The Art of Alfred Hitchcock by Donald Spoto

Author:Donald Spoto [Spoto, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56714-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-08-22T16:00:00+00:00

Montgomery Clift and Anne Baxter.

Accordingly, we see Ruth’s vision of it all as in memory she slowly descends a spiral staircase to the arms of the young soldier Logan, and there the camera revolves round them in Hitchcock’s favorite cinematic gesture for lovers. In this regard, Hitchcock is again more sophisticated than the sophisticates who see him simply yielding to the conventions of romantic moviemaking (as, some insisted, Hitchcock did in the taxi scene between Jane Wyman and Michael Wilding in Stage Fright). On the contrary, Hitchcock, as always, subverts every such absurd romantic convention. The hazy, gauzy, impossibly adolescent aura of Ruth’s memories are not endorsed, they are shown for what they are. This woman lives in a world of storybook fiction complete with soap-opera dialogue and hopelessly antiquated greeting-card sentiment.

I Confess is not, then, merely a straightforward and gloomy narrative based on an arcane ecclesiastical code. It is rather a subtly acted examination of three sets of couples, balanced precisely in terms of plot and theme: the Kellers, the Grandforts, and Logan and Larrue.

The counterpart to Keller is his frightened, beleaguered wife (significantly named Alma), one of the most lovingly rendered supporting roles in Hitchcock’s films (and reminiscent of the crofter’s wife in The 39 Steps). Forced to complicity by her husband and thus bound to cooperate with Logan’s indictment for murder, she cannot, finally, see the priest reviled by the community. When she blurts out the implication of her husband’s guilt and is shot by him, she too makes a dying confession and is forgiven by Logan. At the midpoint of this first relationship is the astonishing shot when Keller confronts the priest, taunting him with the reminder of the confessional’s inviolability and the consequent safety of himself and his wife. In a stunningly realized, long and swift reverse tracking shot, the two men walk through several rooms, round corners and up a flight of stairs. During this, Keller absentmindedly drops—one at a time—an armful of flowers he had intended to bring to the church; the gesture suggests simultaneously his failure at his job, the death he has caused, his loss of grace and his own inevitable funeral.

The second set of characters is the Grandforts. Where Keller shows little emotion, Ruth constantly demonstrates too much. In this regard, I Confess does not ultimately compare the murderer with the priest but the murderer and his former girlfriend. Both are destructive influences on Logan’s life in the present, both exploit his sincerity and good will. The complement to Ruth, of course—and the parallel to the faithful and slightly pathetic Alma Keller—is Pierre Grandfort, who must also endure the pain of knowing the truth about a spouse. He is the man of the noble gesture, the martyr who hears his wife’s admission that she has never loved him. He is the only man who can temper her hyperactive imagination, and her recognition of this is perhaps why Ruth leaves Logan before the final outcome and departs (smiling) with her husband.

The final structurally balanced set of couples is Father Logan and Inspector Larrue.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.