Boomerang!

Circles and lines: It opens with a 360° pan in downtown Stamford, Connecticut, then sketches the killer as a disembodied hand and revolver entering the frame at a jagged slant. The victim is the beloved town pastor (Wyrley Birch), the ensuing police manhunt and "political three-ring circus" proceed with cutaways to tangible location photography in neighborhood porches, pool halls, a bridge party at a fire station. The blend of stylization and faux-documentary reportage shows Elia Kazan’s understanding of the true innovations of Italian neo-realism, he has bigger fish to fry than merely illustrating a Reader’s Digest article. The fellow snagged in the whirlwind of public outrage and media scorn is a drifting WWII vet (Arthur Kennedy), who signs a confession after a few sleepless days under the police station’s interrogation light. A conviction would pave the way to the governor’s office for the State Attorney (Dana Andrews), who sees the whole thing as "close to a perfect case." Doubt crosses the prosecutor’s mind after he sees the accused face to face, and, despite protests from his own party, he steps into the courtroom to demolish the witnesses and invalidate the evidence. The indirect model for Kazan’s "lesson in trial procedure" is Young Mr. Lincoln, the lynch mob waiting outside the jailhouse is adduced even as Ford’s mythical vision yields to the unease of postwar film noir. Jane Wyatt’s versatile docility as Andrews’s wife (she can serve milk and beer) coexists with the profuse sweating of Ed Begley, a disturbed momma’s boy full of unmentionable sins (Philip Coolidge) is offered as the real culprit for a hint of divine law. The best work is done against the grain of Louis de Rochemont’s newsreel tidiness, with biting rousers like Lee J. Cobb and Sam Levene punching through the gray veneer. Kennedy’s final walk out the courthouse gates illustrates the very young Godard's description of Kazan’s early filmmaking, "an accentuation of the phenomenon of the proscenium." With Karl Malden, Cara Williams, Taylor Holmes, and Robert Keith. In black and white.