How is this for topical: A Catholic Priest has an affair with a married woman, which leads to a bit of trouble with the church and his parishioners? Okay, just to make it juicy, the woman is married to an elected government official. Sound like something you saw on 60 Minutes last week? Well, it’s all part of Hitchcock’s 38th movie, I CONFESS. A dark, brooding film about guilt that you may not have heard of... but is worth checking out.
Nutshell: In Quebec, poor church handyman Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse) decides to break into dirtbag lawyer Villette’s house and steal two thousand dollars, which will change his life completely. Villette has a lot of undeclared cash sitting around, due to his sideline as the local blackmailer. When Keller is caught in the act, he kills Villette and goes back to the church to hide... Where he runs into Father Logan (Montgomery Clift) and confesses what he has done. And how he managed to avoid suspicion walking on the streets late at night - by borrowing one of Logan’s priest’s cossacks. As Keller tells his wife later, “He can not tell them what he heard in confession”. But here’s the problem: Villette was blackmailing the wife of prominent politician Grandfort (Anne Baxter) because she once slept with Logan. The detective investigating the murder LaRue (Karl Malden) has eyewitnesses that place a priest at the scene of the murder, and the evidence begins to mount against Logan... but he can not break his vows and tell LaRue what Keller told him in confession. This gives us our falsely accused man, not on the run, and with a Catholic twist. Hitch, a life-long Catholic, gets to explore issues close to him in an exciting thriller format.
Experiment: As far as cinematic experiments are concerned, nothing major - the film has dark, brooding black & white cinematography, but that’s not an experiment, just great lighting.
As far as story is concerned, there are probably two things that are of interest, the way the story flows between characters (which we’ll look at in a moment) and the concept of transference of guilt between characters. Even though Keller is the killer, once he confesses to Logan it becomes Logan’s problem... and even though Logan is not guilty he must deal with the guilt. This was explored in Hitchcock’s previous film, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, which we will look at next week. There are echoes of I CONFESS in movies like THE SILENT PARTNER and BAD INFLUENCE - especially the idea of a psychopath and a fairly normal guy who made one little mistake becoming almost partners in the crime. They have a relationship built on some horrible thing, which one did and the other is blamed for. The moment Logan hears what Keller has done, it is as if Logan has done that thing... as if he killed Villette. He takes on Keller’s guilt and can’t shake it until the end of the story.
Probably the two greatest experiments for Hitchcock in the film was working with Method actors like Karl Malden and Montgomery Clift - he usually worked with big personality actors, and here he works with more internal actors. But it works in this story. Clift has that dark, brooding quality that perfectly fits the character, and Malden is a very external method actor who was best known for his stage roles at this time. The other experiment for Hitchcock was shooting on location - most movies were still shot on the back lot, and Hitchcock took the whole crew up to Quebec and shot most of the film on actual locations. You get a real feel for the city.
Hitch Appearance: A couple of minutes in, walking on a path above a stairway, almost a complete silhouette.
Great Scenes: One of the cool things about this film is that it is filled with confession scenes. It’s almost wall-to-wall Perry Mason Moments (those scenes on the TV show where Perry Mason starts with “Isn’t it true...” and ends up getting the person on the witness stand to admit to killing someone... and that kind of fits, because a section of this film *is* a murder trial with some moments like that). The script is filled with juicy reveal scenes. And, though I’d have to watch it a few more times, I suspect that the Keller character manages to break most of the Ten Commandments and most of the Seven Deadly Sins as well. He seems like a nice guy, but is filled with envy and lust and pride and covets just about everything he doesn’t get around to stealing. This is another Hitchcock film that I really appreciated after seeing it again. The writing is great, the characters are amazing... and just watching Keller crumble from a seemingly nice guy to a killer who can justify just about any heinous act to stay alive is amazing.
Opening Scene: How do you create an opening that pulls us into the story without dialogue? That has a thematic element, say, like a finger pointing in accusation? This story has Quebec standing in for... Quebec! And we begin with the city, where a traffic arrow points down a street. Another street, another traffic arrow. A smaller street, and another traffic arrow. We are going from an over view of the city to a specific place... with the arrows pointing the way. The final arrow points down a small street to a lighted window... where Villette lays dead on the floor of his office. We follow the killer, in a priest’s cossack, as he walks down the dark street, passing a pair of school girls in uniform... ending up at a beautiful ornate Catholic church.
