Call Northside 777 (Fox Film Noir)
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Betty Garde, Helen Walker, James Stewart, Lee J. Cobb, Richard ConteBrand: Fox
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 1.0; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 1.0; Polish (Original Language); French (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 1.0
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 111 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2005-03-15
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Movie Reviews of Call Northside 777 (Fox Film Noir)
Movie Review: He don't do this thing.
Summary: 5 Stars
A poor woman, Tillie Wiecek (Kasia Orzazewski), runs a newspaper ad offering $5000 for the capture and conviction of the men who killed a Chicago policeman over a decade ago (`Call Northside 777.) Her son Frank (Richard Conte) was tried, convicted and sentenced to 99 years for the murder, but she's convinced of his innocence. City Editor Brian Kelly (Lee J. Cobb) reads the article and assigns beat reporter P.J. McNeal (James Stewart) to investigate the story. There are angles to be played.
And played they are. They liked to rip `em from the headlines back then, too. CALL NORTHSIDE 777 (1948) is an old school docu-drama, one of a number to emerge in the immediate post-war era. Armed with lighter cameras and faster film stocks, steeled with a passion for location and a love of verisimilitude, these movies boldly left the dressed set for the dirty street. In this case it's the Polish ghettos and the grimy prisons of broad-shouldered Chicago that are surveyed. Stewart, in one of his first non-boy ingenue roles, is given a chance to play a skeptic, an ambitious assignment reporter with a deep well of cynicism and an eye for the angle. Films like CALL NORTHSIDE 777 not only open with a title card telling us "This is a true story," they emphasize that all important point by assuring us that `real locations were used whenever possible.' The movie opens with an extended montage of Chicago from the Great Fire (I think that one, at least, must have come from a reenactment in another movie) to the Prohibition era, replete with Chicago's finest smashing casks of bootleg hooch and brief newsreel footage of such real-life notorati as John Dillinger and Al Capone. All this preface material blends seemingly seamlessly into the movie proper.
Stewart was always a relaxed and easy-going actor. The understated, naturalistic approach this movie takes suits him well. In fact, the highlights of the film are the scenes he shares with Kasia Orzazewski, who seemed to have little more to offer than naive sincerity. Understatement is the key word here, though, and Orzazewski's lack of actress-y affectations adds, rather than detracts, from things. Lee J. Cobb and Richard Conte come off well, too. I should mention poor Helen Walker, who plays Stewart wife and gets maybe ten minutes of screen time. She's more or less a sounding board, a film contrivance who's there only to give Stewart someone to share his humanizing doubts with. As James Ursini and Alain Silver point out on the commentary track - a pretty good one, although Ursini has an annoying habit of dropping his voice to a hard-to-hear whisper at the end of sentences - the Production Code forced the McNeals to sleep in separate twin beds. What they don't mention, at least I didn't hear it, was the rather anti-Code exposé of police corruption the movie investigates.
Also, as Ursini points out, this movie loves technology. Photo transmitting gizmos, miniature cameras, and sophisticated telephone relay stations are all lingered over. Most glaringly there is a really, really long polygraph session scene that features the non-actor inventor of polygraph technology Leonarde Keeler. It probably came across as cutting edge back then, but it reads `quaint' today. In fact, it's yet another `new' technology that director Henry Hathaway spends a good thirty minutes building up to that provides the vital piece in the movie's resolution. I won't give it away, but the `evidence', the one that the movie is so proud of, is totally bogus! If I was one of the half-dozen or so attorneys crowding into the frame during that nearly final scene I'd have been sputtering outrage. Still, it didn't quite wreck things for me. In fact, I loved CALL NORTHSIDE 777 as much for its flaws as I did for its strengths. It's not perfect or even all that convincing, but it gets a strong recommendation nonetheless.
Summary of Call Northside 777 (Fox Film Noir)
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