A.H. I think so, too. A mother sometimes demonstrates her love for her baby by playing a game that consists of frightening the infant with gestures and sounds like “Boo, brr . . .” The baby may be scared, but it will laugh and wave, and as soon as it can talk, it will call for more. One English newspaperwoman said that Psycho was the film of a “barbaric sophisticate.” Who knows, she may be right.
F.T. In any case, it’s an interesting definition.
A.H. And probably true at that. If Psycho had been intended as a serious picture, it would have been shown as a clinical case with no mystery or suspense. The material would have been used as the documentation of a case history. We’ve already mentioned that total plausibility and authenticity merely add up to a documentary. In the mystery and suspense genre, a tongue-in-cheek approach is indispensable. I feel that both I Confess and The Wrong Man suffer from a lack of humor. The only question then is whether one should always have a sense of humor in dealing with a serious subject. It seems to me that some of my British films were too light and some of my American movies have been too heavy-handed, but it’s the most difficult thing in the world to control that so as to get just the right dosage. It’s only after the picture’s done that one can judge that properly. Do you feel that there’s a connection between my Jesuit upbringing and the heavy-handedness of I Confess?
F.T. Not necessarily. I attributed that to the austerity of the Canadian climate, which is further weighted down by the Teutonic gravity of Otto Keller and his wife.
A.H. Yes, there is a certain off balance there, and we run into it every time a story takes place in a mixed ethnic community: Britishers with Americans or else Americans with French Canadians. It’s also true for pictures that are filmed in a foreign country when all the characters are English-speaking; I’ve never been able to get used to that.
Aside from that, I didn’t want Anne Baxter to play the feminine lead; I wanted Anita Bjork, who had played Miss Julie. However, Warner Brothers decided against her, sent Anita Bjork back to her fiords, and I was informed by a phone call that Anne Baxter had been assigned to the picture. I met her for the first time a week before the shooting, in the dining room of Quebec’s Hotel Château Frontenac. When you compare Anita Bjork and Anne Baxter, wouldn’t you say that was a pretty awkward substitution?
F.T. Yes, I would agree on that, but I must say that Montgomery Clift was truly remarkable. Throughout the picture his attitude as well as his expression is consistent. He has an air of total dignity at all times, and it’s only through his eyes that we sense his bewilderment at all the things that are happening to him. The picture, once again, is on the theme of the transference of guilt, which, in this case, is reinforced by religion and an absolute concept of confession. From the moment that Montgomery Clift accepts Otto Keller’s confession of the crime, it’s as if he himself had become a party to it. And that’s the way Keller sees it.
A.H. I think that’s a fundamental fact: Any priest who receives the confession of any killer becomes an accessory after the fact.
F.T. Certainly, but the trouble, I think, is that the public doesn’t realize that. People like the picture, they’re absorbed in it, but they keep on hoping that Clift will speak up, which, of course, is a misconception. I feel sure that you didn’t expect that sort of reaction.
A.H. I agree with you. What’s more, aside from the public, there were many of the critics who apparently felt that for’a priest to guard a secret at the risk of his own life was absurd.
F.T. I don’t think that’s what shocked them, but rather the extraordinary coincidence at the beginning.
A.H. Do you mean when the killer puts on the priest’s robe?
F.T. No, that’s the postulate. The coincidence I have in mind is about Vilette, the victim. Isn’t it a rather formidable coincidence that the murderer who has killed him in order to rob him should happen to confess his crime to the very priest who was being blackmailed by the dead man?
A.H. Yes, I suppose so.
F.T. I think this is the coincidence that really disturbs our friends, the plausibilists. It’s not merely an unlikely situation, it’s an exceptional situation. In fact, it’s the height of the exceptional.
A.H. Let’s say it comes under the heading of an old-fashioned plot. And while we’re on the subject, I should like to ask you a question. Why has it become old-fashioned to tell a story, to use a plot? I believe that there are no more plots in the recent French films.
F.T. Well, that isn’t systematic, it’s simply a trend that reflects the evolution of the public, the impact of television, and the increasing use of documentary and press materials in the entertainment field. All of these factors have a bearing on the current attitude toward fiction; people seem to be moving away from that form and to be rather leery of the old patterns.
A.H. In other words, the trend away from the plot is due to the progress in communications? Well, that’s possible. I feel that way myself, and nowadays I’d prefer to build a film around a situation rather than a plot.
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F.T. We were talking about I Confess, and I should like to get back to it. We agreed that the public was irritated with the plot because they kept on hoping that Montgomery Clift would speak up. Would you consider that a weakness of the screenplay?
A.H. It certainly is a disadvantage. If the basic idea is not acceptable to the public, it compromises the whole picture. And this brings up another generalization: To put a situation into a film simply because you yourself can vouch for its authenticity, either because you’ve experienced it or because you’ve heard of it, simply isn’t good enough. You may feel sure of yourself because you can always say, “This is true, I’ve seen it.” You can argue as much as you like, but the public or critics still won’t accept it. So we have to go along with the idea that truth is stranger than fiction. Suppose you were to introduce a miser or a recluse like one of the Collier brothers in a picture. After all, they were real, I knew someone just like that, yet I could never put him in a picture because no matter how much I insist that such a character exists, the public will remain skeptical because they don’t know him.
