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It was inspired by the Kefauver Committee's hearings dealing with organised crime which were of enormous public interest in 1950 and 1951, and which inspired quite a few film noir moments, as it happened.
The idea of these hearings as a locus for the challenging of crime by means of public morals, created a unique set of cultural points for the 1950s. Since prohibition times, crime had grown into a major enterprise, and this its mangerial Kefauver-style film noir re-telling with sensation, morality, family, frienship, thuggery and downtown Los Angeles location shooting.
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Starring Dana Andrews, Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden, Arthur Kennedy and Jane Wyatt, with voiceovers by Reed Hadley, Boomerang also boasts the most comprehensive roster of film noir character actors in all of the styles many movie productions.
By making use of the stentorian voiceover which was becoming increasingly popular as the 1950s fast approached, there is a semi-documentary feel to Boomerang (1947), which seeks noir authenticity not only by broadcasting the action in the voice of authority as it takes place, but under the forward-thinking direction of Elia Kazan, makes good use of New England people and locations, to infuse the film with a special layer of authenticity — a technique becoming more popular as the procedural style evolved.
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As the 1950s approached classic film noir began to make an uneasy turn towards portraying, usually via the medium of the earnest authoritarian male voiceover, the technological and forensic crime detection methods.
Never much required in earlier film noir, the voiceover becomes an unnoticed interruption in the crime drama, and forms one aspect of the documentary style noir storytelling, and aspect somewhat determined to lecture and inform, as well as providing the useful service of telling the audience what is happening on screen.
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On Dangerous Ground (1951) is a classic Nicholas Ray urban rural violent cop film noir starring Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino in a tale of loneliness and duality combining the full and contrasting forces of both the wildscapes of the north and the urban environments on the individual.
Robert Ryan plays Jim Wilson a brutalised city cop, in danger of losing his job due to his lack of control when it comes to managing violence in his job.
Ida Lupino plays Mary Malden, a blind woman who characteristic of blindness in the movies at the time — is symbolically set to allow the hero to finally 'see'.
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Odds Against Tomorrow is one of the last films to appear in the classic noir cycle, and is notable for a plot which features a serious commentary on racism.
If there were to be such a sub-genre as arthouse-noir from the late 1950s, Odds Against Tomorrow would qualify. The score is by The Modern Jazz Quartet, so it would be hard to groove harder than that in the late-noir groove-yard of arthouse heist noir.
As well as the most solid of noir tropes, such as the ex-soldier turned to crime, and the massive dose of 'one last job' which everybody seems to be on, there are also dramatic shots of birds in flight, city landscapes and children at play, all set to that arty jazz soundtrack by John Lewis — and even some experimental infra-red photography.
There'd be no film noir without paranoia, and one of the stand-out examples of this is the 1948 film noir Sorry, Wrong Number, with Barbara Stanwyck, Burt Lancaster ... and tucked away there, along with Ed Begley, is Wendell Corey.
Of all the significant innovations the film noir style introduced to the popular imagination, paranoia may be among the best. First there’s the political paranoia, whether it is down to Nazis or Communists, or later in the cycle, your own government.