I Confess
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Movie Reviews of I Confess
Movie Review: Overlooked
Summary: 5 Stars
This movie is a great character study and a slight deviation from Hitchcock's traditional suspense filled films. I particularly enjoyed Montgomery Clift's restrained performance but couldn't stand Anne Baxter at all - she would probably be the only drawback to an otherwise greatly enjoyable movie.Movie Review: Incredible!
Summary: 5 Stars
This is an awesome movie. If you're Catholic, it will encourage you to step into the confessional with confidence. If you're not, you'll understand what all this Reconciliation fuss is about. I am going to buy a few more copies of this movie to give as gifts...to people I really like!Movie Review: I Confess
Summary: 5 Stars
Quebec and Hitchcock - can't get a better combination. Montgomery Clift an added bonus. My wife has wanted this movie for a long time. Now we can watch it anytime and we will do - often. Got it quickly and at a good price at Amazon.Movie Review: Great product/quick delivery
Summary: 5 Stars
Very pleased with both the prices and the timeliness in getting the product. Have ordered before and will do so again.Movie Review: A Collared Suspect
Summary: 4 Stars
It's ironic in a sense that Hitchcock's first color film ROPE was basically an elaborately filmed stage play and limited largely to a single (patently artificial) set. That he followed that 1948 film with black & white classics like STRANGERS ON A TRAIN and I CONFESS suggested that he was not quite ready to make the leap into fully "opened up" technicolor extravaganzas--and considering the "look" of these remarkable films, we can only be grateful and glad that that was the case.
There is probably no better "looking" Hitchcock film than I CONFESS. It can--and has--serve as a study of "noirish" cinematography unto itself. Robert Burks' moody images of Quebec City are as beautiful as they are sinister. Critics have often remarked on the ingeniousness of using Quebec, the most Old World looking city in the New, as the film's setting. There's a certain irony about that choice too. Quebec can be a lovely, colorful and "color-filled" city, and was likely even more so in the early '50s when this film was shot. To see it rendered in brooding, Expressionistic black and white is, in a very real sense, quite jarring.
All this atmosphere helps to make up for some of the film's structural and dramatic flaws. It is Hitchcock at his talkiest. So much of the film's plotting is revealed in narrated flashback that the film begins to lose momentum quite early on. Admittely, it would be difficult to come up with a better expository plot device than the Anne Baxter character's lengthy police deposition. I certainly don't have a better idea. Nonetheless it's a fairly leaden device that goes on way too long and falls all too flat. Luckily for the viewer, the plot twists further and her character's good intentions go horribly wrong when her attempts to provide our protagonist with an alibi are actually used against him.
The plotline is fairly well known among Hitchcock buffs. A priest (Montgomery Clift), bound by the vow of confidentiality of the confessional, cannot divulge the identity of a murderer, even when he himself (the priest) is accused and tried for the crime. I'm told by friends knowledgeable in church doctrine that this is certainly the case--which certainly opens up all kinds of delicious dramatic possibilities. And Hitchcock exploits them up to a point. There are no scenes, however, that have the priest even attempting to counsel the actual murderer that he continues to be in a grievous state of sin by not coming forward and admitting his guilt, even when another man (the priest himself) is charged with the crime.
Throw in a subplot suggestive of an illicit love (of course, it's not really that--this is the '50s after all), and blackmail and you've got all the ingredients for a corker of a story. Well, what we get is a pretty good story, but one that was obviously sanitized and dramatically compromised in unfortunate ways. Commentary by Peter Bogdanovich, Richard Schickel and others included in the DVD version's special features indicate all the compromises Hitchcock had to make--to censors seen and unseen (i.e. within and outside of the studio)--in order to get this film made. From what they relate, it's easy to imagine an even more dramatic and satisfying film that the one we have.
It's not at all bad, but it's not truly great.