F.T. In other words, your own knowledge or experience of out-of-the-way things can merely serve to suggest a similar idea, one that can be worked into a film so that it will be accepted.
A.H. That’s the trouble with I Confess. We Catholics know that a priest cannot disclose the secret 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.”
F.T. Then would you say that the basic concept of the film was wrong?
A.H. That’s right; we shouldn’t have made the picture.
F.T. Just the same, there are some very good things in it. One of them is the way Montgomery Clift is always seen walking; it’s a forward motion that shapes the whole film. It also concretizes the concept of his integrity. The scene at the breakfast table is especially Hitchcockian. Otto Keller’s wife, serving coffee to all the priests, keeps on passing back and forth behind Montgomery Clift, while she’s trying to figure out what he plans to do. The dialogue between the priests is completely innocuous. It’s only through the image that one understands that the essential of the scene is happening between the woman and Montgomery Clift. I don’t know of any other director who can successfully convey that, or who even tries to.
A.H. You mean the sound track says one thing while the image says something else? That’s a fundamental of film direction. Isn’t it exactly the way it is in real life? People don’t always express their inner thoughts to one another; a conversation may be quite trivial, but often the eyes will reveal what a person really thinks or feels.
F.T. Yes, in this sense, your film-making is definitely realistic.
By the way, the turning point in Otto Keller’s attitude is when he instructs h
is wife not to clean up the bloodstained cassock. At that moment he relinquishes any claim to being a naïve and deeply religious man: he is deliberately trying to destroy his confessor and benefactor; he’s become diabolic and evil.
A.H. That’s the idea. Up to that point he had behaved in good faith.
F.T. Brian Aherne’s characterization as the prosecutor was quite interesting. The first time we see him, he’s playfully balancing a knife and fork on a glass; the next time he’s lying on the floor, balancing a glass of water on his forehead. I had the feeling that both incidents were related to the idea of equilibrium, that they were put there to suggest that in his scale of values, justice was merely a parlor game.
A.H. Yes, that’s the general idea. You may recall that in Murder I showed the defense attorney and the district attorney having lunch together during the trial recess. In The Paradine Case the judge, who has just sentenced Alida Valli to death by hanging, is having a quiet meal at home with his wife. You feel like saying to him, “Tell me, your Honor, what do you think about when you go home after having sentenced a woman to death?” And Charles Laughton’s cold, unruffled manner suggests that his answer to such a question would be: “I simply don’t think about it!” Another illustration of the same idea is the way the two inspectors in Blackmail, after locking the prisoner in his cell, go to the men’s room to wash their hands, just like any two office workers. As a matter of fact, I do the same thing. When I shoot a terrifying scene of Psycho or The Birds, I don’t go home to have nightmares all night long. It’s simply another day’s work; I’ve done my best and that’s all there is to it. In fact, although I’m very serious during the shooting, I might even feel like laughing about those things afterward. And that’s something that bothers me because, at the same time, I can’t help imagining how it would feel to be in the victim’s place. We come back again to my eternal fear of the police. I’ve always felt a complete identification with the feelings of a person who’s arrested, taken to the police station in a police van and who, through the bars of the moving vehicle, can see people going to the theater, coming out of a bar, and enjoying the comforts of everyday living; I can even picture the driver joking with his police partner, and I feel terrible about it.
F.T. Yes, but what appealed to me in those two instances of equilibrium I mentioned is that they’re related to the concept of the scale of justice. And since your pictures are very elaborate throughout . . .
A.H. They’re elaborate in an oblique way; yes, they are.
F.T. They’re so elaborate that it’s difficult to believe that these things just happen to be in your films. If so, they must be credited to a powerful cinematic instinct. Here’s another instance of what I mean: When Montgomery Clift leaves the courtroom, he is surrounded by a hostile crowd of people in a lynching mood. And just behind Clift, next to Otto Keller’s lovely wife, who is obviously upset, we see a fat and repulsive woman eating an apple and looking on with an expression of malevolent curiosity.
A.H. That’s absolutely right; I especially worked that woman in there; I even showed her how to eat that apple.
F.T. Well, what I’m trying to bring out is that these elaborate details are generally overlooked by the public because all the attention is focused on the major characters in the scene. Therefore, you put them in for your own satisfaction and, of course, for the sake of enriching the film.
A.H. Well, we have to do those things; we fill the whole tapestry, and that’s why people often feel they have to see the picture several times to take in all of these details. Even if some of them appear to be a waste of effort, they strengthen a picture. That’s why, when these films are reissued several years later, they stand up so well; they’re never out of date.
F.T. In I Confess, Montgomery Clift is cleared by the court of the charges against him. In this picture, as well as in several others, including Vertigo, although the defendant has been legally cleared, he will remain under a cloud because someone in the court may disapprove of the verdict.
A.H. That’s very often the case when the circumstantial evidence is insufficient to warrant a conviction. In the courts of Scotland there’s an additional verdict: Not proven.
F.T. In France the expression is: Acquittal by benefit of the doubt.
