Boomerang! (20th Century-Fox, 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

When I got home last night from the showing of Thoir: Love and Thunder my husband Charles and I watched a quite good movie on Turner Classic Movies called Boomerang!, made in 1047 by producer Louis de Rochemont for 20th Century-Fox/ De Rochemont had been the founder of The March of Time newsreel in 1935, and while fans of the British documentary movement ridiculed it as slovenly edited, overly reliant on staged re-creations with actors, and either blessed or cursed (your choice) by the God-like voice of Westbrook Van Voorhis as the narrator, ht was a highly popular series and largely crowded out other newsreels from theatre screens. In 1945, a decade after launching The March of Time, de Rochemont cut a deal with 20th Century-Fox to make narrative features that would not only be based on true stories but be shot as much as possible on the actual locations where the real events took place. One of the people who liked the idea of shooting on real locations was the film’s director, the young Elia Kazan, who had just finished making The Sea of Grass with Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn at MGM and had been appalled that he was expected to shoot an intense drama about the open range inside an MGM soundstage on a carefully carpeted floor made to look vaguely like a wheatfield. Boomerang! was Kazan’s third feature credit (he had made his debut in 1945 with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn) and he loved getting the chance to do it on the real locations, though he wasn’t as fond of the old-school Hollywood actors, Dana Andrews and Jane Wyatt, he was given as his leads. Kazan was much more comfortable with actors he’d worked with on stage, including Lee J. Cobb as the police chief of the small (and unnamed) Connecticut town where it takes place.

The gimmick is that after years of misgovernment by a corrupt political machine, the voters of the town rose up and elected a reform government that included a new city council, police chief Harold R. Robinson (Lee J. Cobb) and public prosecutor Henry L. Harvey (Dana Andrews). The new reform government gets to work on major public projects, including a children’s recreation center to be ron by Harvey’s wife Madge (Jane Wyatt), when suddenly their agenda is derailed by the murder of a popular old Episcopal priest, Father George Lambert (wyrley Birch). With seven alleged eyewitnesses to the crime, none of whom agree on much other than that the killer was wearing a dark coat and a light fedora hat, the police are clueless for at least two weeks and they’re getting ragged on by the local newspaper, the Record. The Record’s publisher, T. M. Wade (Taylor Holmes), was a strong supporter of the former city government and seizes on the Lambert murder as a way to make the “reform” government look incompetent so voters will turn against it and put Wade and his crooked friends back in power. We get a cloe as to Lambert’s real murderer when we show him confronting a middle-aged man and telling him point-blank that his sins,whatever they are, are endangering other people. Lambert says he’s going to insist that the man enter a sanitarium, and when Lambert also tells the man that he’ll have to let his wife know, the man goes ballistic.

This was obviously a piece of fiction added to the story by the screenwriter- Richard Murphy, since according to the narration (and presumably the original Reader’s Digest articles by Fulton Oursler – whose book The Greatest Story Ever Told was the basis for that notoriously ponderous biopic of Jesus Christ starring Max von Sydow and directed by George Stevens – on which Boomerang! was based) Lambert’s real killer was never found and the case remained open and unsolved. (We get a brief shot of a newspaper clipping announcing the death of this man in an accident, which reinforced my conclusion that the man’s terrible secret was he was an alcoholic and got into accidents while driving drunk.) Eventually the police send out a composite sketch of the suspect based on the accounts of the seven eyewitnesses, and from that they finally get a suspect: John Waldron (Arthur Kennedy), a World War II veteran who’s been leading a marginal life ever since he returned from combat. With seven eyewitnesses, a ballistics test that matches Waldron’s gun to the bullet that killed Father Lambert, and even a confession extracted from Waldron during a police interrogation in which they browbeat him for two days straight, not letting him sleep, it seems like an open-and-shut case. But D. A. Harvey becomes convinced that Waldron was actually innocent, and he shocks the town by declaring on the first day of Waldron’s preliminary hearing that he’s going to ask the judge to drop the case.

Later he partially backs off after a member of the reform party, Paul Harris (Ed Begley), threatens him, first by pulling a gun on him, then by announcing that he’s the sole owner of the Sunset Realty Company on whose land the recreation center was supposed to be built, and telling Harvey that if the reformers lose power in the next election, the machine will cancel the rec-center project and Harris will be ruined financially. But Harvey asks the judge for permission to call witnesses at the preliminary hearing, including Irene Nelson (Cara Williams), who had an affair with Waldron that ended badly when he abruptly left town and is willing to lie against him to get him executed. Harvey carefully deconstructs the case against Waldron. He gets his own ballistics experts to re-examine the gun and prove it could not have fired the bullet that killed Father Lambert, and in a dramatic display he has his assistant shoot the gun at him from the position behind Father Lambert’s neck the autopsy documented was where the gun was fired. When the gun fails to fire, Harvey announces to the judge that its firing pin was broken and therefore the gun couldn’t have gone off in that position. An imdb.com “Trivia” post notes that the actual case took place in 1924 and “Harvey” was actually Homer Cummings, who was later appointed U.S. Attorney General during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration – and Cummings was still alive when the film was made and endorsed the film as accurate. Elia Kazan didn’t like the narration the film was saddled with, nor did he care for Dana Andrews as an actor – though one day Andrews showed up for work with a hangover just as Kazan was about to shoot his climactic courtroom scene. The scene had been rewritten overnight and Kazan was understandably worried that Andrews couldn’t learn the new dialogue in time. “Just give me 20 minutes,” Andrews told Kazan, and 20 minutes later he emerged from his dressing room to shoot the scene – and was line-perfect.