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.

 

 

How to Make Sex Boring: All Fours and How to Sleep at Night

 

All Fours (2024)

By Miranda July

Riverhead Books, 326 pages.

★

 

How to Sleep at Night (2025)

By Elizabeth Harris

William Morrow Books, 290 pages.

★★

 

Did I get your attention with the headline? Good. Be sure to tread lightly around these  two books. 

 

 

 

All Fours has gotten a lot of attention for being transgressive and bold. It is both of those things, but too bad few have asked if it has anything to say. Not really.

 

An unnamed multi-media artist who conducts interviews with women about sex gets caught in her own anthropological web. After many years of libertine hook-ups–more with women than men–she married Harris, a music producer, and, they have a  “they” child, Sam, because mom doesn’t want to force Sam into any category. (One wonders, though, about her insistence upon having baths with Sam.) The crisis point is that she is now 45 and fears she’s on the downward curve of being attractive or libidinous. She has just gotten an unexpected royalty check from a whiskey company, though it was something she wrote about hand jobs. She plans to drive from Los Angeles to New York and perhaps interview a pop star. This surprises Harris who says there are “Parkers” and “Drivers” and she is definitely a Parker who might not be up to a cross country journey.

 

Turns out he’s right (on several levels). She gets no further than Monrovia, California, checks into a motel and stays there for nearly a month, all the while pretending to be driving to or being in the Big Apple. At a petrol stop she meets Davey and falls in lust with him, though he’s much younger. Luckily his wife Claire is a designer whom she pays scads of money to transform her shabby motel room into a luxury suite. It will be the site of her frantic bouts of masturbation. She fantasizes sex every which way and manages to lure Davey to her suite. No intercourse occurs, but there is a degrading lap dance and a cringe-worthy insertion of her tampon. Davey seems more fixated on becoming a dancer. Nonetheless, she develops a deep fixation on Davey that takes a toll on her marriage. Harris agrees to live in an open relationship, she meets Davey’s mother and a friend who was once Davey’s sexual partner and coach. A perimenopause diagnosis exacerbates her midlife crisis and I reckon we are supposed to applaud her return to her premarital lesbianism.

 

This polarizing book has been reviewed by some a “funny,” and by me as pathetic. If you want a middle position, numerous reviewers took Miranda July to task for trying too hard to be offbeat and outrageous. I can live with that, but I can’t live with the novel’s illogical scenarios or soporific writing. 

 

 

 

How to Sleep at Night has more depth, though its four central characters would be boring were not three gay and the fourth conflicted. Ethan, a junior high history teacher, and Ethan, a lawyer, have been married for nine years and are parents to young Chloe. Ethan’s sister Kate is a lesbian and a well-known TV journalist in New York City who has lost her mojo and joie de vivre. Nicole is married to Austin, has recently moved from Atlanta to New Jersey,  and is playing the roles of upper middle class housewife and mother to Sarah. In college, she dated Kate. Think they’ll get together?

 

Ethan is the problem figure. He wants to run for Congress as the “future” of the Republican Party; Gabe is to the left of Bernie Sanders. There are some amusing James Carville/Mary Matalin moments, but if you’ve been paying attention to politics, you know that Ethan's “makeover” to suit party bigwigs will be fraught and that both Gabe and Ethan will be driven to a breaking point.

 

Author Elizabeth Harris is a far better writer than Miranda July, as one might hope of a New York Times reporter, yet as noted, the major thing that distinguishes the dilemmas of her central characters from run of the mill malaise is that each is gay, lesbian, or bisexual. (To be fair, Harris does has an intriguing subplot on journalistic ethics.) Harris, has a wife and child, which I mention solely because there is a lot of passionate lesbian sex in her novel, but Ethan and Gabe are confined to pecks on the lips and hugs. For me, the characters lacked maturity. It’s as if they are recent graduates rather than adults in their late 30s. 

 

Rob Weir

Fire Exit: Morgan Talty's Identity Dilemma

 

 

Fire Exit (2024)

By Morgan Talty

Tin House, 235 pages.

★★★★★

 

Morgan Talty is a rising name in Native American fiction. He authored Night of the Living Rez, a short story collection. This makes Fire Exit his debut novel. Talty is a member of the Penobscot Nation in Maine.

 

Fire Exit concerns itself with questions of blood and percentages. How Penobscot must one be to be an Indian? That’s not an academic question. Unlike the antebellum South where a single drop of African blood made one “black,” Talty tells of “The Book,” a literal counting of percentages; to be in The Book, one must be at least 25 percent Native. It matters for federal recognition and, in Maine, to determine who is included in the Indian Claims Settlement Act. Talty invites us to “laugh” in his preface, though his protagonist Charles Lamosway is obsessed by the question:

 

There is nothing strange about a white person wishing to be Indian. It’s comical, if anything. And white  people saying they’re Indian happens all the time, and it’s laughed at by Native people…. I get it. I do. I’m not skeejin–not Native… . But I feel that I am…. No place makes a Native a Native. It strengthens it… but it’s not the deciding factor.

 

Or is it? Charles flunks the 25% rule. His mother, Louise, married a white man, but her second husband, Fredrick, was Native, hence Louise and Charles could live on the Penobscot reservation. It was Charles’ step-father “whose love… made me feel Native.” Fredrick taught him about Penobscot ways and customs. Louise continues to live on the reservation because she married an Indian, but Charles is officially “white” and had to move away after Fredrick’s death. Now he stares across a river that separates him from Native friends and culture. To paraphrase, Charles knew what it was like to belong and not to belong.

 

Fredrick died in a hunting accident in 1996, which deprived Charles of his chosen identity, teacher, protector, and provider of love that his cranky mother withheld. In 1967, Fredrick and Charles built a 500 square foot house on the other side of the river when Fredrick sold his camp to pay bills. He and Charles lived there, but it’s all Charles’ now and it could use some TLC that he has neither the time nor inclination to give it.   

 

It would fair to say Charles is adrift. In the greater Bangor area, the closing of pulp mills left the region with a per capita income that remains 40 percent lower than the average for Maine. Lately Charles has spent a lot of  time crossing the Penobscot River in his battered truck; Louise has dementia and sprints between lucidity and living in the past at the speed of light. She needs various treatments (including electroconvulsive therapy), so Charles spends a lot of time taking her to the hospital. He also looks out for Bobby, who is a cross between a friend, a hanger-on, and a problem. Bobby’s an alcoholic prone to creating havoc–not exactly the best company for Charles who has been sober for 22 years. Bobby is helpful, though, when Louise needs care and Charles is busy trying to make a living.

 

An even bigger burden rests on Charles’ mind. When he was younger he fell for a lass named Mary whom he impregnated. That ended their relationship because of the ostracism associated with giving birth to a partially white child. Mary subsequently married Roger, a Penobscot. As fate would have it, his house is directly across the river  from Charles’. Charles hasn’t had contact with his biological daughter (Elizabeth) since she was a toddler, but he watches her from afar. She’s now a young woman who assumes she is Native. Charles, however, wonders if she has a right to know who she really is.

 

Fire Exit is ultimately about blood, identity, family, culture, and the damage that can be done by making an “incorrect” choice between truth and fiction. We go deeply inside Charles’ mind, one so conflicted that there is no need for Talty to resolve or sermonize. Instead he present us with universal puzzles: Who am I? What makes me, me? What duty do I owe to truth? You will notice that most of the Penobscot have Anglicized names. Nobody ever said there were easy answers to moral dilemmas. If you’re wondering, there is a fire in the book, but is there an exit?

 

Rob Weir