We're watching every Montgomery Clift film for his Centennial. Here's Jason Adams
And so we come to Montgomery Clift's sixth film, and that accursed number of the devil seems appropriate given I speak of Alfred Hitchcock's I, Confess. The Master of Suspense's 1953 drama had the actor slipping into the world's most form-fitting cassock to play a Quebecois priest suspected of murder most foul. The twist in this whodunit is he didn't dun it, but knows who did dun because the guilty party confessed the crime in confessional. A fact Monty's character of Father Logan can't share with the prosecution, given ye damned sacramental seal of confession. It's a trap! Call it The Father Who Knew Too Much and then call it a day.
The marriage of Monty and Hitch was a well-documented rocky ride...
Hitch & Monty on the set of I Confess
Hitchcock the director who pre-drew and diagrammed every on-screen elbow and saw actors as cattle, and Clift, the proto Method man who wanted all of his freedom of movement and expression, who threatened to quit film and return to the stage with every picture he made. Clift got frustrated with Hitch's exacting marks, and Hitch grew weary of Clift's meandering ways; you hear tell of far more takes than usual on the set of I Confess as the two's contrasting approaches butted up on one another.
And funny enough that's a tension that's felt in the film, one that becomes a sort of meta-commentary on itself if you're looking for it. The drama of Father Logan's situation is an entirely internalized wrestling match between a man and his own faith -- we as viewers are drawn into Logan's inner conundrum of whether he should confess the murderer's confession, therefore sparing himself. And this is one of Clift's stillest performances -- Logan, a seasoned listener, doesn't let on much of anything. Clift buries it all, all the tumult contained in a furrowed brow, a repressed choke here and there, a strained un-smile -- Logan is tasked with projecting goodness and tranquility but the details, purposefully, don't add up. It's a sort of inner flop sweat in the place of peace.
For his part Hitchcock is better at taking advantage of an unrevealing character's unspoken terror than any rigid dichotomy gives him credit for -- watch for all the times he focuses his camera on the back of Monty's head; Hitch found clever ways of expressing the unexpressed with an atypically shifty trickery. But the absence of the usual big Hitchcockian flair, the way all of I Confess' tension remains semi-obscured behind Monty's holy mask, was felt by critics and audiences at the time who found the film less than and lacking. You can sense Hitch straining for cinematic momentum with Father Logan's many long walks around Quebec City -- in their noted chat together Francois Truffaut was especially keen on these sequences -- while attempts to juice up the plot with rainy love-scene flashbacks and a last-act gun-fight do feel somewhat awkward; tacked on from another film.
And yet over the years the spectacle of Montgomery Clift playing a man burying a secret too well for everybody's liking has gathered its own sort of steam to it, and it's easy to project all sorts of meta-text now. (I mean... Montgomery Clift is playing a priest.)
Logan's always one secret too far in for everybody -- the detective (Karl Malden) thinks it's all about an affair with a woman (Anne Baxter) while the woman thinks its all about Logan's time in the army where something changed in him. But Monty just keeps staring back -- beautiful enough that we have no choice but to keep looking, but resolute, giving nothing up. That mystery served him well.
Next: Indiscretion of an American Wife / Terminal Station (1953)
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