Call Northside 777 (1948)

It had been a month and a half since my last B&W film, so I decided to watch one of the few such entries on my Netflix streaming list. All I could recall about this one offhand was that it starred James Stewart and had a noirish look to it. The next big thing I learned, after the opening credits, was that it's a true story (albeit with a few identifying details changed for legal reasons) shot in the actual locations whenever possible. Reportedly, it's the first Hollywood movie shot entirely in Chicago.

P.J. McNeal (Stewart) of the Chicago Times is assigned to interview an old woman who advertises a $5,000 reward for any information that could exonerate her son, Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte), convicted of murdering a policeman back in the Prohibition Era. The resulting article makes waves. At first McNeal is rather sour about it, because he still believes Wiecek to be guilty, but his attempt to acquire info that would put an end to the media love affair only casts doubt on the verdict. Soon he's digging up anything he can to get a definite answer, which he hopes is innocence. But since it took 11 years for Mrs. Wiecek to save up the 5K, it's not easy to find what he wants.

Yeah, this isn't the kind of noir that puts the protagonist in much danger. (McNeal does get threatened with a gun when he questions a shady character, but he's not particularly convinced he'd get shot.) It's more about the intensity of wanting to rectify a perceived miscarriage of justice -- while the system fights back. Sure, Chicago police of the early '30s already had a pretty bad rap, but the present police fear that the public will revile them too. And many people hate to entertain the idea of a wrong conviction.

McNeal doesn't entirely play nice in his own methods. To get access to records that he feels shouldn't have been classified in the first place, he gives the impression of being a policeman. (To call it an impersonation is a stretch; he never directly claims as much.) He plays up angles regardless of what the interviewee says, rejecting what doesn't fit the narrative. And when a key witness won't come forward, he writes up harsher language than I've ever seen in a modern mainstream newspaper, risking a libel lawsuit. Believe me, the partiality of today's news sources is nothing new.

Lie detection pioneer Leonarde Keeler plays himself. Even back then, his polygraph test and personal analysis were not considered reliable enough for admissible evidence. But nowadays, someone would probably object to the tester smoking during the test. You might just take interest in a lot more signs that things have or have not changed since the '40s, such as an alleged cop killer being allowed to kiss his visitor at the front desk.

The gestalt kind of reminds me of The Wrong Man (1956) told from a different perspective -- and headier. Perhaps that complexity comes of fidelity to the realities of law and journalism. It's nice to find a film to engage your brain as well as your heart.