The Passion of the Hitch

SPOILERS for "I Confess" "The Wrong Man" and "Frenzy"

"Hindsight is dynamite," and we can look back over Hitchcock's career and see how "I Confess" in 1952 provided the first of two "bookend movies" in the fifties for Hitchcock.

The other one is "The Wrong Man" of very late '56 or '57.

Connections:

Both in black and white (all the Hitchcock movies in between them are in color.)

Both for Warner Brothers (all the ones in between are for Paramount, except ONE other Warners movie, "Dial M for Murder.")

Both, in Hitchcock's words, "lacking humor" (all the ones in between have a fair number of jokes and witty lines.)

Each, therefore, starring a major HUMORLESS Hollywood male star OTHER than James Stewart or Cary Grant: Young Monty Clift in "I Confess"; Older Henry Fonda in "The Wrong Man" (each being the ONLY film the men made for Hitch.)

Each lacking the occasional hard action and/or chases of a more rip-roaring Hitchcock thriller and,

...most importantly of all:

Each being a strongly RELIGIOUS film about the endless and unfair persecution of an essentially decent and selfless man,and the role of faith in saving him.

Hitchcock was, by most reports, a religious man subject to a strict Catholic upbringing. At least one early article he wrote as a British film director spoke to his strong belief in God and in God as the only planner of any life.

That said, Hitch wasn't much of one to "push" God and religious themes in his movies, but when he did -- it was with fairly full-pressure.

In "The Wrong Man," prayer comes in near the end, and divine intervention makes its presence known. Until that point, the persecution of Henry Fonda is rather "secular."

Not so in "I Confess." Montgomery Clift is a priest in a city of priests and churches and steeples. The role of the religious man is at the heart of "I Confess." Clift himself prepared for this role with great reverance for it. He wanted to plumb WHY a man would become a priest, forsaking sexual love and marriage, offering himself up to help and save others.

The premise of "I Confess" is as direct and suspenseful as any in Hitchcock: a killer confesses his murder to a priest. The priest can't tell the police. But the priest becomes the CHIEF SUSPECT in the murder, and now ...the pressure's on.

As always in Hitchcock, from such simplicity, a thousand complexities bloom.

Start with the real killer, Otto Keller (Otto Killer?) Like Robert Walker's Bruno Anthony just one film before, this killer torments an innocent man who is accused of HIS crimes. But Bruno was FUN -- fey, weird, nutty, funny, kinda cute in the Hitchcock Villain manner. Otto Keller is a rather plain and dumpy and whiny man. And though he starts "sympathetic" (confessing his murder immediately to a man of the cloth), as the movie goes on, he becomes petty and evil and demonic. He suspects his own frail wife ("Alma" -- sound familiar?) of being ready to turn him in, and he threatens her life. Meanwhile, he practically DEMANDS that the priest confess all, for he wants the priest to be as weak as he is. Funny thing though: if the priest talks, Keller suggests he'll kill him,anyway.

But the priest DOESN'T talk. In Montgomery Clift's weirdly calm (but NOT emotionless) performance, this priest is subject to one burden after another, and he never talks. Things do get a BIT heavy-handed as Clift's Christ-like torments manifest (with Christ put over his head on a courtroom wall in one scene in a way that predicts the owl over Norman's head in "Psycho"), but then the Christ story is rather heavy-handed.

I like the side characters in "I Confess." As always in Hitchcock, they are nuanced and interesting. There's Brian Aherne's suave and elegant prosecutor -- the priest's friend who, nonetheless, must try to put him away in court. There's Anne Baxter's rather dreamy and spoiled lawyer's wife -- Clift's ex-lover (but how far?) who must come to grips with his love for the church. And above all, there's Karl Malden's mean and relentless police inspector, a highly judgmental man who sees only guilt in the priest, and/or desires to wring "the truth" out of him as to the real killer. (Malden, a good but notoriously heavy and pompous actor, would be no fun at all as Hitchcock's puckish investigator Arbogast in "Psycho." Malden the Interrogator in "I Confess" is "Arbogast with no humor." And a longer life span.)

Hitchcock was coming off a big flashy Warner Brothers comeback hit in "Strangers on a Train," filled with garish murder, a berserk merry go-round , a fist-fight and a wild tennis match. He felt he'd "earned" the right to then make the somber and brooding "I Confess" (with its ethereal, otherworldly heavenly choir and French-inspired Quebec locales.)

But "I Confess" is, still, rather "Strangers on a Train" done very dramatically. Like Bruno and Guy, Keller and Father Logan are dark-and-light, entwined, with one man committing a murder that frees the other even as it entraps him. Keller becomes quite awful at film's end, killing his own very nice wife and chortling that Father Logan (who has been acquitted but not cleared in the trial, and pelted with trash by a raging mob) is "alone, like I am."

As Keller dies from a police bullet, the craven cruel man still begs for Father Logan's final forgiveness. And Father Logan gives it. The moral comes through. Even a tormented man can forgive his tormentor.

It's hard to call "I Confess" a full success. It IS rather too serious, and Clift feels oddly hamstrung -- this isn't quite the work he delivered in "A Place in the Sun" or would in "From Here to Eternity." But its a rare match of Hitchcock with a great star who WASNT Grant or Stewart, and worth considering.

One great moment: asked if he can identify incriminating evidence on the stand, Logan says "I can't say." Two meanings: "I can't say if it is or not." "I can't tell you my confession knowledge." Several years later, this play on words will repeat when Kim Novak shows Jimmy Stewart where to clasp Carlotta's necklace on her neck: "Can't you see?"

Prayer and forbearance save the heroes in "I Confess" and "The Wrong Man", but in tougher 1972, Hitchcock had a female victim say a prayer while being raped in "Frenzy" -- and the prayer saved her not at all. She was strangled shortly after completing it.

Did Hitchcock lose his religion?

Probably not. But he became tougher about it, no doubt. The woman prays in "Frenzy" to avoid thinking about what's happening to her. The prayer ends up comforting her on the journey out of this world.

Or maybe its just this: sometimes prayer works, sometimes it doesn't.

Hitchcock was never clear-cut about anything. Even religion.