Call Northside 777

Call Northside 777 (1948)

Runtime: 111 minutes

Directed by: Henry Hathaway

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

From: 20th Century Fox

Not the only appropriate film I’ll be watching for Noirvember. The origins of movie buffs seeing film noir during November is unknown to me but it’s a trend I support… even if I only watch one or two appropriate pictures during this month. Between a collection of Fox Noir, several films from Veronica Lake and still others from John Garfield, the Criterion Channel alone is a solid resource for those wishing to watch more than me-that is where I saw this motion picture.

Jimmy Stewart plays a newspaper reporter who on the prodding of his superior Lee J. Cobb starts covering the case of Richard Conte and Conte’s pal having been in jail for 11 years for a cop killing after Conte’s working-class mom posts a $5000 reward. The story goes largely as you’d expect although it’s important to note that back during the late 40’s, people had far less knowledge that false convictions could happen & mistakes could happen whether it comes to law enforcement or the judicial system… whether or not corruption plays any role. This is all I’ll say about those thorny topics…

It's done in a semi-documentary style so it’s on the dry side, can be long at times and I would have liked to have seen more w/ Stewart and his wife (a couple so quaint they do jigsaw puzzles together). That said, I was still enthralled with Call Northside 777. The lead characters and the actors portraying them definitely helped; this only had a few of the noir trappings but other movies this month will deliver on that front. Unlike typical, this was actually filmed in Chicago, which not only was the movie’s setting but was the setting where the real life events this was based on happened. You see, in ’32 two men named Joseph Majczek and Theodore Marcinkiewicz were convicted of murdering a police officer before that was overturned years later. By Hollywood standards the fictional version was accurate to the actual events.

It was a basic story where it’s easy to root for Conte and the love he has for his family along with Stewart to right an injustice; that went a long way to make the movie so engrossing. Later in the month I’ll be discussing more hard-boiled tough as nails stories involving no shortage of reprobates. For now, I was happy to check out something involving various actors I always enjoy on the silver screen. One last random bit of trivia I only learned from Wikipedia. There is a suspense-filled scene involving a polygraph machine; that was done by some identified as Leonarde Keeler. Believe it or not, Keeler was one of the people who actually invented the polygraph & he played himself on screen.