Henry Hathaway - Call Northside 777 (1948)

In 1943 Chicago, a small ad in the classified section of the Chicago Times piques the interest of the City Editor, Brian Kelly, who assigns reporter P.J. McNeal to investigate. The ad, purportedly placed by Tillie Wiecek, is offering $5,000 reward for information as to the identity of who murdered CPD Officer John Bundy in 1932. In reading about the case and interviewing Mrs. Wiecek, a scrubwoman who indeed placed the ad, McNeal learns that it was her son Frank Wiecek and his associate Tomek Zaleska who were convicted, she knows wrongly at least in Frank's case, and sentenced to 99 years each for the murder. Bundy was only one of many officers killed in that era of prohibition, where police officers were often open targets. It has taken Mrs. Wiecek these 10 years to save the reward money from scrubbing floors, having foregone all else in her life for Frank's sake. McNeal's human-interest story garners such a positive reaction from the readership that Kelly wants McNeal to continue to work on the whole of the story. Although McNeal walks in feeling Frank guilty based on the public record of evidence, Kelly allows him to walk away from the story anytime he feels that Frank definitely guilty and the story glorifying a cop killer. Slowly, McNeal begins to want to see Frank free; he comes to like him as a person despite still believing that he's guilty, then he comes to truly believe that he is innocent. Frank ultimately railroaded by a then corrupt system. In proving beyond a doubt Frank's innocence or that he was convicted by faulty evidence hits several roadblocks including the CPD, especially the rank and file, providing little to no assistance in not wanting to see a convicted cop killer set free, and he unable to locate Wanda Skutnik, the operator of the illegal speakeasy where Bundy was shot, whose eyewitness testimony largely put Frank away.