Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I enjoyed the concept of this movie. That someone confesses to a priest (Michael Logan played by Montgomery Clift) about a murder and then the priest feels compelled to honour his vows and say nothing to the police. It creates a lot of tension. You can see it begin to weigh down on the priest. Surely he is becoming conflicted about what the right thing to do is.Logan ends up becoming a main suspect through some unfortunate details. A couple of girls saw a priest out at night. He happened to have a meeting with the victim and didn't want to reveal what its purpose was. His reluctance to answer questions makes him more suspicious in the eyes of the police. We learn about an interesting back-story involving a love triangle which Anne Baxter tells to the police in order to save Logan. She is upset to find that her words are being twisted to supply a motivation for Logan committing the murder. She reveals personal things and it all backfires.This was a movie where everyone's motivations made sense to me. I understood their choices. Nobody is flat-out stupid. Perhaps they are stubborn or short-sighted but that's an accurate insight into human nature. The villain becomes less sympathetic over time and yet Logan is so righteously unwilling to compromise his beliefs. It does remind me a bit of how Darth Vader gets a cute redemption in Return of the Jedi but none of the other henchmen or innocent victims get any such attention. Perhaps Logan realises he made a mistake by the end, it's up for debate.In any case, I greatly enjoyed the acting and the story of I Confess. I liked most of the characters and empathised with their situation. The ending is suspenseful and satisfying. It raises some moral questions like what rights should police have to pry into personal lives in order to solve a case and whether priests should divulge confessions in certain situations. There is one shot with Jesus on the cross looming above Logan as he again refuses to give any useful information. It's not distractingly obvious but it's a powerful image. I am consistently impressed and affected by Hitchcock's films in new and original ways and I Confess is no exception.

I confess that "I Confess" is the ONLY film to which i have given a rating of "1" in all the years i have been coming to IMDb and rating films. It is a ghastly, embarrassingly bad, over-acted, under-plotted, intensely smarmy and "reverential" social drama. I had high hopes for it because it was on an IMDb list of "100 best film noir movies." What a joke! It is not a film noir movie. It is not a police procedural. It is not a psychological thriller. It is not an action thriller. It was a downright waste of film stock when it was released -- and now it is a downright waste of electrons.The only, and i mean the only, only, only reason to watch this movie is to get a nice look at the architecture and clothing of the era. Hitchcock never disappoints as a film director when it comes to the long shot, the composition of black and white, the interplay of light and shadow. Okay. That's out of the way. Turn the damnable thing into still frames and have done with it.There is no way to write a "spoiler" for this mess because it doesn't have an actual plot. Well, actually, it has what i call a "buzz-buzz plot" -- that is, the whole thing hinges on the type of scene that marks a failed script, where one character turns to another and says, "Here's what i want you to do ... i want you to (sound drops) buzz buzz buzz (scene cut)." That is it. THAT, friends, is the plot.Mongomery Clift is completely unconvincing as anyone's former love-interest or as a World War Two veteran or as a priest. His idea of emoting is to clench his jaw a little.And as for the classic goof with Anne Baxter's costume (detailed here in the "goofs" section) it is more than a little "goof" -- it is a jaw-droppingly obvlivious loss of filmic continuity that will make your head spin.The jumbled use of about 16 different forms of post-War French and British and American and Mittel-European accents is just the kind of thing that makes me wish that i was watching "The Third Man" with Orson Welles and Joseph Cotten instead of this waste of Brian Aherne's time.Oh, and "reverential." I did mention that above. Please, if you want "reverential," do yourself a favour and watch "Going My Way" with Bing Crosby." Great film.Okay, i am done. My one consolation is that i will never have to watch this movie again.

I hadn't seen this film for some years when I caught it on TV. My opinion(s) have changed since the first viewing and since I've seen or re-seen all of Hitch's films, a certain new perspectives came into play. Guilt and oppressive authority pop up so often in the director's films, some times directly but quite often by insinuation. In this film, these two topics take a major role. It has been written that Montgomery Clift was drinking while the filming took place although I couldn't see anything in the final draft. I know also that he was "method" while Hitch was definitely not, so that might have been a source of conflict. Again, nothing was apparent on screen. Actually, the role of a priest in this work would not have been happy hunting ground for any method actor. Clift was settled on after a number of extremely good actors turned the role down. I've always enjoyed the visual aspect of Hitchcock's cinema and his daring "behind" the camera but in this film there was no room for unusual angles, editing brilliance or anything like that. It turned out to be a film of ideas and conflicts within agreements and there is nothing "cinematic" about that. I am happy to have seen this film once again as I would be with just about any film directed by Hitchcock, particularly during the fifties and sixties, but this once takes back seat to almost all of the others around it.

Most likely somebody has told you a secret on the condition that you promise to tell no-one. I think it is quite common that people have a hard time keeping such promises. But what if keeping the secret puts you in a difficult spot? That is the premise of this movie. Not only is Father Logan required to keep a secret in respect for the privacy of the confessional, but the secret he has to keep is one that would clear him of a murder charge. That kind of pushes the keeping a secret business to the limit.I think any Montgomery Clift performance is worth seeing, and this one is no exception. Clift is able to say a lot with facial expressions and Hitchcock gives him an opportunity to use that talent with many extreme close-ups. Clift's Logan can display a combative side at some points while evincing a disciplined, spiritual, rectitude at others.If you go into this expecting a Hitchcockian high-wire thriller, then you will most likely be disappointed. The script is more introspective than action packed.I don't associate Hitchcock with film noir, but I think that "I Confess" is a good example of that genre. The use of high contrast black and white lends a dark overtone to the proceedings, particularly in the use of shadows and dark cityscapes. I was impressed with the photography, perhaps the most artistic of any Hitchcock I have seen. The print on the DVD I watched was pristine, amazingly so for a movie that is over sixty years old.The original score by Dimitri Tiomkin is bombastic and intrusive--a big negative.It is interesting to compare this with the 2011 "The Confession" that has a similar initial premise but plays out in a much different way.