A Closeup on one of the witnesses coke bottle glasses. Another closeup on the feeble old obviously insane bum as one of the culprits in the ridiculously eclectic police lineup. The expressions of the shunned waitress that screams "I'm lying and just seeking revenge." Scenes where townsfolk speak to each other which sound like a much too perfectly timed rehearsal. The politicians having a meeting while an idyllic putting green of a golf course sleeps in the background. Ed Begley pulling a gun, and thus making leading man Dana Andrews's role that much less mysterious and engrossing. Sam Levene, as usual, playing the perfectly wise "progressive" working man, who knows more than anyone with a wink, almost directed right at the audience. And a narrator that pours on the grim irony behind a pseudo-documentary template. Boomerang is extremely disappointing, especially since it's a movie starring Cult Film Freak Cinema's favorite actor, Dana Andrews, and directed by one of my favorite directors, Elia Kazan, who hadn't yet met Marlon Brando i.e hit his stride, and became more subtle, and implied.Idealistic is an understatement for this contrived Film Noir that's hardly a Film Noir. And that's the word to center on... The one connected to Under... Which is, Statement. This movie is not only making one, it's screaming like a wounded and abused banshee. This is why Dana's usual director, Otto Preminger, hit it outta the ballpark with his masterpiece Anatomy of a Murder, by having all the characters ambiguous, and, unlike Boomerang, remaining realistic without having heroes and villains. Such characters should never be anywhere near a Courtroom Drama.Anyhow: Dana Andrews did a good job and stayed tried and true despite starring in a movie that not only made up its mind from the start, but takes sides, one side... One-Sided, and beyond!

The picture was based on a case involving Homer S. Cummings, a former Mayor of Stamford, CT and one our greatest Attorney-Generals. He served under FDR in the 1930's and created a strong criminal justice arm of the Department of Justice. I saw the film more than 50 years ago and watched it again the other evening on Turner Classic movies. The cast is excellent and I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Dana Andrews when he visited Boston University in the mid 1960's. He was always a very serious actor and was wonderful in "The Best years of Our Lives," and "Laura."Richard J. Garfunkel Host of the Advocates WVOX 1460 am radio New Rochelle, NY

