Thursday Movie Picks #400: Wrongly Accused

This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. It's hard to believe, but this venerable blogathon is up to its 400th edition, which means it's being going on for close to eight years. This week's theme is "Wrongly Accused", which isn't too difficult, although I wanted to use movies that I haven't used in blogathons before. That made things a bit more difficult, as I'd already used A Cry in the Dark and They Won't Forget before. Still, I was able to find three films:

Boomerang! (1947). Dana Andrews plays a district attorney in Bridgeport, CT, who has a notorious murder of a beloved local minister happen in his jurisdiction. Eventually demobbed soldier Arthur Kennedy is found out of state and accused of the murder. Andrews starts investigating the evidence, and finds out that Kennedy may not have been the murderer after all. However, most of the people in Bridgeport want somebody convicted, and Kennedy is somebody. This is based on a real case in the 1920s and the prosecuting attorney, Homer Cummings, would go on to become US Attorney General under FDR.

The Children's Hour (1961). Shirley MacLaine and Audrey Hepburn play two women running a private girls' school. There's some strain on their friendship because Hepburn is engaged to James Garner, but things are about to get much worse for them when one of the young female students tells her grandmother a lie about MacLaine and Hepburn being romantically involved. Parents start pulling their daughters out of school, and the two women have to defend themselves, but at great personal cost. This is based on a play by Lillian Hellman that had already been turned into a movie in the 1930s called These Three, although that version couldn't have any lesbian overtones.

Boy (1969). Japanese film from avant-garde director Nagisa Oshima about a family on the edges of society where the father had decided the way they're going to make their living is to fake traffic accidents and then accuse the drivers of running over Mom in order to extort money from the drivers. However, Mom becomes unable to do this, and Dad makes the son, the titular "Boy", fake the accidents. The story is mostly told from the perspective of the son, and is based on a true story.