Call Northside 777

Henry Hathaway’s Call Northside 777 isn’t a police procedural but a newspaper procedural filmed in the semi-documentary style Hathaway helped make popular for a time in the late forties. Based on true events, the film follows newspaperman PJ McNeal (James Stewart) as he investigates, reluctantly at first, whether a man imprisoned for 12 years was wrongfully convicted. Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte) was accused of killing a cop in a Chicago speakeasy during Prohibition (a genuinely frightening flashback), but Wiecek’s devoted mother Tilly (Kasia Orzazewski), after placing an ad in the newspaper, persuades McNeal that he was wrongly convicted, which sends the reporter on an investigative odyssey interviewing prison inmates, examining photograph and polygraph evidence, bar hopping in the Polish neighborhood, and hunting for the speakeasy owner, Wanda Skutnik (Betty Garde), whose positive ID put Wiecek away. (Helen Walker, by the way, plays McNeal’s wife in a decorative role.)  After the opening scenes of semi-documentary police footage, stentorian voice-over, and truth-seeking newsrooms, the always righteous McNeal’s first meeting with sweet, determined Tilly scrubbing an office lobby floor introduces unexpected pathos that sustains the procedural story line through the end. Of particular note, McNeal’s encounter with Skutnik in a dilapidated slum is beautifully and eerily filmed with sputtering lights and train whistles as if the Volstead Act is still keeping her underground. “It’s a good world outside.”