Trailer
Plot summary
Prosecutor Henry Harvey and Chief Robinson are handed a killing they cannot solve: a priest, Father Lambert, shot dead on a street in Bridgeport, Connecticut, with no suspect in sight. The case becomes a political weapon: the corrupt machine that the reform administration displaced attacks it over the lack of an arrest, and the newspapers and the public demand results. Robinson and Harvey are under pressure to produce a killer or to accept help from outside. A vagrant military veteran, John Waldron, is picked up in Ohio because he matches the general description of the wanted man, and officers bring him to Connecticut, where witnesses identify him.
Cast
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Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Boomerang! (1947)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film's murder case comes from real life: the Rev. Hubert Dahme was fatally shot behind the left ear near the Lyric Theatre in downtown Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1924, and those in the theater were so shocked that none called for an ambulance for ten minutes; he was pronounced dead two hours later at St. Vincent's Hospital.
SPOILER
Harold Israel, a vagrant and discharged soldier, confessed to the 1924 Bridgeport murder, but state's attorney Homer Cummings cleared him; Cummings, the model for the film's prosecutor Henry Harvey, later became United States attorney general under Franklin D. Roosevelt.- In the film, police keep interrogating suspect John Waldron after he asks for a lawyer; that practice would later be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in the 1981 landmark case Edwards v. Arizona.
- Elia Kazan was denied permission to film in Bridgeport, Connecticut, where the real murder and trial took place, so the film was shot mostly in Stamford, Connecticut instead.
