Call Northside 777: Intriguing Noir/Quasi-Documentary

 

 

 

Call Northside 777 (1948)

Directed by Henry Hathaway

20^th Century Fox, 112 minutes, Not-rated.

★★★★

 

You might immediately notice that Call Northside 777 doesn’t sound like a movie. That’s because it has almost no musical soundtrack. This gives an appropriate documentary effect to a film noir classic that is a documentary of sorts. Yet, it stars James Stewart and other Hollywood heavyweights.

 

It tells a forgotten story from the 1920s and 30s when Prohibition was in effect and Chicago was the gangland capital of the United States. In 1932, a cop was killed inside a speakeasy. Frank Wiecek (wee-check) and Tomek Zaleska, another Polish laborer, were arrested, convicted, and sent to the slammer. Eleven years later,  Brian Kelly (Lee J. Cobb), the editor of the Chicago Times, and reporter P. J. McNeal (Stewart) find a classified ad in their paper offering $5,000 to anyone who can clear Frank’s name. McNeal is assigned to call Northside 777 and interview the person who placed the notice. McNeal finds Tillie Wiecek, Frank’s aged mother, who has washed steps in a public building for 11 years to raise a reward to clear her son.

 

As far as McNeal is concerned, Frank is a cop killer and tells Tillie so. Kelly, though, sees no harm in doing a little bit of digging and McNeal agrees to look into it. Tillie’s plea to talk with Frank rattles in his head. McNeal is pretty sure Frank is guilty, but maybe he can squeeze a week’s worth of human interest stories out of it. To his surprise, McNeal finds discrepancies in news reports and has to resort to subterfuge to get police reports.  After talking with Frank a few times he entertains the possibility that Frank and Tomek were railroaded. Even the warden thinks Frank is innocent, and McNeal is shocked to discover Wiecek’s ex-wife also thinks Frank so. When Frank agrees to submit himself to a new invention, the polygraph, and passes the test, McNeal shifts to advocating for Frank and Tomek.

 

McNeal and the Times build public support, but there are flies in the ointment. Polygraphs were (and remain) inadmissible, thus the only foreseeable way to clear the two men is to convince eyewitness Wanda Skutnik to change her testimony. Is she even alive? Early 20^th century Chicago was a collection of ethnic enclaves; McNeal doesn’t speak Polish and most of Chicago’s Poles had little or no English. Without Skutnik,  there is little chance of reversal. Even worse, as Times attorney Martin Burns (Paul Harvey) advises, bringing mere assertions before a parole board could actually hurt Frank and Tomek when they come before the board in the future.

 

Does McNeal pull a rabbit out of his fedora? I shall say only that what passed for “high-tech” back then came into play. As for the film’s documentary style, the old TV show Dragnet used to begin episodes with these words: “The story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.” That’s pretty much the case in Call Northside 777. It was based on the real life cases of Joseph Majczek and Theodore Marcinckiewicz, and a Chicago Times investigation led by James McGuire. To add gritty verisimilitude, director Henry Hathaway got permission to film inside Illinois’ Slaterville Prison, a truly creepy place of tiered cellblocks built in the allegedly more secure panopticon style. Its security is debatable, but it’s noteworthy that the idea came from 18^th century utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. There’s little doubt of its dehumanization factor.  

 

To strike a critical note, Northside 777 often plays like what we’d today call an infomercial for the Chicago Times. To temper that, the Times was indeed once a powerhouse newspaper quite unlike the anemic merged paper of today.* We might say that Northside 777 is a reminder of what is lost when investigative newspapers are gutted or lost altogether. If young’uns wonder about the title, in 1940 the U.S. population was just over 132 million and not everyone had a phone. (That remained true in the 1950s as well.) A name was given to the operator switchboard exchange and no one needed more than two or three numbers to be connected.** Northside 777 is the number at which Tillie Wiecek  could be reached.

 

Rob Weir

 

*  Today’s merged Chicago Sun-Times has a circulation of around 57,000, a shadow of the 200,000 the Times once had on its own.

 

** My parents had a party line (look it up). I don’t recall the numbers, but the operator exchange was Colony.