Call Northside 777 (Reviewed on Jan. 31/99)
Starring Jimmy Stewart
Whenever I sit down to watch a Jimmy Stewart film, I always have the expectation that I'm going to thoroughly enjoy myself. Stewart always manages to rise above his material, even when it's bottom-of-the-barrel stuff. Not that that tends to happen, though, because somehow Stewart always managed to pick the most engaging and entertaining scripts. Not so with "Call Northside 777".
The movie casts Stewart as a not-too-ambitious reporter assigned to cover the execution of a death-row inmate accused of murder. The prisoner says that he's innocent, but Stewart (initially) does not believe him. Eventually, though, after reviewing the facts and speaking to a number of people close to the prisoner, he begins to believe him and starts his own investigation.
Intriguing premise, right? There's no way a filmmaker could go wrong with a setup like that, and Jimmy Stewart in the lead, right? Wrong. "Call Northside 777" is an overlong bore. For some reason, *every* single scene in the film goes on much longer than they need to. And to make things worse, the movie is presented to us in a quasi-documentary style, so all the dialogue is extremely dry and without humour.
Another problem with is that everything is over-explained to the max. For example, there is a scene in which the prisoner is hooked up to a lie-detector. Now, since most audiences in 1948 likely had no idea what a lie-detector machine was, the characters spend far too much time explaining how it works. We even see the machine being calibrated for the prisoner, a process that takes about five minutes. Was it really necessary to show all this? I don't think so. This ten minute scene could have easily been cut in half. And there are other examples of scenes that run on much longer than they need to.
At the beginning of this review, I mentioned how Jimmy Stewart is always good in his movies. Sadly, this is not so here. None of his usual charm is present. Instead, he plays the character very somberly, I suppose because it's based on a true story. Stewart looks like he's trapped in this role. You can see, ever-so-briefly, moments in which his engaging personality bubbles to the surface, but these moments are very sparse.
"Call Northside 777" could have been an exciting, tension-filled thriller. Instead, it's technically flawless, but there's no heart.
** out of ****
David Nusair dnusair@chat.carleton.ca
:"Yesterday, the last professional hockey player to play without a helmet : ; announced he's retiring. His actual words were, `I no play hockey never ; : more.'" -Conan O'Brien :
Dept. of Good Vibes, Come visit my Reel Film Reviews site Carleton University at "http://chat.carleton.ca/~dnusair"
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