Capital Celluloid 2022 — Day 105: Sun Apr 17

I Confess (Hitchcock, 1953): BFI Southbank, NFT1, 12 noon 


This 35mm presentation, also being screened on April 20th, is part of the Big Screen Classics strand at BFI Sothbank. Full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Alfred Hitchcock’s earliest serious critics, the Catholic-minded Cahiers group, revered this 1953 film above all his 50s work; today it’s very seldom revived. Montgomery Clift plays a stone-faced priest (Hitchcock’s only direction to him seems to have been “don’t twitch”) who hears a confession of murder and assumes the killer’s guilt. The movie is more interesting than achieved: it’s the most forthright statement of the transference theme in Hitchcock’s work, but it’s also the least nuanced. Still, there are shots of extraordinary beauty, emerging from the grayish Quebec background like flashes into color.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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