Henry Hathaway directed Call Northside 777, a reality-based newspaper drama, starring Jimmy Stewart as the persistent journalist and Richard Conte as the wrongly imprisoned Frank Wiecek.
Grade: B
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Theatrical release poster
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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, a policeman is murdered inside a speakeasy. Frank Wiecek and another man are arrested, and each convicted and sentenced to serve 99 years imprisonment for the killing.
Eleven years later, Wiecek’s mother puts a classified ad in the Chicago Times offering $5,000 reward for information about the true killers.
The paper’s city editor, Brian Kelly, assigns reporter P. J. McNeal to look more closely into the case. Initially, McNeal is skeptical, holding Wiecek to be guilty. But he starts to change his mind, upon meeting resistance from the police and the state’s attorney’s office, who are unwilling to be proved wrong.
There’s also political pressure from the state capital, where politicians are anxious to end a story that might prove embarrassing to the administration.
Credits:
Directed by Henry Hathaway
Screenplay by Jerome Cady, Jay Dratler; Leonard Hoffman (adaptation); Quentin Reynolds (adaptation), based on 1944 “Chicago Daily Times” articles by James P. McGuire
Produced by Otto Lang
Narrated by Truman Bradley
Cinematography Joseph MacDonald
Edited by J. Watson Webb Jr.
Music by Alfred Newman
Distributed by 20th Century-Fox
Release date: February 1948
Running time: 111 minutes
Box office: $2.7 million (US Rentas)
