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Boston Globe (20/Jan/1985) - 'Stage Fright', 'I Confess' fill gap in Hitchcock collection

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'Stage Fright', 'I Confess' fill gap in Hitchcock collection

STAGE FRIGHT

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, screenplay by Whitfield Cook, Alma Reville and James Bridie. Starring Jane Wyman, Richard Todd, Marlene Dietrich, Michael Wilding, Alastair Sim, Sybil Thorndyke. Warner Home Video, VHS and Beta, $59.95.

I CONFESS

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, screenplay by George Tabori and William Archibald. Starring Montgomery Clift, Anne Baxter, Karl Malden, Brian Aherne, O. E. Hasse. Warner Home Video, VHS and Beta, $59.95.

With the famous Hitchcock films increasingly accounted for on videocassette, here are some gaps being filled. These two films were made just before and after "Strangers on a Train" — "Stage Fright" in 1950, "I Confess" in 1952 — and while neither is a masterpiece, each has some entertaining aspects. The trouble with "Stage Fright," which casts Jane Wyman as a young actress shielding Richard Todd from what she sees as a trumped-up murder charge by Marlene Dietrich, is that it cheats by misinforming the audience instead of merely misdirecting it.

The chemistry wasn't magical between Wyman and Hitchcock, but Wilding projects sophisticated romantic appeal, and Dietrich is more amusing than you might suppose. It's fun to watch her parody her wooden, unresponsive star presence, and she's a campy howl singing Cole Porter's "The Laziest Gal in Town." Alastair Sim seems a bit lost as Wyman's father with a weakness for intrigue, but Joyce Grenfell is a serendipitous presence as a starchy type running a shooting gallery at a charity fair, waving a rifle and shouting adenoidally, "Lovely ducks."

"I Confess" is the more intriguing of the two, although Hitchcock was inclined to write it off because it lacked an element of ironic humor he thought it should have had. Its motor is the transference of guilt, as a murderer confesses to a priest (Montgomery Clift). What starts the transference is the fact that the priest, who was being blackmailed by the victim, had reason to want the man dead, too. Clift, fresh from his Actors Studio drill, is intriguingly elusive and enigmatic as the priest. His soft-voiced ambiguity and dignity do much to quicken the prevailing heaviness of this somber film, shot in Quebec.

Karl Malden is interesting as the tenacious inspector, Anne Baxter is undistinguished as the woman in Clift's past, and Brian Aherne is interesting as a prosecutor to whom the administration of justice is just another of the party games Hitchcock twice shows him enjoying. The question of whether the priest will break the confidentiality of the confessional to save himself was, Hitchcock ruefully concluded, not enough to save "I Confess" from commercial disaster. The tightly composed black-and-white frames in both films transfer well to the small screen, and Hitchcock buffs may want to know that he briefly appears looking over his shoulder at Jane Wayman talking to herself in the street in "Stage Fright" and crossing the top of a flight of stone steps early in "I Confess."