Boomerang – DVD Review

Justice and vengeance typically become blurred in the eyes of society. When a crime happens—especially a violent one—we want results and we want them yesterday. The public outcry goes out and everything the police and DA say and do is subject to the highly unobjective magnifying lens of the media. We want somebody to pay; we want the person caught so we can believe the world is a safe place once again. So the question becomes, what role does the law serve in all of this? Is it in place to protect the public or the individual? In an ideal world, that question would never need to be asked, but as film noir movies so effectively point out—this is not an ideal world.

Based on a true story and directed by the legendary Elia Kazan, Boomerang begins with the sudden, seemingly unwarranted death of a local priest in a small Connecticut town. Seven people witnessed the event, but all they saw was a man in a dark trench coat and light fedora. This naturally doesn’t give the police much to go on, but that doesn’t stop every armchair detective and political opportunist from accusing the police of every kind of incompetence imaginable. Like any other mob, the townspeople want blood disguised as justice, and their constant pressure takes its toll on everyone involved, leading them to what could be a very costly mistake.

Like the other Fox Film Noir releases, Boomerang is a superb movie with brilliant writing, acting, and directing. However, it’s not a perfect movie.

Although I understood the need to establish the town and this importance of the priest to it, the first twenty or so minutes of the film were the most uninteresting. The movie really doesn’t pick up until a suspect is caught and we see how the pressure from the public has affected the police. Admittedly this point in the movie and the trial later probably wouldn’t have had as much impact without the establishing scenes at the beginning, but that doesn’t stop the fact that my attention wandered for that first twenty minutes.

Another problem is the infrequent, obtrusive voice-over. Unlike other noir movies where the voice over is typically done by the main character—think Orson Wells’s Lady of Shanghai—Boomerang‘s narrator is some disembodied, omniscient storyteller who does little more than tell you what’s happening on screen, almost as if the movie doesn’t trust you to understand what you’re seeing.

In many ways, the voice-over narration dates this movie more than the old cars and the fedoras. Although I understand that this was a convention of movies at the time, it doesn’t hold up as well as other movies from the time which used the same device, and a lot of that is due to the almost haphazard way of cutting in and out of the picture and that it isn’t grounded. Thankfully it disappears about the time the police catch their suspect and that’s when this turns into a truly great movie where the characters have to contend with the question of who do they serve: the public or the individual?

It’s not an easy question, and if you watch the movie you’ll find that there’s no easy answer. The moral ambiguities highlighted in Boomerang are fascinating, as is seeing how the characters deal with them, and it’s this aspect that carries the movie past its flaws and make it worthy to be included in this collection.

The transfer for this movie is excellent in almost every way except that the movie is presented in 1.33:1 Fullframe, and not in Widescreen. There were far too many times when you could only see half of two characters onscreen because they were positioned at the edges of the scene, which was frustrating. The audio fares better with both English Stereo and Mono tracks. Obviously there was no directionality to the sound, but the dialogue came through clearly and none of the tracks overlapped or overshadowed the other, which is much more important in the long run.

Audio Commentary By Film Historians Alain Silver and James Ursini

Poster Gallery

Theatrical Trailer (running time: 2:29)

Fox Noir trailers
I Wake up Screaming (running time: 2:15)
House of Strangers (running time: 2:13)
Vicki (running time: 2:18)

If you liked this movie you may want to try…
Text synopses of five other classic noir movies.

It’s great to see classic noir movies like this being released on DVD. Even though I had some minor difficulties with pacing and the use of voiceover, that doesn’t change that this is a very good, very intelligent movie. Recommended.

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Twentieth Century Fox presents Boomerang. Directed by Elia Kazan. Starring Dana Andrews, Jane Wyatt, Lee J. Cobb, Cara Williams, Arthur Kennedy, Sam Levene, Taylor Holmes, and Ed Begley. Written by Richard Murphy. Running time: 88 minutes. Rated NR. Released on DVD: September 2, 2008. Available at Amazon.com.