s inner turmoil. Hollywood’s original method actor before Marlon Brando, Montgomery Clift filmed with his acting coach just out of shot, but his performance is a masterclass in subtlety. He interiorises so much, you sometimes start to wonder if he’s acting at all.

[…]

In the work of someone so exhaustively appreciated as Hitchcock, you wouldn’t expect to find forgotten masterpieces but   is one. It might never catch fire, but it smoulders gloriously. (Spoiler alert: The review reveals the ending.)

You can watch the movie online. With its adult themes, it’s not for children, but by today’s standards it’s wholesome for adults.

Its moody evocations of the time and place have an art house cinema feel. Some scenes have that familiar leaden Hitchcock grimness, similar to scenes in, say, The Birds, but overall it captures the era with beauty and fidelity, especially in a charming scene in which two French girls are interviewed by police and in the moments in the parish rectory and dining room. Some characters speak with a heavy French accent, which helps remind viewers of the setting. Many Americans are unacquainted with Quebec, a place so rarely portrayed in movies, even though the province was influential in the founding of America. The Quebec Act of 1774, in which King George III and the British Parliament allowed the French Canadians to practice their faith, is believed by reputable historians to be a major provocation of the American Revolution.

The strict moral obligation for a priest to keep confidential what is revealed in a confessional is the main cause of the tension in this film. Fortunately, the movie was made in, and depicts, an era when there was still grave seriousness surrounding the confessional. Overall, the atmosphere of this film is radically different from the happy-go-lucky, we’re-too-joyful-to believe-in-sin character of counterfeit Catholicism. This is a real blast from the past.

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