Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		4.0

I Confess Blu-ray Movie Review

Catholic Guilt

Reviewed by Michael Reuben February 19, 2016

Alfred Hitchcock once commented that he had miscalculated the audience for his 1953 thriller I Confess. "[W]e Catholics know that a priest cannot disclose the secret of the confessional, but the Protestants, the atheists, and the agnostics all say, 'Ridiculous! No man would remain silent and sacrifice his life for such a thing.'" Audiences today are more knowledgeable. The seal of confession that is central to the plot of I Confess is familiar enough from its use in police procedurals to require no explanation. Even so, Hitchcock's tale of a priest who finds himself accused of the very murder that he knows (but can't say) was committed by a member of his flock, is a tricky tale. Of all Hitchcock's falsely accused protagonists, Father Michael Logan may be the least relatable, because most people would speak up to save themselves.

It's fortunate, then, that Hitchcock cast a young Montgomery Clift as the confessor who is forced to choose between honoring his obligations and avoiding the gallows. While Clift's personal quirks may have irritated Hitchcock to no end, his delicate features and intense concentration are essential to making Father Logan's predicament credible. Hitchcock may not have cared for "method" actors, but he needed one for I Confess—and he got one of the best at an early stage of Clift's all-too-brief film career, before illness, injury, drugs and alcohol took their toll.

The Warner Archive Collection has followed their recent release of Hitchcock's The Wrong Man with a superb Blu-ray edition of I Confess. Both are lesser known entries in Hitchcock's filmography, and both now have been given presentations that allow them to be rediscovered.

I Confess is set in Quebec City, Canada, which Hitchcock chose because he wanted a location where a priest wearing a traditional cassock on the street would not look out of place. The film opens with a clever montage of signs that allows the director to accomplish several things, including getting his cameo out of the way. The signs eventually lead to a murder victim, who will shortly be identified as a lawyer named Villette (Ovila Légaré in flashbacks). The opening also identifies the murderer, who first appears as a dark figure fleeing the scene of the crime and is shortly identified as Otto Keller (O.E. Hasse), a German immigrant and occasional gardener to Villette. Keller takes refuge at the Church of St. Marie, where he works at the rectory as a handyman and his wife, Alma (Dolly Haas), is employed as a cook and housekeeper. There the distraught killer confesses his crime to Father Logan (Clift), who maintains professional detachment but is obviously horrified. He urges Keller to turn himself in, to no avail. Then he must struggle to maintain an outwardly normal appearance, while continuing to live in close proximity to a killer (though, according to Keller, he only meant to rob Villette).

Father Logan's dilemma would make for an interesting debate in a seminary class, but the script for I Confess, adapted by George Tabori (The Journey ) and Richard Archibald (The Innocents) from an obscure French play, deepens the priest's predicament with the kind of intersection between chance and fate that is a staple of Hitchcock's films. As it happens, Father Logan knew the victim. Like a criminal returning to the scene, he visits Villette's house the next day, where the police have been called and a crowd has gathered. There the priest encounters a woman he knows, Ruth Grandfort (Anne Baxter), the wife of a leading member of Parliament (Roger Dann), who is so obviously out of place that she and Father Logan can't help but attract the attention of Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden), the chief investigator on the case. Overcoming the reluctance of his boss, prosecutor Willy Robertson (Brian Aherne), who is a close friend of the Grandforts, Larrue begins digging into the tangle of relationships involving Mrs. Grandfort, Father Logan and the dead man. Suspicion quickly lights on Father Logan, whose refusal to speak only makes him look more guilty.

Father Logan's stoic reserve stands in sharp contrast to the increasingly frantic behavior of Keller, the real killer, who explains his nervousness by referring to his troubled history in Germany. O.E. Hasse's manic performance is the counterbalance to Clift's haunted features, as Keller alternately cowers before Father Logan, taunts him with his vow of silence and ultimately testifies against him. (He also plants evidence.) As much as Hitchcock generates suspense from the mechanics of justice bearing down on Father Logan, it is Keller's gradual transformation from pitifully desperate to connivingly evil that gives I Confess its dark tone.

There's an element of martyrdom in Father Logan's plight that is almost medieval, and Hitchcock reinforces the sensation by showcasing Quebec City's European architecture and repeatedly including images of Christ's Passion in the frame. The film's original script took the theme of martyrdom to its logical conclusion, but changes were made to appease studio objections. Still, I Confess does not have a happy ending in the conventional sense. Justice prevails, but at great cost.

I Confess Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Hitchcock's usual cinematographer, Robert Burks, shot I Confess in lustrous and richly textured black and white. For the film's Blu-ray debut, Warner's Motion Picture Imaging has newly scanned (at 2k) a preservation fine-grain master positive made from the original nitrate negative. As with many older films, the negative had already sustained significant wear-and-tear when the preservation master was created, and MPI performed frame-by-frame restoration to return the film to its original luster.

WAC's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray shows the superior detail and fine delineations of grays and blacks that are the hallmarks of the nitrate "sparkle". Whether in the many closeups of Montgomery Clift's expressive face or in the courtroom scenes crowded with extras, the image is beautifully sharp and clear, with the exception of so-called "process shots", which are especially noticeable in this film because the rest is so vividly detailed. The blacks are deep and solid, whether of the priests' attire or of the film noir-like shadows in which Keller is first revealed as the killer.

Unlike The Wrong Man, which was shot with a deliberately rough texture, I Confess has the fine grain of the best Hollywood productions. WAC has mastered I Confess with its usual high average bitrate, here 34.91 Mbps, ensuring a premium encode.

I Confess Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original mono track has been encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, with identical left and right channels. WAC has restored the audio, removing any pops, clicks or distortion, and the track plays with as good fidelity and dynamic range as the source will allow. Dialogue is clear, and the orchestral score by four-time Oscar winner Dmitri Tiomkin (High Noon), which utilizes a familiar motif from Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique, provides both comment on the drama and an emotional underpinning.

I Confess Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Hitchcock's Confession: A Look at I Confess (480i; 1.33:1; 20:43): Special features producer Laurent Bouzereau gathers the same group of Hitchcock experts who appeared in the extras for The Wrong Man, including director Peter Bogdanovich, TCM's Robert Osborne and film historian Richard Schickel.



• Gala Canadian Premiere for I Confess Newsreel Footage (480i; 1.33:1; 0:59): Hitchcock and Anne Baxter attend the premiere in Quebec City.



• Trailer (1080p; 1.37:1; 2:49): The most notable feature of the trailer is how it promotes I Confess in the style of a pulpy exploitation film ("Caught in the tangled web of murder, three people confess the secrets that torture their souls!").

I Confess Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Vertigo is often cited as Hitchcock's most "personal" film, but I Confess may be more so. The film had a much longer gestation than most of the director's projects, with multiple script rewrites, debates with the studio over story elements considered too controversial (including an illegitimate child) and casting changes. The result is unmistakably a Hitchcock film, but one unlike any other. Highly recommended.