Call Northside 777
| Call Northside 777 | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Henry Hathaway |
| Produced by | Otto Lang |
| Written by | Leonard Hoffman Quentin Reynolds |
| Screenplay by | Jerome Cady Jay Dratler |
| Based on | 1944 Chicago Daily Times articles by James P. McGuire Jack McPhaulwriter |
| Starring |
James Stewart Richard Conte Lee J. Cobb Helen Walker |
| Narrated by | Truman Bradley |
| Music by | Alfred Newman |
| Cinematography | Joseph MacDonald |
| Edited by | J. Watson Webb Jr. |
| Distributed by | Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation |
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Release date
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Running time
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111 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Box office | $2.7 million (US rentals) |
Call Northside 777 is a 1948 reality-based film noir directed by Henry Hathaway and starring James Stewart. The picture parallels a true story of a Chicago reporter who proved that a man in prison for murder was wrongly convicted 11 years before. The names of the real wrongly convicted men were Majczek and Marcinkiewicz for the murder of Chicago Traffic Police Officer William D. Lundy.
Stewart stars as the persistent journalist and Richard Conte plays the imprisoned Frank Wiecek. Wiecek is based on Joseph Majczek, who was wrongly convicted of the murder of a Chicago policeman in 1932, one of the worst years of organized crime during Prohibition.
In Chicago in 1932, during Prohibition, a policeman is murdered inside a speakeasy. Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte) and another man are quickly arrested, and are later sentenced to serve 99 years' imprisonment each for the killing. Eleven years later, Wiecek's mother (Kasia Orzazewski) puts an ad in the newspaper offering a $5,000 reward for information about the true killers of the police officer.
This leads the city editor of the Chicago Times, Brian Kelly (Lee J. Cobb), to assign reporter P.J. McNeal (James Stewart) to look more closely into the case. McNeal is skeptical at first, believing Wiecek to be guilty. But he starts to change his mind, and meets increased resistance from the police and the state attorney's office, who are unwilling to be proved wrong. This is quickly followed by political pressure from the state capital, where politicians are anxious to end a story that might prove embarrassing to the administration. Eventually, Wiecek is proved innocent by, among other things, the enlarging of a photograph showing the date on a newspaper that proves that a key witness statement was false. In actuality, innocence was determined not as claimed in the film but when it was found out that the prosecution had suppressed the fact that the main witness had initially declared that she could not identify the two men involved in the police shooting.
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Wikipedia