This film is self-consciously an outlier among Hitchcock’s Hollywood movies, maybe the great outlier in his career: a film based on a true story, devoted to bringing that story to the screen accurately, with documentary-like restraint and verisimilitude. Like Christ, Father Michael Logan, played by Montgomery Clift, is a silent scapegoat, taking on the guilt of another without properly defending himself.Įven more than I Confess, The Wrong Man is defined by the theme of the accused protagonist’s innocence. What’s more, when suspicion for a murder falls on the priest, the seal of the confessional prevents him from vindicating himself by identifying the real killer, whose confession he has heard. In I Confess, the protagonist is archetypally innocent: not just a good man, but a good priest whose life’s work, as the opening scene emphasizes, entails absolving the guilt of others. The theme of the innocent man wrongly accused is found throughout Hitchcock’s work, from his early silent-era films (e.g., The Lodger: A Story of London Fog, 1927) to some of his best-known works (e.g., The 39 Steps, North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief).īoth protagonists, although innocent of the crime they are accused of, are compromised by an unrelated secret that seems to support their guilt. It’s also worth noting that, while every film Hitchcock directed in between these two films was in color, these two are black and white. Not coincidentally, these two films, which Hitchcock took so seriously, are also the two most overtly Catholic films from a director whose Catholic background has often been cited as a notable influence in his work. It’s also true that nowhere in Hitchcock’s work do we find a purer distillation of two of the director’s defining obsessions: an innocent man wrongly accused of a crime he didn’t commit, and the transmission of guilt from one person to another. It’s true, as Kenny observes, that Hitchcock’s characteristic humor, found even in his darkest pictures, is all but absent in these two films. Alfred Hitchcock’s two most Catholic films Why two of the films Hitchcock took most seriously, I Confess and The Wrong Man, are also his most overtly Catholic works I Confess ( buy) and The Wrong Man ( buy) are both new on Blu-ray from Warner Archive Collection.Ī few days ago, in an excellent essay for, Glenn Kenny identified The Wrong Man, along with I Confess, as the two least fun (or “fun,” to use Kenny’s own qualifying quote marks) films in Hitch’s Hollywood career - a designation Kenny didn’t mean pejoratively, since his piece is an appreciation of The Wrong Man.
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