59 years after its initial run, Joseph Losey's ferociously perverse noir masterpiece The Prowler returns in a magnificent restored print, thanks to the UCLA Film & Television Archive and New York's Film Forum. Praised by the late Manny Farber as one of the best films of 1951, and the recipient of glowing admiration from David Thomson and pulp novelist James Ellroy, Losey's first triumph is a perfectly performed and a genuinely chilling account of seedy manipulation, both sexual and emotional.
Shot in 17 days for less than $700,000, Losey's film opens outside the bathroom window of Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) as she prepares for a shower. She locks eyes with the camera and screams: Someone is watching her! To her rescue come veteran officer Bud Crocker (John Maxwell) and sneering, pompous rookie Webb Garwood (the great Van Heflin) to investigate. The latter stands in for the supposed Peeping Tom in a short reenactment but soon enough takes on the role quite literally. Bored, childless and left alone by her nighttime-DJ husband, Susan can only stave off Garwood's unyielding advances for so long before his nostalgic talks and pie-in-the-sky dreams have her wriggling around his finger.
The film hits its maddeningly paranoid peak when Garwood stages the murder of Susan's husband to look like an on-duty shooting. Though Susan initially suspects Garwood's dark intentions, she is eventually wrangled by his passionate insistence that he is simply dedicated to his job; soon enough, they get married and buy a motel outside Las Vegas with the husband's life insurance. A model of psychological deceit, Heflin's Garwood seemingly has foreknowledge of every screw that must be tightened in order for him to get his way. Once his dreams are realized, however, chaos begins to set in, and the hand that held things in place begins to get sweaty palms, leading to a pair of eruptive concluding set-pieces in the Nevada desert.
Himself frustrated by the burdensome production of his previous feature, The Dividing Line, Losey received rare creative freedom with The Prowler, thanks mostly to legendary producer Sam Spiegel -- the man behind On the Waterfront and Lawrence of Arabia among other titans. But unlike Spiegel's other, better-known films, this one is a morally decrepit, masterfully produced post-war nightmare involving one woman's life in a constant police state and one man's obsession with playing God.
But then, the production itself was living in its own special sort of hell. The script, tightly wound and dialectically nuanced, was written by the great Dalton Trumbo while he was blacklisted; his front, Hugo Butler, would later share the same fate . (Robert Aldrich, Losey's assistant director, would go on to direct Kiss Me Deadly, the most paranoid of all film noirs.) The fear and hysteria of the blacklist era are reflected in The Prowler, but the film is, above all, a marvel of craftsmanship, precise in its movement and sense of place.
The Wisconsin-born Losey would make two more films in Hollywood before he was squeezed by HUAC and beat a path to London, where he continued to face discrimination as a supposed communist sympathizer. Eventually, the director would have a career resurgence in the 1960s, working with the likes of Harold Pinter, and the films from that later period -- The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between, etc. -- are the ones for which he's known today. But like the voice of Susan's husband -- supplied by Trumbo -- The Prowler and the era that produced it refuse to fade away.
Shot in 17 days for less than $700,000, Losey's film opens outside the bathroom window of Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) as she prepares for a shower. She locks eyes with the camera and screams: Someone is watching her! To her rescue come veteran officer Bud Crocker (John Maxwell) and sneering, pompous rookie Webb Garwood (the great Van Heflin) to investigate. The latter stands in for the supposed Peeping Tom in a short reenactment but soon enough takes on the role quite literally. Bored, childless and left alone by her nighttime-DJ husband, Susan can only stave off Garwood's unyielding advances for so long before his nostalgic talks and pie-in-the-sky dreams have her wriggling around his finger.
The film hits its maddeningly paranoid peak when Garwood stages the murder of Susan's husband to look like an on-duty shooting. Though Susan initially suspects Garwood's dark intentions, she is eventually wrangled by his passionate insistence that he is simply dedicated to his job; soon enough, they get married and buy a motel outside Las Vegas with the husband's life insurance. A model of psychological deceit, Heflin's Garwood seemingly has foreknowledge of every screw that must be tightened in order for him to get his way. Once his dreams are realized, however, chaos begins to set in, and the hand that held things in place begins to get sweaty palms, leading to a pair of eruptive concluding set-pieces in the Nevada desert.
Himself frustrated by the burdensome production of his previous feature, The Dividing Line, Losey received rare creative freedom with The Prowler, thanks mostly to legendary producer Sam Spiegel -- the man behind On the Waterfront and Lawrence of Arabia among other titans. But unlike Spiegel's other, better-known films, this one is a morally decrepit, masterfully produced post-war nightmare involving one woman's life in a constant police state and one man's obsession with playing God.
But then, the production itself was living in its own special sort of hell. The script, tightly wound and dialectically nuanced, was written by the great Dalton Trumbo while he was blacklisted; his front, Hugo Butler, would later share the same fate . (Robert Aldrich, Losey's assistant director, would go on to direct Kiss Me Deadly, the most paranoid of all film noirs.) The fear and hysteria of the blacklist era are reflected in The Prowler, but the film is, above all, a marvel of craftsmanship, precise in its movement and sense of place.
The Wisconsin-born Losey would make two more films in Hollywood before he was squeezed by HUAC and beat a path to London, where he continued to face discrimination as a supposed communist sympathizer. Eventually, the director would have a career resurgence in the 1960s, working with the likes of Harold Pinter, and the films from that later period -- The Servant, Accident, The Go-Between, etc. -- are the ones for which he's known today. But like the voice of Susan's husband -- supplied by Trumbo -- The Prowler and the era that produced it refuse to fade away.