A.H. There was a very famous trial that took place around 1890, and I often thought it might make a good picture, but since Jules and Jim, I’ve decided to drop it. You see, it also involves a ménage à trois. It’s a true story. An elderly husband and his young wife, Mr. and Mrs. Bartlett, had a living arrangement in which Reverend Dyson, the local parson, his smoking jacket, and his slippers were part of the same household. The husband would go off to work and the parson would sit and read poetry to the wife, with her head in his lap. To me there was a comical connotation, and I wanted to shoot a scene showing the parson making violent love to the young woman while the husband, sitting in his rocking chair and smoking his pipe, looked on. I would have shown him smoking very contentedly; from time to time he would pull away at his pipe, making little noises that sound like kisses. Anyway, let me tell you the rest of the story.
One day, when the parson was out, the husband told his wife that he wanted to share her favors. Her answer was something like, “Nothing doing. You gave me to him and I can’t go back to you now.” Anyway, eventually, the husband, Mr. Bartlett, died of chloroform poisoning.
Mrs. Bartlett and Reverend Dyson were arrested for the murder.
Dyson told the police how Mrs. Bartlett, a very small and pretty young woman, had asked him to buy two bottles of chloroform, and the empty bottles were found. The autopsy showed that Mr. Bartlett had died in a recumbent position and that his stomach had been burned while he was in that position. This meant that he could not have absorbed the chloroform while standing up, and that’s the only thing they were able to establish.
The whole trial hinged on that point, with the medical experts trying to speculate on the manner of the victim’s death, but they were never able to reach a definite conclusion. It was established that Mr. Bartlett couldn’t possibly have been asleep while they poured the chloroform down his mouth because swallowing is a voluntary action. Besides, had they poured the chloroform in while he was asleep, it would have gone into his windpipe, and his lungs were clear. Still, there was clear evidence that the man had not committed suicide. The verdict of I Confess was inspired by the verdict handed down in that case. The jury said that although there were strong suspicions against Mrs. Bartlett, since there was no proof as to how the chloroform had been administered, she was declared “not guilty.”
There must have been a good deal of sympathy for the defendant because the verdict was greeted with a roar of applause in the courtroom. And that evening, when Mrs. Bartlett and her lawyer went to the theater, the public gave them a standing ovation as they came in. There’s an interesting footnote to the case. Several books were written on it, and one very famous British pathologist wrote an article which said that “now that Mrs. Bartlett has her freedom, we feel that, in the interests of science, she should tell us how she did it.”
F.T. To what do you attribute the sympathy of the jurors and of the general public for Mrs. Bartlett?
A.H. It seems that she hadn’t married for love and that the marriage, in fact, was arranged for her. It was believed that she was the illegitimate daughter of an important British statesman and she was married off at the age of fifteen or sixteen, and then, right after the wedding, she was shipped off to complete her schooling. Anyway, in respect to the film, I must admit that the only reason the idea appealed to me was the scene I described to you: the husband puffing away contentedly at his pipe!
* * *
I. On a train, Guy (Farley Granger), a champion tennis player, is approached by Bruno (Robert Walker), a fellow passenger who is a fan of his. Bruno, who seems to know all about Guy’s personal life, proposes a friendly arrangement for an exchange of killings
: Bruno will get rid of Guy’s wife, who refuses to give him the divorce he wants in order to get remarried, if Guy, in return, will murder Bruno’s overstriet father. Guy indignantly rejects the insane proposal, but Bruno, disregarding the rebuff, proceeds with his part of the plan, strangling Guy’s wife to death in an amusement park.
When the police question Guy, he is unable to provide a solid alibi. Because of his fame and bis engagement to a prominent senator’s daughter, they decide to keep him under discreet observation.
Bruno contacts Guy, demanding that he now carry out his part of the so-called bargain. Guy is evasive, but his guilty knowledge of the criminal’s identity makes his behavior increasingly suspicious to the police.
To get even for what he regards as a failure to honor their contract, Bruno decides to compromise Guy by placing the tennis player’s lighter at the scene of the crime. Guy, who is scheduled to play an important match that day, must race against time to catch up with Bruno before be can carry out his threat.
The picture ends with Bruno crushed to death by a runaway carrousel and the discovery of evidence clearly establishing Guys innocence.
II. Caught in the act of stealing, Otto Keller (Otto E. Hasse), a German refugee who is the sexton of a church in Quebec, murders his victim, a lawyer named Vilette. Afterward, Keller confesses his crime to Father Michael (Montgomery Clift).
As it happens, Father Michael was being blackmailed by Vilette over a love affair prior to his ordination as a priest and Keller had worn a cassock during the crime. These coincidences, together with the fact that Father Michael is unable to provide an alibi for the night of the crime, add up to a strong web of circumstantial evidence against him.
When the police suspicions lead to an indictment and then to his trial, Father Michael, bound by his holy vows on the inviolability of confession, makes no move to clear himself. He will be acquitted by virtue of reasonable doubt, but the hostile courtroom crowd reviles him. The truth comes out when Keller’s wife turns against him. As he attempts to escape, the police shoot him down, and the killer, before dying, makes his final confession to Father Michael.