Steineded How sad is this?

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Onlinewsma Absolutely Brilliant!

Maidexpl Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

bombersflyup Call Northside 777 is an engaging film-noir of a re-opened ten year old murder case.There isn't much to say about the film, it's just a good story told well, engaging from start to finish. I liked McNeal's home life, his wife Laura was very sweet, would of liked to have seen more of this.Tomek: Sure, I could say I did it. Then maybe have a chance of getting out, like you say. But if I confessed, who would I name as my partner, Joe Doakes? I couldn't make it stick for one minute. That's the trouble with being innocent. You don't know what really happened. I didn't do it. Me and Frank had nothin' to do with it.

Hunter Lanier There's only one thing I remember from my twelve years in the public school system, and it's from kindergarten: one dot does a lot. This was, of course, in reference to gluing things, so as not to make a mess; but, it taught me a greater lesson: the strength of subtlety-- boy, that's a hard word to spell."Call Northside 777" is full of dots, and proceeds to connect them. It sounds boring, but if the dots are interesting ones, and if the road from dot to dot is full of zigzags and loopdeloops, it can almost make for a good movie. Unfortunately--for the film and for me--the dots are dull and the lines between them straight and solid.The film stars Jimmy Stewart as P.J. McNeal, a journalist who responds to a peculiar ad in the paper asking for information on a murder from a decade ago. It turns out to be the mother of the convicted, and McNeal turns her into a story, which leads to another, and another after that, until he's in too deep. Stewart sheds his "aw, shucks, I just want everyone to be happy" persona in favor for a more cynical manner; the part's not difficult, as it's primarily just nodding and scrunching your eyebrows, but Stewart plays it straight. The man convicted for murder is played by Richard Conte, better known now as the Don of the Barzini family in "The Godfather"; he's good here, especially in one of the better lie detector bits I've seen on film.Lee J. Cobb--or as I call him, dime-store George C. Scott--is in the film as the editor of the newspaper. He's such a great actor that it's a shame he's given nothing to do but grimace, which would be a greater injustice if he wasn't so damn good at grimacing. Despite my dislike for the spine of the film, I am a sucker for film noir, which this film so daintily sticks its toe into. There's guys in suits and fedoras, walking around in the dark smoking cigarettes, so the movie has that going for it. If you've seen any procedural drama on television or in the movies, you've seen "Call Northside 777." Obviously, the details are different, but the DNA's the same. It's like a Mr. Potato Head with different eyeballs. Or maybe it's nothing like that, I don't know. There are people out there, I know, who eat up regurgitated information and this film will very much appeal to them. Bon appetit.

Movie Critic This is a flawlessly filmed and directed look at 1948 Chicago. The acting is good....James Stewart playing his usual straight shooter down to earth corny blustery stammering when indignantly angry character.What it lacks is suspense and as another reviewer stated it missed a wonderful scene where the perjuring witness Wanda would be exposed.The denouement involves state of art technology of the time....wired photographs and enlarging techniques.What was needed was a more talented writer to come up with some suspense.It gets a solid 7.RECOMMEND

Hot 888 Mama So says one of the observers on random wrongful conviction victim Frank Wiecek in this docudrama (= based on a true AND representative story of the American Way). CALL NORTHSIDE 777 is refreshing for its post-WWII naivete in which inhabitants mistook America for a Democracy (one man, one vote) as opposed to the corporate conglomerate it actually is (one dollar, one vote, codified into law explicitly with the recent CITIZENS vs. UNITED U.S. Supreme Court decision). Why someone as smart as George Bailey (or Chicago TIMES reporter Jim McNeal here) would not know this is beyond me. For 150 years, U.S. law enforcement has had two prime directives: protect rich people's property, and protect itself. Any other goal comes in a distant third at best. When anyone breaches raisons d'etre #1 OR #2, a random poor person can be easily incarcerated and\or fried if the real culprit is not conveniently available or appropriate to convict, as is the case with this story's police patsy, Frank Wiecek (and his inexplicably lost-at-the-end co-defendant, Tomek Zaleska) in this film. Released after 11 years of political imprisonment with just $10, crusading Chicago TIMES reporter Jimmy Stewart tells Frank he's lucky he's been given 91 cents for each of his 11 years at hard labor. So what if Frank lost his youth and his wife, and not even O.J. is looking for Officer Bundy's "real killer" in this case (the late police Captain Norris?). In one of Wikipedia's articles on world justice, it's noted that the percentage of inmates and executed people in the U.S. who were below the poverty line as free civilians is 71%, 20 points higher than any ACTUAL world Democracy (= one man, one vote). Though the Tea Party labels poor people as Satan's spawn, CALL NORTHSIDE 777 proves they're the salt of the earth, as Jesus said, as well as easy pickings when the criminal U.S. justice system needs a scapegoat.