Authors: Patrick McGilligan
The cast and crew stayed at the Château Élysée, with the Hitchcocks at the more elegant Château Frontenac. Most of the exteriors were filmed in Quebec City, and a number of scenes were shot at the house of parliament and city hall. St. Zephirin-de-Stadacona was the main church.
Robert Burks was again Hitchcock’s chosen cameraman. Rudi Fehr was the editor. The score was another by Dimitri Tiomkin, but one of his more interesting, including some elements of a mock-Gregorian chant.
The secondary characters included the pivotal married couple who work in the rectory—the killer who confesses to the priest, and his abused wife. In Tabori’s draft they became German émigrés—“displaced persons,” in Hitchcock’s words. The director cast O. E. Hasse, a powerful character actor trained by Max Reinhardt who had started his screen career as an extra for F. W. Murnau, as the killer; Dolly Haas, a popular German star of the early 1930s before fleeing Hitler, was cast as his wife. Hitchcock remembered Haas fondly from the British remake of D. W. Griffith’s
Broken Blossoms
, where she acquitted herself in the Lillian Gish role.
Karl Malden, a close friend of Clift’s who had just won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for
A Streetcar Named Desire
, was cast as the detective who stubbornly tries to pin the crime on Father Logan. The studio knew enough to be concerned about Clift, already a notorious drinker and troubled soul, and hoped that Malden would keep him steady.
Brain Aherne didn’t become the Crown Prosecutor until the last minute. Besides his fleeting status as Joan Fontaine’s first husband, Aherne was an even-tempered professional whom Hitchcock knew dating as far back as the West End production of
Rope
, in which Aherne played the original Brandon, the dominant partner in the killing. The director phoned his old friend from Canada and asked him to come and play a role in
I Confess
—for less than his customary salary, Hitchcock apologized, because the budget was already overspent.
Dozens of journalists descended on Quebec City to cover the filming, which was plagued by inclement weather (nonetheless augmented for story purposes by wind machines and fire hoses) and observed by huge crowds. Eight thousand people watched Hitchcock shoot the scenes with Clift and Baxter on the promenade overlooking the St. Lawrence River.
Accounts disagree as to whether Clift began to drink heavily in Canada, or later on in Hollywood during the studio filming. Haas thought the star was usually sober on the set, but “mighty unhappy about something.” Malden thought Clift’s erratic behavior had very little to do with the script or Hitchcock; and that the actor was “tragically beginning to fall apart.”
Drunk or sober, Clift was “very neurotic and a Method actor,” according to Hitchcock, and couldn’t relax under the director’s stony gaze. Clift resisted Hitchcock’s preordained camera setups, while trying to draw inspiration from “obscure” sources. “I remember when he came out of the court [in one scene],” Hitchcock recalled. “I asked him to look up, so that I could cut to his point of view of the building across the street. He said, ‘I don’t know if I would look up.’ Well, imagine. I said, ‘If you don’t look up, I can’t cut.’ ”
Clift had his drama coach, Mira Rostova, close by at all times; she had been made part of his contract, and was umbilically attached to his performance. Rostova rehearsed with the sensitive actor daily, and then stood just out of sight whenever the cameras rolled. Clift waited for
her
nod of approval, not Hitchcock’s, before moving on.
Malden thought Rostova’s presence created “a deep division and tension” on the set, a gulf between the star and the director—but if so it remained a largely unspoken gulf. Hitchcock left Clift and Rostova alone. What would be gained otherwise? Wasn’t everything about
I Confess
a fait accompli? If anything, Hitchcock was extraordinarily patient, exceptionally polite, as he went about collecting his shots and angles.
The director realized that, if anything, Rostova helped the production by soothing Clift’s wounded psyche. Although Hitchcock dubbed her the “little pigeon,” he treated the drama coach with elaborate courtesy, and made a point of including her in the cast dinners he hosted at the Château Frontenac in August and September, and later at Bellagio Road.
Holding court at the cast dinners up in Canada, Hitchcock steered the conversation toward a recent trial in a Quebec courtroom: a Quebec jeweler had wanted to murder his wife so he could collect on her insurance policy and marry his mistress. His girlfriend’s brother made a bomb with a timing device, and the mistress express-mailed it on an aircraft carrying the wife. It was timed to explode over the St. Lawrence River, theoretically destroying evidence of the crime, but instead blew up forty miles outside Quebec at seven thousand feet, killing the wife and twenty-two others. The man and his accomplices were arrested and convicted, and in 1950 they were hanged—all for a ten-thousand-dollar policy.
