Henry Hathaway’s follow-up to his neo-realist pulp piece Kiss of Death is somewhat superior, a key work of the post-war docu-drama style, and a defining example of the popular sub-genre of the true-life miscarried justice crusade. After a brief prologue setting up the essentials of a case involving a policeman’s murder in 1932, the story proper commences in 1943, when Chicago Daily Times journalist – you remember what they were, kids? – Jim McNeal (James Stewart) is sent by his editor (Lee J. Cobb) to check out an advertisement offering a $5,000 reward for information about the policeman’s murder: the title is the phone number given to call in the ad.
McNeal discovers that appeal has been placed by Tillie Wiecek (Kasia Orzazewski), a cleaning lady, who has slaved for over a decade to accumulate the cash reward because her son, Frank (Richard Conte) was one of two men convicted for the cop’s killing. McNeal, initially highly sceptical of Wiecek’s claims of innocence, is nonetheless drawn steadily into the case as he encounters the man himself in prison, and then his ex-wife Helen (Joanne De Bergh), who’s divorced him and remarried, she swears, at Frank’s own behest. McNeal eventually becomes convinced that Wiecek’s imprisoning was dictated by the climate of 1932, one of the worst years of the city’s bootlegger wars, but soon finds many of the people responsible, including the judge who thought he deserved another trial, have died in the interval.
Hathaway offers a raft of moments familiar from later variations on this type of film – it’s impossible not to think of In The Name of the Father, for instance, when McNeal accidentally gains access to evidence that’s being suppressed by the police authorities. Like a lot of immediate post-war crime movies, but distinct from the inky neurosis of proper noir, Call Northside 777 is obsessed with procedural detail and the new-fangled science of investigation, with a long, gruelling sequence in which Wiecek is subjected to the then-new polygraph test, a superb piece of acting from Conte as his forehead becomes a lake and his whole body swims with discomfort, as Stewart and Cobb look on in stern, expectant curiosity, both compelled by commercial and personal interest to see how the test comes out. For extra piquancy, Leonarde Keeler, the real-life inventor of the polygraph, plays himself.
Later, a vital piece of evidence has to be procured by a sophisticated photo-enlargement process. There’s still a lot of good old-fashioned leg-work to be done, as McNeal pounds pavements and ventures into bars in search of Wanda Skutnik (Betty Garde), the witness whose identification put Wiecek away, having run the speakeasy where the cop was shot. McNeal believes she may have been pressured by senior officers into fingering him to avoid prosecution herself. As ever, it all becomes a matter of a down-to-the-wire rush to get the crucial evidence before a parole board.
The cliché narrative ploys don’t hurt the film, which essays them with exceptional confidence in the staying power of sustained suspense. Hathaway’s domestic scenes tend towards the blandness that would come to afflict the genre so much in the ‘50s, with stereotypical roles – good man who needs a break; hard-bitten hack with a conscience; good women who need only want their loving men back in their stabilised home – are a bit coy for truly urgent character drama. The project lacks the pep that, say, Raoul Walsh might have brought to it in the ‘30s, or, hell, even at the time it was made, considering White Heat was two years ahead. But Hathaway’s stately, observant pace and poise – which seems determined to prove that location-based cinema could be as definably “well-made” as the studio kind – is generally a plus here, and he and his crew did some good work in capturing locales in a Chicago virtually vanished, particularly in exploring the precincts of the city’s old Polish communities, with scenes set in the bars populated by expatriates where old folk songs blare on the phonograph, little islets of homey exoticism amidst the chiaroscuro cityscape.
DOP Joe MacDonald’s work is consistently beautiful, offering clear, cleanly composed frames, replete with classical lines of perspective even in the simplest location shots. Although most of the dialogue scenes are handled with standard shot-reverse-shot grammar, Hathaway and MacDonald take care to almost always keep two conversing figures in the frame, to maintain a charged consistency of engagement between characters, who are variously probing and observing each-others’ motives and intentions; it’s an effective methodology, if also a bit academic, compared to the minuet of edits, pans and close-ups employed in the polygraph scene.
Late in the film, some authentic noir does creep in as McNeal searches for Laura and finds her in a seamy boarding house, finding her now a toad-like grotesque harridan protected by a gun-toting paramour and happy to punish anyone handy to maintain her last shred of dignity. McNeal’s forlorn apology to Tillie when he believes their case is kaput sees a hint of religious martyrdom enter as Tillie sighs over her private shrine to the Virgin Mary and McNeal walks dispiritedly away, passing by the neighbouring church upon which the camera momentarily lingers, a touch that tries to evoke a deeper meaning to the drama but only looks like convenient sentimentalising. Garde steals the film, gruesomely effective in her limited screen time, but Conte is excellent and Stewart is very fine in one of his tersest pre-Hitchcock roles.
