Stop The Presses! Red Eddie Muller has chosen a good one that hasn’t been on TCM’s Noir Alley before! It’ll be interesting to see what Eddie says about Jimmy Stewart; And TCM is Following It with a Much Greater Picture: See a Jimmy Stewart Doubleheader! Henry Hathaway’s Call Northside 777 (1948), on Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET, and Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), Widely Considered the Greatest Movie Ever Made, Co-Starring Kim Novak, in One of the Greatest Female Performances Ever, and Bernard Herrmann’s Haunting Music, at 2:15 a.m.

By David in TN
friday, june 14, 2024 at 7:48:00 p.m. edt

TCM’s Film Noir of the Week Saturday Night-Sunday Morning at Midnight and 10 a.m. ET is Henry Hathaway’s Call Northside 777 (1948) with James Stewart, Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb, Helen Walker, John McIntire and Kasia Orzazewski.

Film Noir Guide: “This interesting semi-documentary, shot on location in Chicago, is based on actual events. Stewart is cast against type as a tough, outspoken reporter assigned to follow up a story about a man (Conte) convicted of killing a cop eleven years earlier. He interviews the con’s mother (Orzazewski), a Polish scrubwoman who has scrimped and saved enough money to be able to offer a five thousand dollar reward for information that will prove her son’s innocence.

“Knowing a hot human interest story when he sees one, Stewart’s editor (Cobb) sends his reluctant ace reporter to Illinois State Prison to interview Conte, who’s serving a ninety-nine year term. The skeptical reporter finds himself believing Conte’s story and starts investigating more thoroughly, running into numerous obstacles—a police department covering up its mistakes, a missing witness, a dead judge and politicians worried about being the fall guys for a previous administration’s screw-ups.

“Walker plays Stewart’s wife, and McIntire is a frightened politician. The film is thoroughly entertaining, thanks in large part to Stewart’s solid performance as the methodical investigative reporter.”

David in TN: Stop The Presses! Red Eddie Muller has chosen a good one that hasn’t been on Noir Alley before! It’ll be interesting to see what Eddie says about Jimmy Stewart.

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) with James Stewart and Kim Novak, is on TCM right after Call Northside 777, at 2:15 a.m. ET.

N.S.: Call Northside 777 was brought to the screen by a whole gang of journalists and screenwriters. It was based on articles by journalists James P. McGuire and Jack McPhaul (the latter of whom wasn’t even credited), adapted by Leonard Hoffman and Quentin Reynolds, and scripted by Jerome Cady and Jay Dratler. (There had to be an unnamed “rewrite man” who made the script “ship-shape.”)

Meanwhile, Henry Hathaway developed into one of John Wayne’s favorite directors, especially once Wayne’s beloved “Coach,” John Ford, turned on him: The Shepherd of the Hills (1941); Legend of the Lost (1957); North to Alaska (1960); Circus World (1964); The Sons of Katie Elder (1965); and True Grit (1969).

True Grit is notable for three reasons: It’s a masterpiece; Wayne’s performance got him his Oscar; and it has the greatest fade-out in movie history. And that’s the big cowboy, not a stunt rider, going over that fence, though a stunt rider appears to have started the run-up in the long shot.

Vertigo is the ultimate Doppelänger picture. For many years, Hitchcock was obsessed with such stories. In Shadow of a Doubt (1943), “Charlie” (Charlotte, Theresa Wright) has a spiritual closeness to her evil uncle and namesake, Charles (Joseph Cotten, in one of the numerous performances, for which he should have been nominated for an Oscar, but never was). In 1951’s Strangers on a Train, Robert Walker Jr. and Farley Granger are the doubles. In The Wrong Man (1956), which sought to cash in on the pseudo-documentary fad that began with The Naked City (1949), the doubles were the real jazz musician, Manny Balestrero, played by Henry Fonda, and the bank robber he was taken for. In North by Northwest (1959), Roger O. Thornhill (Cary Grant) was taken for George Kaplan. And in Psycho (1960), the doubles were Norman Bates and his mother.

In Vertigo, Kim Novak plays two very different women, one of whom is a counterfeit.

As for Stewart, I read a British writer a few years ago, who ranked his Top Ten performances, putting his Scotty in Vertigo at #1. Officially, Vertigo’s screenplay was adapted by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor, from the novel, D’Entre Les Morts, by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. However, I read somewhere that Hitchcock had commissioned the “novel” to serve as the basis for the screenplay. If that was indeed the case, then Coppel, Taylor, Boileau and Narcejac all collaborated, stagewise, on one of the most brilliant, original screenplays ever written.