- As I've noted in other reviews, employment of the documentary style in film noir often proves to be a cinematic double-edged sword. While such films necessarily tend to be more realistic than their smokey, shadow-infused counterparts, they often also suffer from the constraints of realism in a film category that benefits greatly from exaggeration and skewed takes on humanity. Documentary noirs like The Naked City and Crime Wave succeed precisely because they are willing to flex the bounds of plausibility when appropriate. Films like Boomerang!, however, are rendered slightly more dull than they would have been if only they had taken place in a less believable world.
- Boomerang!'s story is arranged around the brutal murder of a much-loved parish priest named Father Lambert (Wyrley Birch) in the small town of Bridgeport, Connecticut. The audience knows that troubled souls like John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy) and Jim Crossman (Philip Coolidge) often wandered in to consult with Lambert, but the police, led by the gruff Chief Robinson (Lee J. Cobb), have little to go on aside from a series of vague eyewitness accounts describing a tall man wearing a dark coat and light-colored hat. When they discover that Waldron left town shortly after the killing with a gun matching the caliber of the murder weapon, it doesn't take them long to wear him down into making a confession.
- Trouble is, state's attorney Henry Harvey (Dana Andrews) doesn't buy it. Although the bullet appears to match Waldron's gun and a spiteful waitress (Cara Williams) swears she can place him at the crime scene, the details aren't quite enough to persuade Harvey. Despite enormous pressure to prosecute Waldron from local politicos like Mac McCreery (Robert Keith) and Paul Harris (Ed Begley), Harvey prefers instead to air the facts of the case before making up his mind. His devoted wife (Jane Wyatt) fully supports Harvey, but everyone else in town, including his pal Chief Robinson, is practically on the brink of revolution. How to convince the rest of the world that you're just an honest person trying to get at the truth?
- One expects that questions like that must have plagued the thoughts of director Elia Kazan for much of his life. This film, On the Waterfront, and Face in the Crowd all feature heroic figures who stand alone in believing something that the madding crowds simply refuse to see. More interesting still is the fact that Kazan provides this viewpoint in Boomerang! five years before his immensely unpopular (in Hollywood) decision to cooperate with the House Committee on Un-American Activities by testifying against alleged Communist sympathizers. Despite the enjoyable performances provided by Andrews and Cobb, there's not much to recommend Boomerang! in comparison to much of Kazan's excellent later work, but at least it illustrates that he was already aware of the challenges of standing alone against the world long before he actually did so. You can't say he hadn't warned himself.
- This was based on a true (unsolved) murder investigation that involved Homer Cummings who eventually became Attorney General under FDR.
- Narrated by Reed Hadley.
- This was Ed Begley's film debut, and also featured Karl Malden and a cameo by Arthur Miller.