Boomerang! appears to be a film which weeps for both the disintegration and capitulation of the world-as-we-know-it brought about by those pesky youths; those sociopathic, needlessly aggressive and usually criminally minded youths whom are the doomed future of a once-great nation, and weeps for precisely this as early as 1947. The mournful, regretful and sombre expression of Tommy Lee Jones' character in 2008's No Country for Old Men seems an awfully long way off in comparison and although itself a piece set in 1980, it too dared to document the very dissolution of society as early as when it was respectively set. In the end, we weep more for the judicial system than anything else when we watch Boomerang!; a film with a potentially gloomy outlook on the world which is ultimately a false start, but instead does go to some admittedly impressive lengths to dramatically depict a true-to-life occurrence of a young man accused of murder and the strains on a several people's lives born out of that. Perhaps 1947 was indeed a little too early to start documenting the very falling apart of the world at its seams; to begin to point the finger at a post-war generation under a new global order for bringing about the social apocalypse, but there were nary those too afraid of jumping that proverbial gun.The film begins with a reassuring enough voice-over informing us of how quaint and assured smaller communities are in then-modern day U.S.A.; a quite audacious, given the time and era of American film-making in which this was made, camera shot accompanies what it is the narrator says, specifically, a full three hundred and sixty degree turn on a cordoned off part of a public street encapsulating the whole of the public thoroughfare which includes passers-by; shoppers; everyday buildings as well as automobiles being genuinely driven by their genuine owners. The whole thing is put to the soundtrack of a particular song others will know better than I do entitled "America, the Beautiful" and there is most certainly this idyllic sensibility about things.But hold on, for something truly dreadful has happened within one of this nice, up-standing and quaint little communities seemingly impregnable to all that is nasty, twisted, sordid and shameful: a local priest to one of these communities has been shot dead in a public street and moral panic ensues. The voice-overs change tact and you'd be forgiven for mistaking the opening of the film as a kind of public information broadcast on the odd smatterings of crime that can occasionally rear its ugly head. The crime comes across as a big deal, so much so that the film puts this tragic death on a par with both the Wall Street Crash and the Japanese's attack on America's Navy headquarters down at Pearl Harbour, such is the immense shock at what has transpired. The beginning is very formal and highly personified; that ambiguous and wavy sense of it being possible to happen to anybody effectively put across through its newsreel aesthetic and deliberate lack of any clear-cut characters as of yet. What follows is an investigative drama followed only by another of a varying ilk, specifically, that of the searching for truth rather than a perpetrator and it all melds together rather well.A police chief named Harold Robinson (Cobb) is charged with initially finding the killer, his task coming across as more urgent following the distributing of a deadline in the form of two weeks by a higher-up; after that, the bigwigs enter the fray and the item becomes a national matter. Working with Robinson is a certain State Attourney named Henry Harvey (Andrews), an educated and methodical man with a large house and a wife in an upper-class suburban street whom will come to form the sole hope of a young American man called John Waldron (Kennedy) picked up and charged with the murder after some fairly underhand but effective police interrogation tactics that sees him confess. The process of apprehending such a suspect sees the police force turn to desperation, their snatching of various people off of the street is representative of a tyrannical, somewhat totalitarian regime, and is anything but what a more typified image of American governing is; the disrupting of that idyllic world we saw in the opening has now rippled on into those in charge whom are additionally spoiling their image as a free, conservative and advanced nation.Later plot revelations linked to that of a mayoral election forth-coming, and the desperation the governing mayor has in relation to wanting to win, arises; the putting away of such a criminal whilst he is in office would greatly benefit his campaign, regardless of the man's guilt again inferring a corrupt or tainted political ruling power. Boomerang! is by no means anything even remotely resembling soundly groundbreaking, but it is a decent and well made melodrama which sticks to its guns and covers the one voice sticking up for the victimised in a post-war, moral panic infused nation which, at least at the time, needed to take some serious time to look at itself before it started to pick on the little people travelling to and from towns wanting to be left alone as they chased that so-far-elusive American Dream. The performances across the board are united in their quality, Kennedy in particular playing the role of a jittery and frightened young man whose body language and urgent, nervous delivery of his lines keeps those of us unaware of the true story's actual conclusion in constant suspense as to whether or not he is a stone-cold killer. For what it is, Boomerang! is a nifty and taut little slice of dramatic pie which runs on ideas and character and makes good use of its central item running what's at stake.

The movie is probably best known now for its heavyweight talent, from director Kazan through the stellar supporting cast that includes such heavy-hitters as Kennedy, Cobb, Begley and Malden. Even the one movie star, Andrews, rises to the drama's challenge. Of course, 10 years of Perry Mason courtroom theatrics has since made the storyline more familiar than I'm sure it was at the time.Nonetheless, old movie fans will recognize this TCF production as kicking off the docu- drama style of filmmaking, which immediately caught on with audiences, eventually working its way into such TV dramas as Dragnet and The Lineup. The producer De Rochemont was producer of the documentary March of Time series, so an experienced hand was brought in to fashion this pioneering production.The movie itself works well as a seamless whole, integrating cast and screenplay into the real life surroundings. The result, based on fact, drives home an important point about criminal justice: namely that such seemingly incorrigible evidence as eye-witness accounts and ballistics tests can nevertheless turn out to be in error. I also like the way the high-profile trial gets tangled up with politics, showing how justice in the real world is sometimes not uppermost. The one contrived note is the implied guilt of Crossman as the actual culprit, who nevertheless gets punished in a fatal accident (the religious might assume punished by God). I suppose the Production Code frowned on killers getting away unpunished, regardless of what happens in the real world. At the same time, director Kazan's usual theatrical brilliance is constrained here, no doubt by the demands of the docu-drama format. No, the film is not particularly memorable. But it does remain a solid piece of movie-making that also ushered in an important new style of crime drama.