Monday, May 26, 2014

Boomerang! Philip French on Elia Kazan's Connecticut crime thriller

(Elia Kazan, 1947; Eureka!, PG)

After playing supporting roles in two movies in the early 1940s, Elia Kazan returned to Hollywood five years later (by then an established Broadway director) to direct two unremarkable studio productions, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and The Sea of Grass, the second of which he judged "a terrible picture". He then got the chance to make Boomerang!, a realistic movie produced by the documentarist Louis de Rochemont, the creator of the March of Time series that inspired the opening of Orson Welles' Citizen Kane.

An influential post-second world war hybrid, Boomerang! was shot in harsh black and white and entirely in authentic locations. It combined the documentary, the social-conscience picture, Italian neo-realism and the thriller; in their commentary to this DVD/Blu-ray version, the film noir experts James Orsini and Alain Silver call it "docu-noir". Kazan recalls thinking that "I really will be able to do this picture the way I think pictures should be made. It was our neo-realism", and considered it his first work to bear an individual stamp.

Continue reading...

Source: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/may/25/boomerang-elia-kazan-philip-french-film-review-dvd

Alexis Amore Alexis Love Alexis Texas Alfonso Arau

No comments:

Post a Comment