Featurette
Plot summary
In Québec City, Father Michael Logan is a priest at Sainte Marie's Church, where Otto and Alma Keller, German immigrants, serve as caretaker and housekeeper. Otto also gardens part time for Villette, a lawyer found murdered in his home, and two girls report to Inspector Larrue that a priest was seen leaving the house. Otto confesses to Logan that he killed Villette while trying to rob him, and tells Alma that the priest is required to keep what he hears inviolate. Logan goes to the crime scene the next morning and Larrue questions him there. Logan will not answer the suspicion against him without violating the seal of the confessional.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about I Confess (1953)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Warner Bros. forced Hitchcock to remove two elements from the original screenplay of I Confess: following the source play, the priest and his lover had an illegitimate baby, and the priest was executed at the end of the film.
- Hitchcock first hired Swedish actress Anita Björk as the female lead after seeing her in Miss Julie (1951), but Warner Bros. made him find another actress when she arrived in Hollywood with her lover, the writer Stig Dagerman, and their baby.
- Ireland banned I Confess because it showed a priest having a relationship with a woman, even though in the film the relationship takes place before the character becomes a priest.
- Hitchcock planned to use Quebec churches at no cost, but the local diocese read George Tabori's original script, objected to the priest's execution and rescinded its permission; when Tabori refused to change the script, Hitchcock brought in William Archibald to rewrite it.
- Hitchcock, who as usual created detailed storyboards for every scene, could not understand Montgomery Clift's Method acting and became frustrated with him when he blew take after take by failing to follow Hitchcock's instructions.
- I Confess had one of the longest pre-productions of any Hitchcock film, with almost 12 writers working on the script for him over a period of eight years, a stretch that took in his daughter Patricia Hitchcock's 1951 wedding and the dissolving of his Transatlantic Pictures partnership with Sidney Bernstein.
- According to the filmmaker and historian Peter Bogdanovich, Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess was a favorite among French New Wave filmmakers.
