WORLD TOUR Day 19 - Chicago + Springfield, Illinois
BEFORE: Spending a second day in the Second City seems appropriate. Especially when another Chicago reporter is covering another Chicago murder trial. Can I program a theme week or what? Linking from "The Front Page", Jack Lemmon was also in "Airport '77" with Jimmy Stewart (last seen in "The Spirit of St. Louis"). Sorry, JAMES Stewart, as the IMDB persists in calling him now. More on that later.
THE PLOT: Chicago reporter P.J. McNeal re-opens a ten-year-old murder case.
AFTER: I have to remind myself that this film was made in 1948, and is set in 1943. This sort of thing, the attempted overturning of a verdict, has become a staple of the "Law & Order" franchise, usually with the assistance of new forensic techniques or new technology to re-examine the evidence. There's a bit of that here, with several new technologies (at the time) being used to crack the case.
The main evidence in the shooting of a policeman here is an eyewitness testimony, but if I've learned one thing from "Law & Order" and "CSI", it's that even eyewitnesses can be unreliable. However, I feel like "Law & Order" would have wrapped this story up in 47 minutes (plus ad breaks), and this film takes just under 2 hours to do the same thing. Which would be excusable, if there weren't so much filler. Often characters in this film stated the same information, over and over. As in, "You'll look out for my family won't you? My wife, and my boy, who are my family because they are related to me?" Or, "I'm going to enlarge this photo, and by that I mean I'm going to make it bigger." Gee, thanks for clearing that up.
There are also plenty of shots of our intrepid reporter typing, then close-ups of WHAT he's typing, followed by the same words being typeset into a printing press, followed by the same words on a newspaper headline. Thanks for the detailed look at the printing process, I think. Even harder to explain is the presence of completely unnecessary narration at only two spots in the film. Dropped in like that, it seems like a voice from beyond explaining what doesn't need to be explained, and I half expected the characters to look around the scene, wondering where that voice was coming from.
I'm going to leave alone the old telephone number word-prefix thing, because I covered that in my review of "BUtterfield-8". Same deal with "person-to-person" calls. Hey, at least Jimmy Stewart is seen dialing phones in this film - and they're the old rotary phones, so dialing seven numbers eats up a LOT of screen time, which also helps to pad out the film.
I can get behind the reporter's efforts to track down the arresting officers and witnesses from the old case. A part of my job that I don't often talk about involves tracking art directors and producers in the advertising business, as they move from agency to agency. Some seem to bounce from job to job every 2 months or so, and some have been out of the business for years. The task has gotten easier with things like Facebook and LinkedIn, but it still takes me hours to sift through all the people with similar names to find the right individuals - then I've got to tangle with maiden names, married names, nicknames, etc. Does this guy use Joseph or Joe in his e-mail? Does this last name end with Stein or Stien? Does this woman hyphenate her last name? It can be a long, arduous process, with me playing amateur online detective.
But let's get back to the technology introduced in this film. First up is the lie detector test - again, remember this is set in 1943. One of the device's pioneers, Leonarde Keeler, appears in this film as the polygraph administrator. (Not to be confused with "father of the polygraph" William Marston, who also created the comic-book character Wonder Woman, with her magic lasso that functioned like a lie detector...) But Keeler manages to over-explain the polygraph process, asking the subject to draw a card and then asking him "Was it the ace of hearts? Was it the two of hearts?" No lie, we hear him ask about twenty of these questions - WE GET IT already! Geez, it's a movie, you can edit the process a little bit. But way back then, the polygraph technology wasn't only unreliable, it was completely inadmissible in court - so why do it?
Next we come to a method of transmitting a photo from one city to another, via something that looks like a forerunner of the telex, which was the forerunner of the fax machine. (Kids, ask your parents what a fax was...) When I started working in the film biz, the fax was an amazing device that allowed crappy images with no resolution to be sent over the phone lines - so how good would I expect this photo positive to be transmitted over the wire in 1943? Probably not as good as what is depicted here. (UPDATE: I've learned that this was not a telex, which was text-based, but it was an early version of the fax machine, called a radiofax, which did scan an image line-by-line and transmit it over a land-line or radio waves. Images were first sent across the Atlantic with this method around 1925.)
Yes, it's the familiar Hollywood forensic trick of enlarging a photo, and somehow mysteriously enhancing the detail at the same time. I scream at the TV when I see this on "CSI", since you can't enhance what isn't originally there. Oh, we'd love to have technology that could fill in missing pixels after an enlargement, with a computer making the best guess on how to fill in the gaps, but my understanding is that this tech doesn't exist, even now. However, someone on IMDB pointed out that newspaper reporters back in the day did use those big cameras, with very detailed negatives. Fine, but here the original negative was not available, so the lab had to make a dupe negative from the positive - and how much resolution could THAT have?
NITPICK POINT: The enlargement in question is done to view the date on a newspaper, in the background of the photo. The newspaper is being sold by a vendor, so we can assume that a newsboy couldn't get away with selling yesterday's news. But why zoom in to enlarge the date, when the paper's headline is so much larger? A simple trip to the newspaper's morgue would tell them what the headline was on the date in question. Or even the arrangement of photos on the front page, which would probably be unique to that edition. Zooming in to the tiny date? You're either showing off, or you're full of malarkey. Either way, I call shenanigans.
Also starring Richard Conte, Lee J. Cobb (last seen in "12 Angry Men"), Helen Walker, Betty Garde, with cameos from E.G. Marshall (last seen in "Nixon"), Thelma Ritter (last seen in "Birdman of Alcatraz").
I'm counting this as a Chicago film (and unlike last night's film, it was actually filmed there...), but for the sake of the mileage counter I'm going to throw in McNeal's trip to Springfield, since it's important to the plot. I didn't know where the state penitentiary was located (ah, right, it's in Joliet...), so I'm discounting his trips to the prison. My kilometer count seems to have gotten off by a bit, most likely due to rounding rather than conversion, so I'm adjusting the kilometers to match the mileage. Damn metric system!
DISTANCE TRAVELED TODAY: 176 miles / 284 km (Chicago, IL to Springfield, IL)
DISTANCE TRAVELED SO FAR: 4,518 miles / 7,271 km
RATING: 5 out of 10 Polish bars
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