Call Northside 777 (20th Century-Fox, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles got home from work last night shortly before 9, so we were perfectly timed to watch a “Noir Alley” showing on Turner Classic Movies of a quite remarkable movie: Call Northside 777, directed by Henry Hathaway for 20th Century-Fox and starring James Stewart as intrepid reporter P. J. McNeal, who in 1944 takes up the case of Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte), who 12 years before was convicted of killing a police officer in a gun battle inside a speakeasy owned by Wanda Skutnik (a marvelously hard-edged performance by Betty Garde). The opening credits announce, “This is a true story,” which it is and it isn’t: there were actually two crusading reporters and two unjustly accused and convicted defendants, and though the level of police corruption in Chicago (where the story takes place) in 1932 is briefly acknowledged in the third-person voiceover narration, the real defendants’ exoneration was considerably more complicated in real life and involved the police closing ranks to defend the integrity of their department and themselves even if that meant keeping an innocent man in prison for the rest of his life. The film has a convoluted set of writing credits: James P. McGuire and Jack McPhaul, the reporters who were the real-life equivalents for James Stewart’s character, get credit for their articles, Leonard Hoffman and journalist Quentin Reynolds get credited with “adaptation” and two old movie hands, Jay Dratler and Jerome Cady, receive the actual screenwriting credits.

I remember seeing it for the first time on a commercial TV station in the early 1970’s and being quite impressed by it then. I’m even more impressed by it now, though I wanted to catch up with it again largely because I’d seen a documentary on the history of polygraphs (so-called “lie detectors”) on PBS not long ago and it had mentioned that Leonarde Keeler, one of three rival claimants for the invention of the lie detector, had appeared in the movie playing himself and was shown administering the test to Frank Wiecek. Call Northside 777 isn’t really a film noir, though director Hathaway and cinematographer Joe McDonald get some nice chiaroscuro compositions out of the real-life Chicago locations where the film was shot. Call Northside 777 was one of the then-trendy series of “semi-documentaries,” films not only based on actual events but shot as much as possible on the actual locations where they took place. Helped by the increasing miniaturization of film equipment which made location shooting easier, Hathaway and his cast shot virtually all the movie in Chicago and were able to exploit the often grungy locations involved in the actual story, including a series of real-life staircases as sinister as anything that could have been created by 20th Century-Fox’s set builders.

It’s a film without the moral ambiguity of the best noirs; the good guys are all good, the bad guys are all bad, and there’s even a last-minute rescue as McNeal fights to delay Wiecek’s pardons board hearing long enough for a crucial piece of evidence to reach them (in effect James Stewart is repeating his Mr. Smith Goes to Washington role from nine years earlier, essentially filibustering the pardons board). But it’s also a quite impressive movie and a benchmark in Stewart’s gradual transition from aw-shucks good guy to the darker protagonist he played, particularly in his Westerns for Anthony Mann and his contemporary thrillers for Alfred Hitchcock. It’s also got an O.K. performance by Helen Walker as McNeal’s wife (there’s a scene in their bedroom, with the obligatory twin beds mandated by the Production Code) and a great one by Betty Garde as Wanda Skutnik, still convinced of Wiecek’s guilt. She seems like a Raymond Chandler character who somehow wandered into this otherwise (mostly) true story. Richard Conte as Wiecek is also surprisingly effective, especially in the scene in which he tells McNeal to stop reporting on him because his stories have already “outed” his ex-wife Helen (Joanne de Bergh) and their son Frank, Jr. (Michael Chapin) and thereby undone his careful plan to have Helen divorce him and marry someone else so Frank, Jr. wouldn’t grow up with the burden of being bullied by schoolmates as the son of a “cop-killer.” Call Northside 777 is an estimable movie and a good entry in 20th Century-Fox’s cycle of true-life dramas, many of which – including The House on 92nd Street and 13 Rue Madeleine – also had titles that contained numbers.