Hitchcock and the Censors by Billheimer John;

Author:Billheimer, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Published: 2019-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Montgomery Clift and Anne Baxter, caught in the rainstorm that will lead to a blackmail attempt made implausible by censorship demands. (Courtesy of Jerry Ohlinger.)

Every letter from the Code office regarding the succession of I Confess scripts addressed technical aspects of the confessional so arcane as to be outside the experience of most Catholics and of interest primarily to liturgical scholars. Although each of the letters was signed by Joseph I. Breen, he was recovering from lung cancer treatments at the time and appeared in the office for short periods of only one or two days a week.11 Coded numbers in the signature section of the letters make it clear that the technical observations regarding the confessional were composed by the exseminarian Jack Vizzard rather than by Breen himself. A sampling of these observations follows:

• The priest would never ask the name of the murder victim.

• The priest would never address the penitent by name.

• The priest should not look sharply at the murderer or his wife during the trial.

• The priest cannot speak to the murderer about the crime outside of the confessional.

• The murderer does not have to turn himself in to the police to receive absolution.

• The script must make it clear that the restitution of the stolen money is necessary for absolution.12

It’s safe to say that no non-Catholic and relatively few Catholics would have recognized these details as gaffes had they been left in the film, and a few, such as Father Michael not looking at the murderer during the trial, would have denied Hitchcock one of his chief techniques for building suspense.

In his discussions with François Truffaut, Hitchcock said that the trouble with I Confess was “We Catholics know that a priest cannot disclose the secrets of the confessional, but the Protestants, the atheists, and the agnostics all say ‘Ridiculous! No man would remain silent and sacrifice his life for such a thing.’”13

Truffaut agreed that the general non-Catholic public “was irritated with the plot because they kept on hoping that Montgomery Clift would speak up,” and asked Hitchcock, “Would you consider that a weakness in the screenplay?”

Hitchcock answered, “It certainly is a disadvantage. If the basic idea is not acceptable to the public, it compromises the whole picture … to put a situation into a film because you yourself can vouch for its authenticity … simply isn’t good enough.”14

Truffaut felt that the bigger problem with the screenplay was the “extraordinary coincidence at the beginning” in which the murderer who has killed a man in order to rob him “should happen to confess his crime to the very priest who was being blackmailed by the dead man.”15

Plausibility was never high on the list of Hitchcock’s concerns. He generally kept the plot moving so fast and filled the screen with such ravishing images that the viewer was having too much fun to worry over coincidences and plot connections. Unfortunately, I Confess didn’t move fast enough to cover all its implausibilities. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times

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.