Confession: Along the way the Priest takes off his cossack, so when he approaches Father Logan, we know that it is Keller. He tells Logan that he is thankful for all that he has done for himself and his wife, but has done a terrible thing, and needs to make a confession. In the confessional, Keller tells Logan that he didn’t mean to kill Villette, but he was frightened at being discovered, frightened by possibly having to go to jail... so he killed the man. He manages to justify his stealing by saying that Villette had so much money... it just seemed fair to take some.
Chess Match Dialogue: One of the things which not only creates suspense with dialogue, but is also realistic, are verbal chess matches. I CONFESS is filled with them, and has some of the most interesting dialogue jousts of any Hitchcock film. The morning after, Mrs. Keller (Dolly Haas) is serving all of the Priests breakfast... and she wants to know whether Father Logan has told the other Priests, will tell the other Priests, and will tell the police about the confession. But she can not overtly ask this question without giving it away to the others... so as she serves breakfast her focus is on Logan, and she mentions that her husband is at Villette’s. Wednesday is the day he tends to Villette’s garden... and she watches Logan’s reaction. What will he do? Now, a dopey story note might be that Mrs. Keller would never mention Villette, she would want no one to think of the murder victim. Why even bring him up? But for Mrs. Keller to learn anything, she must take that chance and mention the murder victim’s name... to gauge Logan and te other Priest’s reactions. She must make a move for the opponent to make a move. She must take a risk to be rewarded with information. It’s not stupid if it’s the only way to slyly get the information.
Character To Character Flow: One of the most important thing in a screenplay is *flow* - moving from scene to scene seamlessly. This is especially important when you are first introducing the characters, to show us the relationship between them. I call this the “string theory” - you want to have each character be linked as if they are knots on the same piece of string. One character leads us to the next. So far we have had the murderer, Keller, lead us from the victim Villette to Father Logan. Now Father Logan leads us back to the crime scene, where he meets Detective LaRue. Here we get some more chess match dialogue as Logan tries to find out how much LaRue knows... and discovers that Keller has pretended to discover the body, and is being the perfect cooperative citizen. Now that we have Detective LaRue introduced, we stick with him as Father Logan leaves the crime scene... and bumps into Mrs. Grandfort on the street. LaRue sees this through the window in a great shot where he is interviewing Keller and we can see the street through the window behind him. On that street, Logan tells Mrs. Grandfort that Villette has been murdered, and there’s this pause where she may be wondering if Logan killed him. You wonder what the relationship is between these two. It is *not* the standard Priest / Parishioner relationship. Now we follow Mrs. Grandfort as she goes to the Provence government building, where everybody seems to know her... and where she meets her big time politician husband and asks if he would like to go to lunch. He says she seems less troubled than she was earlier in the day... Now we are wondering why that is. Why would Villette’s murder make a politician’s wife less troubled? Maybe even happy? As one character meets the next, we not only learn their relationship to each other (or create some mystery about it) we also link each element of te story in a logical way that creates a flow to the story. Instead of a jagged, jumbled cut from one character to the next where we do not understand what the heck this person has to do with the story, each character and story element is connected. Easy for us to follow.
Girls? One of my favorite dialogue techniques is misunderstandings. In real life we have no idea what the person we are talking to is going to say, and once said, we don’t know exactly what they mean by it. So we run it through *our* filters and *our* mental filing cabinet and come up with what *we* think they meant, and respond to that. In a bad script, the characters respond as if they know exactly what the other person meant - which is impossible unless you are a mind reader. In a good script, no one understands what the other person means 100%, and these slight misunderstandings (or major ones) create realistic dialogue that doesn’t seem as if it is planned, but just kind of free-forms back and forth across the line where the scene is going. It doesn’t follow the line directly, so it seems as if the characters are making it up... when, in fact, the writer knows where the dialogue is going but has planned some unpredictability.
The Prosecutor (Brian Aherne) is introduced as a guy who takes nothing seriously - throughout the story he does all of these silly parlor tricks: balancing a glass of water on his forehead while doing the limbo, using the silverware on the table to create odd sculptures, etc. These things show us his character, and make him and interesting character. When LaRue says he has a couple of girls waiting outside the Prosecutors office, he gives a leer, “Girls?” Which turns what would have been just a scene introducing the two little school girls who say the priest that night into a gag *and* a fun little twist *and* a way to show the Prosecutors character... and LaRue’s character - because we get his no-nonsense reaction. This makes the scene seem real - the D.A, has no idea who is waiting outside the door, and he jumps to the wrong conclusion.
