By making this circumstantial claim, "Boomerang!' is as guilty of presumption as the evidence-rigging villains in the piece. Cummings' facsimile that violence is done to propriety. de Rochemont's "Boomerang-!" It is only in its implications that it re-enacts an actual case and that the hero, as stated at the finish, is Homer S. A dozen other actors, few of them familiar to the screen, do competently by small-town characters under the sharp direction of Elia Kazan.Indeed, as a piece of melodrama with human and social overtones, there is nothing theatrically faulty about Mr. Lee Cobb broods in dark and towering silence as the badgered chief of police and Sam Levene is amusingly volcanic as a wised-up newspaper man. In a fine and suspenseful court room drama, the issue, however, is resolved and the triumph of unconventional justice over blind and willful subterfuge is shown.In the fluid performance of this story, Dana Andrews does another sensitive job as the tortured but steadfast State's attorney, and Arthur Kennedy is convincingly distraught as the suspect tagged for slaughter, especially in the third-degree sequence. And then the contrary logic of a young State's attorney is brought to play, counterpointed by doubts and temptations interposed by low politics. A truly tormenting representation of the grilling of the suspect is played and the fatality of an individual overwhelmed by trumped-up evidence is implied. Then it brings in the concept that local politics became involved and that the public clamor for a scapegoat compelled an arrest and a trial.At this point the dramatist's prerogative to build his own case is exercised and the film opens up as a comment upon social justice and the integrity of one man. It apparently re-enacts precisely the commission of the crime, the shock that it caused the community and the consequent state of alarm. Cummings at the end-and only distinguishes the community as a "small city in Connecticut," it follows very closely the details of this extraordinary case, with a few questionable omissions and fabrications which mainly make it seem recent. And, with an eloquent deference to justice and an array of explosive facts, he argued against his own case and obtained the defendant's release.While the film carefully garbles true identities-until it cites Mr. Cummings at that time, sprang a shattering surprise by contending that the police evidence was unsound. When the case came to trial, however, the State's attorney, who was Homer S. The murderer escaped and no suspect or motive was immediately adduced, but eventually the police nabbed a young man against whom a circumstantial case was built up. Y.)Actually, the basis of the story was the murder of a priest which occurred on a busy street corner in Bridgeport on a night in 1924. (That was Bridgeport, Conn., but for reasons of diplomacy, it was thought advisable to film the picture in Stamford, Conn., and White Plains, N. And, to heighten the illusion of actuality, they have photographed most of it in legitimate communities adjacent to that in which the basic case occurred. They have used an unseen narrator to describe many of the comprehensive scenes, inter-cut with the realistic dialogue, thus achieving, a news-view effect.
They have put together a screen play which has the dispassion of a good journalist's report and they have filmed it with the steady observation of a newspaper cameraman. de Rochemont and his craftsmen, working for Twentieth Century-Fox, have eschewed the stale patterns and photography of conventional cops-and-courtroom films.
#BOOMERANG MOVIE CAST FULL#
Producer Louis de Rochemont, who has distinguished himself in Hollywood by employing the "March of Time technique" in filming dramas based on actual events (as witness his "House on Ninety-second Street" and "13 Rue Madeleine," has now used this realistic method to tell the story of a celebrated murder case-or a modernized image of it-in his latest film, "Boomerang!" And, to give this new picture at the Roxy its full theatrical due, we must say that this style of presentation has resulted in a drama of rare clarity and punch.For Mr.
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