James Hitchcock The title of this film is a bit of a mystery. There is no connection with Australia, and boomerangs are never seen, or even mentioned, during the film.In 1924 a priest named Hubert Dahme was shot dead on the streets of Bridgeport, Connecticut. There were no obvious suspects and no obvious motive for the crime; Father Dahme was a popular man with no known enemies. Eventually a vagrant named Harold Israel was arrested and charged with the murder. At first the case against Israel seemed a strong one, but he was eventually cleared through the efforts of a determined lawyer. Surprisingly, this was not his own defence counsel but the man tasked with prosecuting him, the Connecticut state's attorney, Homer Cummings, who later became United States Attorney- General under the Roosevelt administration. Cummings became convinced that the police evidence was unsatisfactory and persuaded the Court to discount it. Israel was acquitted; the true murderer was never found.The film is a fictionalised version of this true-life murder case. The action is updated from the twenties to the forties. Names are changed; the murdered priest becomes "Father George Lambert", the accused man "John Waldron" and the state's attorney "Henry Harvey". The local authorities in Bridgeport, who may still have had a guilty conscience about the way Israel had been treated, refused permission to film there, so the film was actually shot in neighbouring Stamford. As in the real- life case the crime is never officially solved, although the film strongly implies who the real killer is. "Boomerang!" has a lot in common with the James Stewart film "Call Northside 777", another crime drama from the following year. Both films are based on a true story from the twenties or thirties, and both deal with a fight to clear men wrongly accused of murder. In "Call Northside 777" the two men have already been convicted and are serving a sentence in jail; here the defendant is on trial for his life. Both are made in a semi-documentary style, a mixture of documentary realism and film noir, and make use of voice-over. One actor, Lee J. Cobb, appears in both films. There is more to the film, however, than a documentary reconstruction of real-life events. There is also a strong political element. Political control of the town in which the action takes place has recently switched to a vigorous reforming administration, here referred to as the "Reform Party". After Father Lambert is killed, however, this new administration comes under attack from both press and public for the alleged incompetence of the police in failing to find the murderer. Harvey, therefore, comes under a lot of pressure from his political bosses who have a vested interest in ensuring that Waldron is convicted, and his reluctance to press the case is misinterpreted as stemming from support for the opposition faction in the town, who have an equally strong vested interest in ensuring that Waldron is acquitted. Those pressurising Harvey do so from a mixture of motives. At one end of the scale is the relatively decent Police Chief Harold Robinson (Cobb's character), who sincerely believes Waldron to be guilty. At the other end is Paul Harris, an obviously corrupt local councillor who does not care one way or the other about justice, but is desperate to see Waldron convicted because he fears than one of his corrupt schemes will miscarry should he be voted off the Town Council.I was interested in the film because it highlights obvious differences between the British and American (or at least Connecticut) justice systems. A prosecuting barrister in Britain could not drop a prosecution without the consent of those instructing him, generally the police or Crown Prosecution Service. Harvey, however, clearly has much more extensive powers, and mindful of the American lawyers' Code of Ethics, which stipulates that a prosecutor's main duty is not to obtain a conviction but to see that justice is done, he begins to subject the police evidence to independent scrutiny. One by one the key planks of the police case, which originally seems a solid one, begin to crumble. Waldron's confession is shown to have been obtained by oppression. Several eye-witnesses are shown to have been unclear or mistaken about what they saw; the one whose testimony seems firm is revealed to be an embittered ex-girlfriend with a grudge against Waldron. The ballistics evidence which seemed to show that the fatal bullet was fired from Waldron's gun proves to be unreliable.Dana Andrews was not always my favourite actor, especially when he ended up in substandard war dramas like "North Star" or "The Purple Heart", but he is good here as Harvey, an earlier version of Atticus Finch, a man who believes that lawyers must have a conscience and act with integrity, no matter what side of the law they may be on. He receives good support from Cobb as Robinson, a decent but limited man who cannot conceive that supposedly firm evidence can turn out to be flawed, and from Arthur Kennedy as Waldron, who shows that innocent men are not always nice ones, and unsympathetic men not always guilty. "Boomerang!" not just a documentary; it is also a solidly-crafted legal drama with a griping courtroom climax. 7/10

mark.waltz The audience is in on the revelation as to who killed a beloved priest almost from the very beginning of this classic film noir. The mass media manipulates the public into slamming the local police force in this quaint Connecticut city to find a suspect, harassing the innocent of being shoved into a line-up then finally arresting a man found in Ohio with a gun who matches the suspect's description and just happened to have just been there weeks before. Local politics is examined as the pressure cooker environment of the law turns everything upside down. Prosecutor Dana Andrews stuns the public by announcing in court that he believes that the suspect (a wonderful Arthur Kennedy) is innocent, jeopardizing his own career which includes an endorsement for governor.The ruthlessness of the headline hungry press and the frustrations of the hands tied behind their back law enforcement keeps this one of the most nail-biting post war problem dramas. Personal ambitions take over idealistic men and tension increases as the case becomes a hot plate of controversy. Director Elia Kazan gives the documentary like presentation a gritty feel as the community, lovely to look at for outsiders, becomes truly ugly as its inner wheels are exposed. Andrews headlines an excellent cast with Jane Wyatt as his supportive wife, Lee J. Cobb brilliant as the tough police chief, Karl Malden as an investigator who brutally rides Kennedy during questioning, and Sam Levene as a relentless reporter. The identity of the killer is never in doubt with the audience, with the sullen face of the creepy character looking on in court with a self-satisfied but worried smirk on his face."Boomerang" will make you think of times in our recent history where the public makes up their mind about a situation without knowing all the facts or simply just to keep in line with everybody else. Public opinion, as we all know, isn't always justified. It is those who stand up to adversity because of their objections towards public opinion who make the true difference in our democracy. If only law makers and politicians could follow in the footsteps of Andrews and follow their hearts rather than the men with fat wallets, our world would be a much more honest place.

MartinHafer "Boomerang!" features an exceptional cast of actors who might not be pretty but who really knew their craft. Think about it...Dana Andrews, Ed Begley, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Arthur Kennedy and Robert Keith all in one film. You can't help but enjoy watching the film simply so you can get a chance to watch these wonderful but generally unheralded actors exercise their craft. And, with Elia Kazan directing, you can't help but expect excellence.The film begins with a seemingly senseless murder. A beloved priest is shot in the back of the head, execution-style, on the street of a Connecticut town. The killer, dressed in a trench coat and hat, manages to get away and the town is clamoring for the police to catch him. In fact, the local paper pushes hard, very hard, for the police to act. And, as a result, it seems that the authorities try too hard to catch someone...anyone. The man they eventually catch (Arthur Kennedy) does give an inconsistent story but there really isn't much to connect him to the murder other than several eyewitnesses.When the District Attorney (Dana Andrews) gets the case, something bothers him. While everyone around him seems pleased about the arrest, he can't get past the fact that the evidence is tenuous--very tenuous. In fact, instead of prosecuting the case as you'd expect, Andrews manages to systematically prove the eyewitnesses were not the least bit reliable. They, too, were in a rush to judgment or had personal reasons to say Kennedy was the killer. And, following his impeachment of the witnesses, he is able to tear apart his own case--proving the defendant could not have been the assailant. While the idea of a prosecuting attorney working hard in court to DISPROVE his case sounds insane, it is supposedly based on a real case. And it also proves just how horrible eyewitness accounts can be--often VERY unreliable and subject to lots of human error. It has a great point to make AND is quite entertaining and well constructed. Well worth seeing.

johnnyboyz 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.