Call Northside 777 (1948)

Film: Call Northside 777 (1948)

Stars: James Stewart, Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb, Helen Walker, Betty Garde

Director: Henry Hathaway

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

The movies have always been fascinated by "things that are real."  You can go well into the Silent Era to movies like Saved from the Titanic, where actress Dorothy Gibson (who had been a real-life survivor of the tragedy) appeared in a depiction of the disaster in the dress she actually wore the night the ship sank (possibly the lost film I'd most want to see).  You see it well into the 21st Century, with movies like The 15:17 to Paris where the actual heroes of the 2015 Thalys train attack play themselves in the main roles.  This has always been a selling point in a movie, and it definitely was for Call Northside 777.  The first studio film to be shot entirely on location in Chicago, the movie tells the tale of a man wrongfully convicted of a murder.  The movie was shot with many scenes in the same places actually depicted in the film, and in one case, the actual inventor of the polygraph to administer a polygraph.  This likely titillated audiences of the time, feeling like they were watching a real criminal investigation play out in the same vein as a documentary.  Years later, we are not so lucky with what the end result was.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is centered around PJ McNeal (Stewart), a skeptical reporter who is assigned to look into the criminal conviction of Frank Wiecek (Conte), who was convicted of murdering a police officer 11 years earlier and is in the middle of a life sentence.  As McNeal investigates Wiecek, he gets to know his humanity, and understands that he can make an actual difference in his reporting, even if it started from the cynical vantage of just trying to sell newspapers.  He also begins to believe that he's innocent, and jumps through hoops to make sure that he is given another chance, particularly given the missing (and we learn soon, untruthful) witness Wanda Skutnik (Garde).  In the end, McNeal manages to get Wiecek out of jail, though it's worth noting that in some ways the damage is done for Wiecek.

This damage is something that I wish the film had spent more time upon.  This is framed as a story of redemption, of something good, but Frank Wiecek spent 11 years in prison for something he didn't do.  During that prison sentence, his mother went broke trying to get him out of jail, and his wife eventually divorced him upon his insistence (the final scene shows him greeting, nervously, her new husband...the man who wouldn't be there had he not been convicted).  This is touched upon, but it doesn't became a damning enough indictment given the messaging around this, and I wish it had been.  I can't imagine the Hays Code (or HUAC) would look kindly on a film that was making cops look like villains, but that's clearly what happened in this story-a miscarriage of justice that was continued by prejudice because of whom the murder victim was.

This lack of really strong perspective (in my opinion) leaves behind a staid film.  We have spent decades watching Law & Order or NCIS, so we know well enough about the different minutia of the criminal justice system, which here has to be part of the appeal (the public wouldn't have had this kind of insight), so I'm giving it some benefit of the doubt, but by sticking so closely to reality, we frequently don't get much intrigue.  Jimmy Stewart is one of the great actors of this era, and he's basically giving a half performance because the script isn't giving him enough to do.  Stewart still carries it through, as does Garde in the best supporting part, but this same year he was solving crimes in Rope with far more intrigue behind it.

1940's: Act of Violence, The Big Sleep, The Blue Dahlia, Blues in the Night, Born to Kill, Brighton Rock, Brute Force, Criss Cross, Crossfire, Cry Wolf, Daisy Kenyon, Dead Reckoning, Detour, Fallen Angel, The Fallen Idol, Force of Evil, Gilda, High Sierra, I Walk Alone, I Wake Up Screaming, The Killers, The Lady from Shanghai, Leave Her to Heaven, Ministry of Fear, Moonrise, Murder My Sweet, Nightmare Alley, Out of the Past, The Postman Always Rings Twice, Raw Deal, The Reckless Moment, Ride the Pink Horse, Scarlet Street, Secret Beyond the Door, Sorry, Wrong Number, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Stranger on the Third Floor, They Drive By Night, They Won't Believe Me, Too Late for Tears, The Woman in the Window, The Woman on the Beach

1950's: Ace in the Hole, Affair in Trinidad, The Asphalt Jungle, Beat the Devil, The Big Combo, The Big Heat, The Blue Gardenia, The Breaking Point, The Burglar, Cast a Dark Shadow, The Crimson Kimono, Elevator to the Gallows, Gun Crazy, The Hitch-Hiker, House of Bamboo, In a Lonely Place, Julie, The Killing, Kiss Me Deadly, Lightning Strikes Twice, Murder by Contract, Night and the City, Odds Against Tomorrow, On Dangerous Ground, Pickup on South Street, The Prowler, Slightly Scarlet, Sudden Fear, Sweet Smell of Success, They Live By Night, While the City Sleeps

Neo-Noir: Blade Runner, Body Heat, Farewell My Lovely, Fargo, From Afar, The Late Show, The Long Goodbye, Lost Highway, Night Moves, Nightcrawler, Le Samourai