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

quest as if the story were the mirroring of his own conscience. As it turns out, McNeal
does not have to call anyone (the title of the movie actually refers to a phone number that
appears in a newspaper ad), and he perseveringly manages to work against the resistance of
forces of justice and to free Frank Wiecek who was wrongly convicted eleven years before.
Figure 49. Call Northside 777
In these semi-documentary noirs, the narrative structure follows the same pattern of
that of the private eye whodunits discussed earlier: an outside investigator penetrates a
maze of complex relationships to solve a certain mystery. Foster Hirsch provides a good
description of these new professional “hunters” in documentary noirs:
The investigation framework has a greater impact when the quester is personally
involved in the case. The private eye, after all, is a hired professional, an outsider.
Like the archetypal western hero, he does what he has to do, and solving the case is
his badge of honor. He may use devious methods, he may well resort to violence,
but he is not a criminal. He keeps his distance from the underworld, and from his
own underworld as well. He is a detached, essentially disinterested figure, and his
fundamentally objective view of crime is engrained in the more or less detached
style that is the mark of the private eye story. (Hirsch 1981:170)
216