Priest Sandwich: Keller returns to the church and has a conversation in front of the other priests which is aimed directly at Logan. The police do not suspect Keller at all. Then a policeman comes for Logan... LaRue would like to ask him some questions at the police station. This creates some suspense - Keller doesn’t know if Logan will give him up. He can’t go along to the police station to find out what Logan will say.
Logan goes to the police station where he is questioned by LaRue... about Mrs. Grandfort. Logan is very evasive, which makes him look guilty. He refuses to explain what his relationship with Mrs. Grandfort is, or why both of them ended up at the crime scene the morning after the murder. LaRue tells Logan that there are witnesses who saw a Priest leave the crime scene. Then he asks where Logan was at the time of the murder... and Logan is again evasive!
What is great about this situation is that Logan is trapped between the real murderer, Keller, and Detective LaRue. Logan has great scenes with Keller and great scenes with Detective LaRue... and there is no way for him not to get crushed in between without breaking his vows. LaRue is logic and reason and the law. Logan is faith and the church. And Keller is a man who has gone astray. These elements battle it out throughout the story. At one point, Keller tells Logan, “You are so good. It is easy for you to be good.” He also asks at one point if Logan is human. We discover that Logan is only too human... but where Logan is what is good in man, Keller is what is bad in man. As I said, Keller’s fear of being caught makes him do more bad things. He begins as a normal man and becomes a psychopath by the end of the film. Keller decides to use the bloody cossack to pin the murder on Father Logan. He bears false witness.
We get a great link from characters to characters again to keep the story flowing smoothly. After Logan leaves LaRue’s office, LaRue calls the Prosecutor... who is at a party at the Grandfort’s house. They want to begin a case against Logan. When the Prosecutor leaves, we stick around with the Grandforts after all of their guests have left... and Mr. Grandfort gets his wife to confess... that she is in love with Father Logan and always has been! We wondered what the relationship was, and now it is revealed. After Grandfort leaves the room, Mrs. Grandford calls... Logan. And after this phone conversation, we are back with Logan in the church.
More Confessions: At the police station, Detective LaRue starts hardballing questions at Father Logan and Mrs. Grandfort... in front of the Prosecutor and Mr. Grandfort. Both are evasive - they have plenty to hide, but we are not sure of the details, yet. But the more LaRue hammers away, the more uncomfortable it becomes until Mrs. Grandford confesses... to almost everything. Starting with her affair with Logan. Which is shocking stuff.
We get this confession in a flashback. What makes the flashback interesting is it is Mrs. Grandfort’s memory of what happened... and not impartial or objective. In her memory, what happened was a story of star-crossed lovers, and the flashback is kind of the trashy romance version of what happened. Before Logan was a priest, he was a young man going off to war... and Mrs. Grandfort was his girlfriend. While he was away at war, she took a job as Grandfort’s secretary. When Logan stopped writing to her, she began dating Grandfort and married him. But when Logan returned from the war, an emotionally scarred man, she met with him... and slept with him... (and in an early draft of the script, had a child by him - but the censors made Hitchcock remove the child, since that would overtly prove infidelity instead of just ***strongly*** hint at it as the film does)... and they are discovered by Villette in each other’s arms. But Logan is so scarred by what he has seen in the war he joins the priesthood, and for several years has just been Mrs. Grandford’s found memory of a fling with Mr. Right... until Villette showed up and wanted to be paid for his silence.
In my thriller class on CD I talk about the small sin that leads to the large sin, and here it’s the returning soldier version of Logan sleeping with the woman he loves... not knowing that she has married while he was away. That’s what causes all of the problems which follow, because had there been no connection between Logan and Villette, there would be no police suspicion that Logan is the killer.
Mrs. Grandfort confesses that she was with Logan at the time of the murder. Discussing what to do about Villette. And Logan told her that he would take care of it.
Reversals: Now that this huge scandal has been revealed, and Logan has his alibi for the time of Villette’s murder, you might think that Detective LaRue would move on to other suspects and maybe even realize that Keller has access to a cossack and knew Villette.. But instead, the coroner comes back with a more precise time of death, and it is later than they first believed. Not only could Logan have killed Villette, but didn’t Mrs. Grandfort say that Logan would “take care” of Villette for her?
