A priest is shot point blank in the head in the middle of a dark street. The killer gets away, despite the presence of several witnesses. A public outcry ensues when the police department can't make any headway in the case, while a rival administration that wants control of city hall milks the situation for all it's worth to make the current administration look bad. To appease the public, the police latch on to a suspect who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and force a confession from him. But the district attorney has twinges of conscience and can't bring himself to prosecute a man he doesn't believe is guilty.
Such is "Boomerang!", Elia Kazan's quick and dirty docu-drama from the late 1940s, a period rife with films like this. The interest in "Boomerang!" lies not so much in the drama swirling around the accused man (played by a young-looking Arthur Kennedy) or the sleazy politics or even the personal crisis faced by the D.A. (played by a stoic Dana Andrews), but rather in the procedural details surrounding Andrews' attempts to persuade a courtroom that the evidence massed against Kennedy is flimsy. In this way, the film is a premonition of a bigger and more famous movie, "Anatomy of a Murder," in which the outcome of the case doesn't matter but the gritty details of poring over grisly evidence does.
The film's weakest link is a superfluous storyline featuring Ed Begley that ends in an implausible dramatic twist that has not much of anything to do with the movie. The film would be dramatic enough without it.
Also with Lee J. Cobb, for once tolerable as the good-guy chief of police, and Jane Wyatt, window dressing as Andrews' wife.
Grade: B+
Such is "Boomerang!", Elia Kazan's quick and dirty docu-drama from the late 1940s, a period rife with films like this. The interest in "Boomerang!" lies not so much in the drama swirling around the accused man (played by a young-looking Arthur Kennedy) or the sleazy politics or even the personal crisis faced by the D.A. (played by a stoic Dana Andrews), but rather in the procedural details surrounding Andrews' attempts to persuade a courtroom that the evidence massed against Kennedy is flimsy. In this way, the film is a premonition of a bigger and more famous movie, "Anatomy of a Murder," in which the outcome of the case doesn't matter but the gritty details of poring over grisly evidence does.
The film's weakest link is a superfluous storyline featuring Ed Begley that ends in an implausible dramatic twist that has not much of anything to do with the movie. The film would be dramatic enough without it.
Also with Lee J. Cobb, for once tolerable as the good-guy chief of police, and Jane Wyatt, window dressing as Andrews' wife.
Grade: B+