Been meaning to ask this for a while. Couldn’t find much on Google. Or maybe I’m not doing it right.
Anybody know just how true to life this movie is?
If it was a trumped up case, why was McNeil (IIRC, the reporter’s name was rally McNair, or something like that), the reporter played by Stewart, only able to free one of them?
Did the con’s mother really save her pennies for years to pay the reporter to look into the case?
At the beginning of the movie, when the two guys are arrested, the film stock is fairly grainy. It looks like actual 1920s/30s footage. Was it fotage of the actual arrest of the two characters in the film?
Where can I find a copy of the actual photo that McNeil has enlarged to get the date from the newspaper? Or was this bit fiction as well?
In 1951 Reader’s Digest published a 30th anniversary collection of stories from their magazine. Included is the story “Tillie Scrubbed On” by William F. McDermott and Karl Detzer. A footnote says that this is the story that was made into “Call Northside 777”. I’ve read the story and seen the movie and they are actually pretty close. The reporter’s name was McGuire and he answered the ad from Tillie Majczek. Her son had been in jail for years and she worked and saved her money for a reward for anyone who could help prove he was innocent of the murder he’d been convicted for. She’d saved $5000, a considerable sum in the 40’s, but the paper McGuire worked for turned the money down, after Joe Majczek had been proved innocent. As in the movie he’d been married but his wife divorced him while he was in prison. Joe was released on August 15, 1945, after fourteen years in prison.
The part about the photo was a movie invention I think, the article doesn’t mention it. Probably they used it as a device to telescope the research and digging into overlooked evidence that was involved. But I think the movie was true in spirit to the real story.
Thanks, it is a lot more than I knew. Even when I first saw this film as a nine or ten year old, thirty years ago, I thought, “Why didn’t the other guy get set free also?”
That’s the biggest thing that, as I’ve seen the film a couple times over the years, has made me think maybe Majczek (Wieczek, in the film) really was guilty.
Using your info on the real name of the imprisoned fellow, Majczek, I did a search on “Tillie Majczek,” and found an article that answered three of my questions (the grainy footage still looks to be real footage but of whose arrest, I know not).
And yes, the photo bit was false. McGuire and his writing partner found the date discrepancy in Majczek’s identification and arrest after Joseph Majczek himself told them of it. They confirmed it simply by looking at dates on arrest records, not by a near-miraculous enlargement of a photograph.
So, thanks, Baker.
If no one else wants to add anything, Mods, if you want, close this up.
Oh, and the other guy was left to languish simply because nobody wanted to champion him. Seems his mother didn’t scrub floors to raise reward money, so there was no human interest angle.
He turned down a commutaion, but was finally pardoned himself in 1950.
Yes, the photo enlargement business is pure BS. I worked with large cameras like the one they used in the movie. (They’re called process cameras, or copy cameras or lith cameras; all newspaper camera departments had them before the age of Photoshop and the digital scanner.)
They can make amazingly large and detailed enlagements, but they can’t pull up images that simply don’t exist in the original. And the original newsphoto would not be able to capture as fine a detail as the distant date on the newspaper, let alone in perfect focus.