I Confess (1953)

Film: I Confess (1953)

Stars: Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne, OE Hasse, Dolly Haas

Director: Alfred Hitchcock

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2021 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different one Alfred Hitchcock's Leading Ladies.  This month, our focus is on Anne Baxter-click here to learn more about Ms. Baxter (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Similar to last month, we're going to end our month devoted to the career of Anne Baxter with the reason she's included in this series, her teaming with Alfred Hitchcock.  We've already discussed this a bit, but Baxter nearly was cast in 1940's Rebecca, but was deemed too young for the role by Hitchcock himself.  13 years later, he was ready for her, though, with today's film I Confess.  In 1953, Baxter was not the ingenue that she'd been when Hitchcock had first met her.  Last week we talked about her in the 1948 film The Luck of the Irish, but in 1950 she'd have what would be her defining role, and her sole nomination for Best Actress, as the titular Eve Harrington in All About Eve.  While that was a huge hit, Baxter decided not to sign again with Fox three years later, and instead became a freelance actor, with I Confess being her first film under this newfound status as an artist-for-hire.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is about Father Logan (Clift), a priest who has heard the confession of German immigrant Otto Keller (Hasse), who has murdered a man he was trying to rob.  Keller knows that Logan is bound by the sanctity of the confessional, and therefore cannot tell a sole his crime.  In the coming days, though, Inspector Larrue (Malden) begins to suspect Logan is the killer, and indeed it does feel like he's done some suspicious things, and has an unusual relationship with Ruth Grandfort (Baxter), the wife of a local politician.  As the film wears on, we learn that Ruth & Father Logan were once in love, but when he went off to fight in World War II they split apart.  They reconnected years later, and spent a (chaste) night together when she was married, and both were being blackmailed by the man that Keller murdered, threatening to cause a scandal for catching them together in such a compromising position.  As the film wears on, Father Logan stands trial, and while he's found not guilty, the public is not convinced.  In the end, though, Father Logan is exonerated when, after killing his wife who is about to expose his secrets, Keller confesses in a gunfight with the police & Father Logan, the latter never breaking the sanctity of the confessional despite being put through great trial.

I Confess is one of the least famous movies in Hitchcock's filmography of the 1950's, and considering the very buzzy cast here, I was genuinely curious as to why.  The reason, it turns out, is that the movie itself isn't particularly good.  The film casts Clift as a sexless lover, and one could make a sincere argument that he's supposed to be gay (many Clift characters of this era you could make that argument about the closeted actor), but he doesn't work as the lead.  Baxter has stated since then that Clift's heavy drinking & depression made him a difficult leading man to work with, and one wonders if she would've pulled off better chemistry with a James Mason or Farley Granger in the lead role.  As it is, the movie drags and is a bit tedious with a tepid chemistry between the two leads, and no one comes out the better here.  This is perhaps the least of all of Hitchcock's films from this decade.

Anne Baxter would continue making movies for most of the 1950's, and would have one of her most iconic roles three years later as Nefretiri in The Ten Commandments (give or take All About Eve, this is what modern audiences most associate her with now), but like many actresses of her era, she began the shift to television, making appearances on Dr. Kildare, Ironside, and Batman.  Her most noted role was in Hotel, in the 1980's, a series she'd do until her death in 1985 from a stroke, a role that she'd win when a different actress dropped off of the project...in a true sense of life imitating art, that woman was Bette Davis.  Next month, we're going to take a trip back to the 1940's as we briefly break chronology to talk about one of Classic Hollywood's most lasting figures, and one of Hitchcock's favorite leading ladies.