Call Northside 777 (1948) - film review

In 1932, in the era of prohibition, the police of Chicago are fighting a losing battle against the mobsters and the bootleggers.  When a policeman is shot dead on entering a speakeasy, two Polish men - Frank Wiecek and Tomek Zaleska - are soon arrested on the flimsiest of evidence.  Although both men protest their innocence, they are found guilty and sentenced to 99 years’ imprisonment, on the testimony of the speakeasy’s owner.  Eleven years later, Wiecek’s mother places an ad in a newspaper, offering a reward of 5000 dollars to anyone who can provide evidence that will clear her son’s name and get him released from prison.  Hard-nosed reporter P.J. McNeal is assigned by his editor to interview Wiecek’s mother and is surprised to learn that she had raised the 5000 dollars by working hard as a cleaning lady since her son was imprisoned.  Moved by the old woman’s faith in her son’s innocence, McNeal begins to investigate the case and is soon persuaded that Wiecek has been wrongly convicted.  Unfortunately, most of the evidence that supports Wiecek’s version of events turns out to be inadmissible in a court of law and his case appears hopeless - until McNeal makes a surprising discovery...

Arguably the highpoint of director Henry Hathaway’s career, Call Northside 777 is a compelling noir thriller that relates a real-life incident using an extremely effective near-documentary approach.  James Stewart is exceptionally well-cast as the driven journalist who unravels the mystery, motivated less by personal gain than by a simple honest desire to see a terrible miscarriage of injustice put right.   Stewart’s laconic everyman persona makes his character easy to engage with and he resembles a beacon of light in a murky and corrupt world in which the boundary between the lawmakers and the lawbreakers is far from apparent.  Northside 777 is a sublime example of what may be termed realist film noir - it lacks the obvious motifs and heavy stylisation of classic film noir, but it retains its essential elements, notably a lone hero fighting against a seemingly insuperable adversary, only to end up enmeshed in a dangerous web of intrigue.

Hathaway avoids the kind of tawdry sensationalism that American thrillers of this era were prone to but still delivers a film that is thoroughly riveting.  The concluding twenty or so minutes are especially nail-biting and Hathaway keeps us on tenterhooks as the last piece of jigsaw is slowly slotted into place.  One of the things that sets this film apart from other crime dramas of this era is the quality of the acting.  Without exception, the performances are true to life and compelling, the scenes with Stewart and Kasia Orzazewski being particularly moving.  Whilst the film avoids an all-out assault on the police and judiciary (who are obviously the villains of the piece), it still makes a very effective argument against capital punishment.  Northside 777 is ahead of its time in other ways - with its almost forensic attention to the details of crime investigation, it is an obvious forerunner of the modern police procedural.

© Alex Sullivan 2011

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