Although listed in many movie guides as one of Hitchcock’s “lesser” films, there is nothing lacking in drama in this movie. Clift’s Fr. Logan, looking otherworldly and ascetic in a cassock, hears the agitated confession of a parish workman who has just killed a man. A chain of circumstances leads to Fr. Logan himself being accused of the crime, for which he stands trial. It’s another version of the classic Hitchcock preoccupation with people who are accused of crimes they did not commit, but here there is a double twist: not only is Fr. Logan prevented by the seal of the confessional from identifying the true murderer, but he is likewise prevented by that same seal from providing exonerating evidence of where he was on the night of the murder.

Intriguingly enough, the centerpiece of the story — the seal of the confessional — is never once explicitly mentioned. Wouldn’t Protestant viewers be confused? Hitchcock evidently thought not: perhaps it’s a sign of the health of the culture in 1953 that he was able to take for granted that moviegoers would know that a Catholic priest can’t reveal what he hears in Confession. When at his murder trial Fr. Logan is asked how a bloodstained cassock (used as a disguise by the murderer) that is not his found its way into his trunk, he responds simply, “I can’t say.” The camera captures him at this moment in profile, with the crucifix on the courtroom wall (this was Quebec before lapsed Catholicism became the dominant religion) the only other element in the picture. Only a well instructed viewer will notice how weighted are those three words — and that indelible picture — with theological meaning and moral courage.

Moral courage, yes, even though it comes out in due course that Fr. Logan was in fact with a woman on the night of the murder. This woman (played with opulent melodrama by Anne Baxter) was being blackmailed by the murdered man — she was paying him to keep quiet about her relationship with Fr. Logan. But none of this is as it seems, and in fact Fr. Logan is innocent of all immorality, although Hitchcock is masterful in leading even the viewer to suspect him.

Throughout the movie Fr. Logan consistently and indefatigably acts like a man whose primary concern is to be faithful to Jesus Christ. At one point the murderer, Keller, growls at him, “You are so good. It’s easy for you to be good!” But in fact it isn’t at all easy. Again and again we see just how difficult it is for him. He is in profound struggle with himself, and finally determines to remain faithful to his God no matter what the cost. When it becomes clear that he is going to be arrested for the murder, he disappears abruptly from his rectory. Wandering the streets in agitation, he eyes a three-piece suit in a store window. It’s Hitchcock’s wonderful cinematic economy for Father’s temptation to escape — as easily as changing his clothes. We even see him, briefly, break down. But ultimately he shows up, still in his cassock and resigned to his fate, at the police station.

Similarly, when Anne Baxter is about to make quite a different kind of confession to the police — about her lingering unrequited love for Fr. Logan — the priest implores her: “Think of yourself. Think of your husband.” This, even though he has every reason to believe that what she is going to tell them will exonerate him of the murder charge. Later, his life essentially ruined by the murderer, he nevertheless approaches him unarmed and unprotected after the wretched Keller has already shot three people. Indeed, the movie ends virtually where it began: with Fr. Logan again pronouncing Ego te absolvo over Keller, performing his priestly role despite the enormous cost to him personally.

Fr. Logan’s actions are so aboveboard that a description of them on paper risks making him sound like a plaster saint — an unconvincing character out of a hyper-pious hagiography that does more to discourage the struggling members of the Church Militant than inspire them. But this priest is rescued from the unreality of sentimental piety by Montgomery Clift’s outstanding performance, which fills in Fr. Logan thoroughly as a man with the same fears and desires as the rest of us, but who’s willing to risk the pain of the flesh for the pleasure of the spirit. Hitchcock, also, is working with a script and a visual setting that heightens Fr. Logan’s plight and brings into sharp relief his wrenching spiritual conflicts.

Despite its Catholic elements, this is not a “Catholic movie” or even an overtly religious one. In the Hitchcock oeuvre, it’s another thriller. It would only suffer from added didactic content. A sermon (or police station lecture) by Fr. Logan about the seal of the confessional would only have slowed the plot and added nothing that wasn’t clear already.

On the other hand, I Confess would be virtually incomprehensible outside a Catholic context. Even a movie that hinged on other types of confidentiality wouldn’t have played as well, because of the lack of the sacred and mysterious element: a thriller about a reporter who refused to breach the confidentiality of his sources would have a hard time avoiding a legalistic, pedantic tone that is nowhere in I Confess.