Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

City, Paramount’s Union Station and Columbia’s 711 Ocean Drive (1950). All of these
newsreel-style films present the main characteristics of the noir semi-documentary and
became standard in this new cycle of films: the stress that was put upon actuality and
investigative procedures, the use of location photography, and a stentorian narrator. Most
of the films starred a government institution and used a government agent that goes
undercover to report the activities of the malefactors (in the case of The House on 92 nd
Street, Bill Dietrich (William Eythe) is asked to become an undercover agent and account
for the activities of German spies and infiltrators).
Evoking the outdoor shooting adopted in much of interwar French cinema, the noir
semi-documentary constituted a socially affirmative alternative to the noir’s psychological
and individual emphasis found in the early American noirs of the forties, featuring stable
organisational heroes such as James Stewart’s crusading Chicago reporter in Call Northside
777 (1948) and Barry Fitzgerald’s veteran Manhattan cop in The Naked City. These two
films have on-location camerawork and brought to light the problems of institutional
forces, the social injustices and the bureaucratic intransigence of the legal authorities. In
fact, these “police procedural” films can also be seen as an attempt to appropriate some of
noir’s louche glamour for the forces of order. Both protagonists (James Stewart in the role
of newspaper reporter McNeal, and Barry Sullivan as Inspector Donnelly) sense the
corruptive influence of police work which is mechanical and rule-bound, and their solution
is to be as detached and objective as possible to crack their cases and ultimately to defeat a
corrupt political machine. The scene below (fig. 49) shows McNeal and Lt Kelly in the
Police Department office trying to investigate the case of Frank Wiecek (Richard Conte),
who has been sentenced to life imprisonment for killing a police officer during a grocery
store robbery. With his hat on, McNeal is just finishing a phone call and making his way
out into the streets of Chicago to slowly gather the pieces of evidence which will absolve
Wiecek.
Call Northside 777 is an important reference for this phase of film noir as it was the
first film to be shot in a semi-documentary style. Yet, the film (based on a true story) is
simultaneously an investigation of the hard-boiled world of a big city daily newspaper,
with a reporter for whom the story is what really matters. Along the way, it is the corrupt
Chicago legal system, the hearing board, and the police that are scrutinised as they all seem
not to be interested in Wiecek’s case. The whole film becomes then McNeal’s personal
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