With the disheartening prospect of
I Confess
all around him, he distracted himself with talk of how a bomb on an airplane might make an exciting Hitchcock film.
Inevitably,
I Confess
suffered from its patched-together script (“lacking in humor and subtlety,” as Hitchcock told François Truffaut) and disappointing leads. Montgomery Clift proved a disappointment not only to the director, but also to his friend Karl Malden. Malden and Clift had a falling-out during the filming: Malden thought the star was trying to upstage him in their scenes together, and he became convinced that Clift and Rostova were whispering against him. Silently seething, Malden felt betrayed by Clift’s behavior. After he was invited to view a rough cut of
I Confess
, Malden realized that Hitchcock must have seen and understood everything that passed between them. The editing subtly favored Malden. When Malden thanked him, Hitchcock murmured, “I thought you’d like it.” (“I felt it was his way of offering me a little prize for staying cool about Monty and Mira,” wrote Malden.)
Anne Baxter never had much of a chance: the final absurdity of the script was her character leaving the grand ballroom on the arm of her husband (Roger Dann), even before the violent denouement of
I Confess.
Her character’s scenes were rewritten one last time on location; by then Hitchcock felt hamstrung by the casting. His camera preferred the exquisite Dolly Haas, playing the sympathetic character named for his wife, Alma.
I Confess
smolders without ever catching fire. Hitchcock is most comfortable with the secondary characters (the Brian Aherne scenes are especially playful), the brooding Quebec City and Catholic atmosphere, the dreamlike flashbacks. (These silent interludes, depicting the idyllic prewar romance between the priest and his girlfriend, seem almost to achieve the kind of hyperrealism Hitchcock had wanted from Salvador Dalí for
Spellbound.
) Perhaps the best part of
I Confess
is the Hitchcockian ending—“which is liturgically and thematically right (transference of guilt healed by confession),” in film scholar Bill Krohn’s words—although it was virtually imposed by the studio as an alternative to hanging the priest.
The ending finds Father Logan, after being acquitted in the courtroom, met outside by hostile reporters and a mob of angry people.
*
The killer’s wife can’t stifle her conscience any longer, but when she tries to shout the truth, her husband pulls a gun and (somewhat illogically) shoots her. Pandemonium
erupts. The priest and police then chase the man through descending levels of the Château Frontenac. Defiantly clutching his gun, the killer winds up—like the Drummer Man or Mr. Memory before him—alone on a stage at the far end of a grand ballroom.
Father Logan dares to approach the killer. The jittery man makes a threatening gesture, and the police shoot him. The killer collapses in the priest’s arms—another villain who has improvised his own self-murder in a Hitchcock film. “I am alone as you are,” he murmurs to Father Logan, pleading for forgiveness. The priest closes his eyes and whispers a prayer over the dying man. Hitchcock was usually compassionate toward his sinners, but this is his most compassionate ending to his most Catholic film.
The time Hitchcock had taken off in 1951 paid off in dividends for the decade ahead.
Unusually for him, by the time
I Confess
went into postproduction, Hitchcock knew what his next several film projects were going to be. After
I Confess
, he planned to direct
The Bramble Bush
for Transatlantic; after that he was going to direct another Transatlantic property, an adaptation of a novel called
To Catch a Thief.
He had read the book in galleys, and Sidney Bernstein had optioned it on his behalf. They sent it to Cary Grant, who in 1952 tentatively committed to playing the lead, a retired jewel thief living on the Riviera.
While in New York in the fall of 1952, Hitchcock saw a play called
Dial M for Murder
, a hit imported from London; he filed it away in his mind as a possible run-for-cover subject. He met with Leland Hayward, who wanted to sell him on a Cornell Woolrich short story, which Hayward had optioned in partnership with Josh Logan. Logan, a Broadway director who wanted to move into film, had written a treatment of the story. Hayward wanted Hitchcock to produce the Cornell Woolrich film, with Logan directing James Stewart in the lead; alternatively, Hitchcock might direct the film, from Logan’s script. Around this time Hitchcock also had the idea of Stewart starring in the long-bruited-about remake of
The Man Who Knew Too Much
, and he asked Bernstein if he could pin down the rights for Transatlantic.
In his spare time, he was already scribbling notes for an unusual film, based on a book by Jack Trevor Story. It wasn’t a well-known book: not
What Happened to Harry?
