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Alfred Hitchcock's I Confess was based on Paul Anthelme's 1902 play Nos Deux Consciences. Hitchcock began working on the film in 1947 but had great difficulty in fashioning a script which met both his requirements and those of various other interested parties, including the Production Code Administration and the Roman Catholic Church. The paper traces the compromised development of the project through to its location filming in Quebec in 1952, and suggests that problems with the film cited by Robin Wood and others can be traced to this troubled development process.
Cinematic representations of religious figures have always risked raising the ire of audiences. When Alfred Hitchcock proposed making a film about a priest suspected of murder, hardly anyone thought the project was a good idea. As early as October 1947, Lee Wright of Simon & Schuster's 'Inner Sanctum Mysteries' wrote to Katherine Brown at MCA, regarding a proposed tie-in with the film. Wright wrote, 'There's no doubt that the basic idea ... is a very interesting one. I'm afraid though that in myopinion it has been worked out very badly'.1 Brown agreed. 'Please don't tell Hitch, as it's none of my business, but I thought the story frighteningly bad, and I hope he makes enormous changes before he does it as a picture'.2 By the time the film I Confess began shooting at the end of August, 1952, the story had been revised numerous times as the producers struggled to address fundamental problems with the concept.3
The kernel around which the film is built is the main character's refusal to speak. Framed for murder by a killer who has confessed to him in the first few minutes of the film, Father Michael Logan (Montgomery Clift) refuses to violate the secrecy of the confessional even after he is accused of adultery and the murder of his married lover's blackmailer. Arrested and put on trial for his life, his best defense is a meager 'I can't say'. Everymajor character in the film tries to provoke a response from Father Logan only to be exasperated by his silence. Critics have been equally frustrated, seldom discussing the film except to express a fundamental dissatisfaction. The most generous, Robin Wood, declares the film to be 'earnest, distinguished, very...