Since 2010, film fans have celebrated November as “Noirvember,” challenging each other to dig into the film noir genre. Noir, which had its Hollywood heyday in the 1940s and ’50s, featured morally ambiguous characters navigating a grim universe where the only thing darker than the shadows was the evil in the human heart.
Despite its essential pessimism, noir resonates strongly with Catholicism. Noir characters wrestle with sin and shame, a desire for salvation and the persistence of temptation. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that a number of the writers and filmmakers who shaped noir were raised (and in a few cases remained) Catholic, including James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, Charles Laughton, Graham Greene and Fritz Lang.
But the filmmaker most associated with both noir and Catholicism is inarguably Alfred Hitchcock. Hitchcock grew up in a strict Catholic family and attended a Jesuit high school. In his book Afterimage: The Indelible Catholic Imagination of Six American Filmmakers, former America film critic and editor Richard A. Blake, S.J., quotes Hitchcock as saying: “The Jesuits taught me organization, control, and to some degree analysis…. As far as any religious influence goes, at the time I think it was fear.” He maintained a complicated relationship with the church throughout his life, and Catholicism clearly shaped his filmmaking.
This is never more apparent than in “I Confess” (1953), with a screenplay by George Tabori and William Archibald, based on the play “Nos deux consciences” by Paul Anthelme. While considered a minor work in Hitchcock’s filmography and the annals of film noir, “I Confess” is Hitchcock’s most explicitly Catholic film. That makes it a perfect choice for a Noirvember Catholic Movie Club.
Montgomery Clift plays Father Michael Logan, a parish priest in Quebec City. He hears the confession of Keller (O. E. Hasse), a German refugee who helps out around the parish, who admits to killing a man while robbing him. Afterwards, Keller shows no desire to turn himself in, placing Logan in a uniquely Catholic moral conundrum: Does he break the seal of confession or allow a murderer to walk free?
Matters become more complicated when Inspector Larrue (Karl Malden) discovers that the dead man—an unscrupulous lawyer named Villette—was blackmailing Logan’s former lover, Ruth (Anne Baxter). When witnesses report a man in a cassock walking away from the crime (really Keller, who wore it as a disguise), Father Logan becomes the prime suspect. If he tells the police what he knows, he will be excommunicated; if he doesn’t, he may be executed.
“I Confess” underperformed at the box office, which Hitchcock attributed to a general audience’s unfamiliarity with Catholic teaching. To a non-Catholic, Logan’s dilemma is a non-issue: Why wouldn’t he tell the police the truth? But a Catholic can more easily relate to Logan’s angst.
“I Confess” isn’t the best showcase of Hitchcock’s famous ability to create mood and tension. Logan spends most of the film suffering in silence, turning what could be a fascinating portrait of a man of faith in crisis into a holy cipher. (Clift’s screen presence helps a bit as he is compelling to watch even when he doesn’t have much to do.) Hitchcock also had a gift for conveying emotion without words, and there are glimmers of that here. In one striking shot, we see a brooding Logan in the far background, framed beside a silhouetted statue of Christ carrying the cross in the foreground. Even Logan’s silence can carry weight, as his internal struggle flashes across Clift’s face before he composes himself. But often his struggle feels too interior, to the point of remaining at a dramatic distance from the viewer.
The most interesting storyline concerning sin and grace in “I Confess” actually belongs to Keller, the murderer. When we first meet him, we sympathize with his plight: He is a stranger in a strange land, trying to create a better life for himself and his wife, and his crime was largely accidental. But after he confesses to Logan, he becomes almost intoxicated by having dodged accountability. His fear of exposure—and beneath it, perhaps, his guilt—spirals until it rules his entire life. Increasingly erratic and paranoid, he becomes willing to justify any action that will keep him from facing the consequences, including framing Logan and killing again.
Keller is a classic noir character: His ordinary human weakness leading him to monstrous acts of violence. But like so many noir characters, he also harbors a secret, almost scandalous, hope for salvation. There’s a reason he went to confession in the first place, after all. But that confession was poisoned by his lack of remorse, and he experiences no true absolution—his later actions make that clear.
In the end, only a true confession can save him and Logan both. Noir is all about what lurks in the shadows, but we only find salvation when we step into the light.
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