Call Northside 777 (1948, Henry Hathaway) (Patreon)

56/100

Might have gotten overly excited about this one early on, when it appeared as if Jimmy Stewart's newshound was less dogged or intrepid than grudging. It's one thing to uncover a huge miscarriage of justice via good old-fashioned legwork; it's quite another to do so whilst scoffing and rolling your eyes and patiently explaining why the theory that you're pursuing—strictly out of professionalism—understand—makes zero sense. That describes Northside's first hour, more or less, and I should have realized that the film was merely drawing out a standard skeptic-to-believer arc; this is my seventh Hathaway picture, and while a couple of them are pretty good (The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Niagara), none show any evidence of an artist who was interested in frustrating viewer expectations to the degree that I'd have wished for here. Once McNeal becomes convinced of Wiecek's innocence, the film fully assumes crusader mode, and in a way that doesn't exactly honor journalism's best practices. Sure, you may feel confident that somebody you interviewed is lying, but that doesn't mean it's okay to print a lede like "Wanda Skutnik, ignorant and unreliable key witness in the Wiecek case, was finally found today and arrogantly refused to alter her false identification of Frank Wiecek. This evil, heartless, and corrupt woman, showed no vestige of human decency." [Punctuation sic.] I mean jesus in my opinion. And then the climactic suspenseful production of ostensibly exonerating evidence (which really just serves to slightly impugn Skutnik's testimony, though in real life that was apparently sufficient to persuade Illinois' governor that a pardon was merited) amounts to the mid-20th century's equivalent of someone standing beside a computer tech dude and repeatedly saying "Enhance."

What's most interesting here, in addition to McNeal actively resisting and undermining his own story for so long, is the innovation trumpeted following the opening titles: "This film was photographed in the State of Illinois using wherever possible, the actual locales associated with the story." [Punctuation sic again; someone just did not understand how commas function.] Shooting extensively on location was still relatively rare in 1948, and Northside—possibly the first Hollywood feature ever to be made in Chicago, though that Wiki-factoid has an ominous "citation needed" superscript at this writing—consequently looks markedly different from most of its contemporaries. That McNeal spends so much time occupying what's unmistakably the real world lends a certain credibility to his cynicism, suggesting that the standard twists and turns of glossy entertainment don't apply; he never dismisses some seemingly far-fetched scenario with "This isn't a movie," but the movie itself, by virtue of not looking like one, does that work for him. This verisimilitude extends to a central polygraph sequence that sees inventor/proponent Leonarde Keeler play himself and demonstrate the device at considerable length, even though Wiecek "passing the test" convinces nobody but McNeal and ultimately plays no part in the pardon board's assessment. Even McNeal's wife (Helen Walker, fresh off her far more sinister turn in the original Nightmare Alley) naturalistically modulates both her support and her concern, coming across simply as a caring partner who knows when not to push things. ("Just remember I'm here.") I do note with approval, however, that while Fox made a point of keeping the wrongly convicted men and their families Polish, changing Majczek to Wiecek and so forth, they understood that nobody would go see a movie titled Call GRO 1758.