What a great movie 1947’s Boomerang! is. It fully justifies that screamer and yet it doesn’t get the love it deserves. For two reasons, of which more later.
But first let’s clear away the baggage. It’s not a film noir, though it’s often described as one. Instead it’s one of those “ripped from the headlines” crime dramas that came along a bit later, relying on “you are there” levels of authenticity to bolster its dramatic credentials. In a written preamble we’re told that not only was the film shot on the same locations as the events it relates, but it uses some of the same people.
The first is not true. The real-life incidents Boomerang! depicts took place in Bridgeport, Connecticut, who refused the production permission to shoot there. So instead the neighbouring Stamford was used.
Some of the witnesses and bystanders are used, however, adding a belt of veracity to the story of a much loved priest gunned down in cold blood, the ensuing witch hunt that develops to find the killer and the eventual trial of the man who is supposed to have committed the crime.
It’s a detailed, almost forensic, account of how these things go, and go wrong, as concerned townsfolk, appetites stoked by newspapers hungry for a story, put pressure on the police to find a killer, while to the side politicians and players in the attention economy (as no one called it back then) try to exploit the situation for their own purposes.
The cast is cracking. Dana Andrews as the state prosecutor resisting attempts to just throw the man to the wolves. Lee J Cobb as the tough but fair cop certain he’s got his man. Down the page we have the likes of Karl Malden as one of the dogged officers on the case, Ed Begley, in an early screen role, as a corrupt local realtor and Taylor Holmes as the even more culpable newspaper publisher.
Unlike noir, it’s shot bright and punchy and there is an almost loving attention to the everyday activities of an American town. Paperboys and barbers, pool players and churchgoers, firemen and washerwomen. This is the era of artist Edward Hopper producing works like Nighthawks and Hotel Lobby and cinematographer Norbert Brodine may have taken some cues from the artist whose New England stamping ground is where this movie is set.
Andrews is remarkable, and really comes into his own in trial scenes where he delivers lines with a rapper’s sense of rhythm (I’m exaggerating slightly, but not much). Thanks to him Boomerang! has one of the great courtroom-reversal dénouements, in which the prosecutor goes against not just the mood of the room and the town but upends his own job description to see that justice is done. And yet the film doesn’t turn up much in the “best of” tallies. Just to check I wasn’t making that assertion up, I did an internet search for “great courtroom movies” and Boomerang! wasn’t on any of lists in the first ten answers that turned up, and one of those was an IMDb list of “800 Recommended Legal and Courtroom Thrillers” (there were 784, in fact, but no Boomerang!).
Part of the reason may be that the movie fingers as the real killer a man it’s suggested is a homosexual and in one of the few scenes that poor, lovely Father Lambert (uncredited Wyrley Birch) gets in flashback he denounces the man’s activities as deviant and suggests the funny farm – from a modern viewpoint not so poor and lovely then. Also, Elia Kazan is the director here, a problematical figure who’d later shop fellow movie professionals to the McCarthy congressional hearings into communist infiltration.
That was five years in the future. Ironically, a witch hunt is precisely what this film is about, and how the wisdom of crowds is nothing compared to mass hysteria once it gets going. A powerful, brilliant movie.
Boomerang! – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2024