, Hitchcock kept having to correct Bernstein, but a scenic little novel called
The Trouble with Harry.
And to journalists who interviewed him on the press tour for
Strangers on a Train
, Hitchcock had spoken for the first time about a future film, in which he envisioned a wrong-man hero—someone like Cary Grant—hiding inside Abraham Lincoln’s nostril atop Mount Rushmore. What the
hero was doing there, or how he got there, the director didn’t have the slightest notion.
In New York, Hitchcock shared drinks at “21” with Otis Guernsey of the
New York Herald Tribune.
His eyes lit up when Guernsey said he had an idea for a film about an “ingenuous American” saddled with a mistaken identity—the “highly romantic and dangerous identity” of a “masterspy”—being pursued by assassins. Hitchcock turned Guernsey over to Kay Brown, who eventually extracted a treatment from the newspaperman that even Guernsey felt evinced too many “faults of a) logic b) corn or c) overcomplicated devices.” But Hitchcock didn’t mind the faulty logic, the corn, or the overcomplicated devices—and he paid for the sketchy treatment.
Bernstein spoke with Ben Hecht about expanding the wrong-master-spy idea into a vehicle for Cary Grant, but Hecht was too busy, so Hitchcock set it aside. Guernsey’s idea bore obvious similarities to
The Bramble Bush
, with its politics and wrong-man conceit, yet it offered a fallback if the other project bogged down. “The Man in Lincoln’s Nose” was Hitchcock’s joke title for the idea, which almost a decade later became
North by Northwest.
The consent decree that forced the major studios to divest themselves of their theater chains, the surge of television, and the shadow of the blacklist had combined to hobble Hollywood at the beginning of the 1950s. Production was down drastically, and in late 1951 Hitchcock noted in a letter to Bernstein, not without pity, that the much-admired Michael Curtiz had just been cashiered by Warner Bros. after twenty-six years as a contract director. Hitchcock suddenly found himself one of only a handful of filmmakers under long-term agreement—suddenly he was the studio’s star director.
Hitchcock, who had started out in the business writing intertitles for silent pictures, took stock of the dubious trends sweeping the industry, in his letters to Bernstein. He dryly disparaged the quick fixes of Cinema-Scope, Magnascope, Cinerama, 3-D, and “road show” pictures—the official alternatives to television. Warner Bros., Hitchcock knew, was about to jump on the 3-D bandwagon. The veteran director was skeptical of fads, but thought at least they had the merit of distracting the bosses from watching him too closely. While the bosses panicked, Hitchcock crackled with confidence. While they had forgotten how to entertain, he was refining his ideas. Hollywood was adrift—but his films would sail through the gaps.
Hitchcock was fascinated by Darryl Zanuck’s high-wire act amid nervous stockholders at Twentieth Century–Fox, and amused to observe Jack Warner’s sudden pique whenever a Zanuck triumph was reported in the trades. Except for David O. Selznick, who was nominally independent of
the major studios, Jack Warner was the mogul Hitchcock got to know best, and the only one still as firmly in control in 1950 as he was when Hitchcock first visited Hollywood. Hitchcock’s letters indicate that many of the final, touchy decisions involving his Warner Bros. films were settled privately between him and the top man.
Most directors who started out in silent pictures were winding down, just as Hitchcock was charging full blast into the coming decade. Jack Warner could take pride in having such a man under contract—at a time when there was little else the studio could point to with pride.
Rope
and
Under Capricorn may
have been box-office failures, but Warner’s only handled the distribution on these films; Transatlantic absorbed the losses.
Stage Fright
and
Strangers on a Train
, on the other hand, had proved economical and surprisingly profitable. For Warner Bros., Hitchcock was a triple achiever: a man with an audience track record, a consistent awards contender, and a publicity asset.
It was at Warner’s that Hitchcock first began to consult closely with the studio about the promotion of his films, and that the publicity began routinely to refer to him as “the Master of Suspense.” Hitchcock made appearances for the studio at premieres outside of New York and Los Angeles, doing minitours of regions and markets, familiarizing himself with influential local critics and columnists. (When Irv Kupcinet traveled to London in 1953, Hitchcock was able to write ahead, informing Bernstein all about “Kup,” advising that a “tiny red carpet” be thrown for the
Chicago Sun Times
columnist, who also hosted his own television show.) During his time at Warner Bros., Hitchcock added to his list of friendly media contacts and cultivated a wider network of relationships.