Logan Thinks: Without an alibi, Father Logan goes on the run... except this isn’t NORTH BY NORTHWEST and he’s a Priest, so he just takes a walk around the city to think of what he should do. How do you show what someone is thinking? Here we get a great example of visual storytelling, because everything that Father Logan passes on the street shows him a different possible outcome for his dilemma. A traffic cop seems to be pointing at him in accusation... but he’s just directing traffic. A movie poster shows a man in handcuffs being lead away by two policemen. A clothing store has a mannequin in a suit in the window... should he change out of his Priest’s cossack to blend with the rest of the city? He has sinned, should he quit the Priesthood? He passes a church with statues of Christ carrying his cross. His burden. The burden of knowing what Keller said in confession, yet being unable to tell the police and prove his innocence. He goes into the church... and prays... and makes his decision. He goes to the police station to turn himself in.
One Woman Jury: Point of view is one of the most important tools a screenwriter has... not using POV as a shot, but showing the action from a character’s perspective instead of being completely uninvolved in the story. We ave a Catholic Priest on trial for murder - that pretty much fills up a courtroom with press and spectators. But instead of giving us this scene from Father Logan’s point of view, or Keller’s point of view, or even the Prosecutor’s point of view; this scene is told from *Mrs. Keller’s* point of view as she watches in the gallery. She knows the truth. She watches as that silly Prosecutor turns into a clever, very competent Prosecutor who manages to get every single bit of evidence to point to Logan’s guilt. She watches her husband’s testimony, waiting for him to confess... but he does not. She watches Mrs. Grandfort’s testimony, which exposes all kinds of deep secrets to the public, with her husband sitting next to her... will he put a stop to this by confessing? He does not. She watches Father Logan on the stand, as he protects Mrs. Grandfort’s reputation the nest he can... then is questioned about the night of the murder. Will Logan break his vows now that his life is on the line? Will he tell what really happened? Logan does not break his vows... and when he gives a slightly different account of his meeting with Keller *before* the confession, it makes it look like Logan is lying. Mrs. Keller keeps waiting for the truth to come out - but it does not. She looks at her husband sitting beside her, waiting for him to tell the truth so tat this innocent priest does not go to prison for the rest of his life... but he says nothing. By writing this scene from Mrs. Keller’s seat it the gallery, we see the trial from the most interesting perspective, rather than just a flat telling of the scene.
The Verdict: What’s the worst that can happen? If they find Logan guilty, the conflict is over and Logan is carted off to prison... so that is *not* the worst thing that could happen. The jury comes back with a not guilty verdict, but the judge makes it clear that this does not mean Logan is innocent - the judge believes he is guilty, but there was not enough evidence to convict. Which means Logan has this cloud over him forever. When he leaves the courthouse, the crowd jeers him, “Take off that collar!” The crowd tries to tear him apart! It looks like he’s going to be lynched!
And that’s when Mrs. Keller breaks away from her husband at the courthouse steps and runs to Logan. She tells a police officer that Logan is innocent, and turns to point at her husband... who turns to point his gun at her! He shoots his own wife to shut her up, then goes on the run. Logan cradles her as she lays dying. LaRue wants to hear what she said - will she exonerate Logan with her dying words? No. Her dying words are, “Forgive me.” She dies without letting Logan off the hook for murder.
Final Confession: But Keller is now on the run for killing his wife. And LaRue wants him captured alive so that he get Keller to confess to Villette’s murder. But Keller has escaped into a huge hotel, and he is armed and dangerous, and it will not be easy for the police to take him alive. Problem is, if they kill Keller, the cloud will forever be over Logan’s head. So we get a really exciting chase through the hotel (maybe the first kitchen shoot out on film), ending with Keller trapped in the hotel’s theater. LaRue and Logan are now a team against Keller... and after LaRue tries to get Keller to confess to Villette’s murder without success, it’s up to Logan to walk in, unarmed, and get a confession. By this point, Keller is a paranoid maniac - he even blames Logan for the death of his wife! Logan “made him kill her”. Logan finally gets his confession, Keller is shot by the police... and begs Logan to help him, forgive him. Logan cradles him as he lays dying and gives him his last rights. The end.
Sound Track: Dimitri Tiomkin with a great score, it becomes especially important in the scenes without dialogue to give us the emotions below the surface. Tiomkin can go over the line into that “big score” thing, but here he uses his gift for strong rhythm to add weight to scenes and keep the suspense high.
I CONFESS is kind of a “lost” Hitchcock film. No one talks about it, it seldom shows in revival houses or on TV... yet it’s an interesting film with some great performances and some really great dramatic scenes.
- Bill
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