User Reviews

In "The Prowler", an adulterous affair born out of greed and betrayal leads inexorably to murder as a manipulative man pursues the wealth and status that he believes have only been denied to him in the past because of "lousy breaks". His cynicism is perfectly exemplified when he says, "so I'm no good, but I'm no worse than anyone else", and his ambition to own his own motel in Las Vegas is attractive because it offers him the chance to be able to earn money even when he's sleeping. This sordid tale contains numerous elements that are immediately recognisable as being similar to "Double Indemnity", "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and a number of home invasion movies but it's also brilliantly directed, extremely tense and full of interesting twists.

After a woman who lives in an affluent neighbourhood of Los Angeles reports the presence of a prowler on her property, a couple of cops call by to investigate. When the older, more experienced Bud Crocker (John Maxwell) interviews Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes), his partner, Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) checks around for any obvious evidence that might help to identify the intruder. Although no evidence is found, Susan seems reassured by the officers' prompt response and the advice that she's been given about how to avoid attracting peeping toms in future and the police officers leave. Shortly after, Webb returns, ostensibly to make a follow-up call and this proves to be the first of a series of nightly calls that he makes to Susan's house.

It transpires that Susan is a lonely, bored housewife who spends her evenings alone because her husband is a night-time radio D.J. She doesn't particularly like Webb at first but after they discover that they both came to California from Indiana and she remembers seeing him during his time as an accomplished basketball player, she warms to him and they embark on an affair.

Webb had been attracted to Susan because of her looks and her obvious wealth but one evening after seeing her significantly older husband's will, he becomes aware that she'll be the recipient of an enormous inheritance after his passing and so concocts a plan to kill John Gilvray (Sherry Hall). His plan works perfectly but Susan is immediately horrified because she believes that he's murdered her husband.

In the coroner's inquest that follows, Webb's account of the circumstances under which he killed his victim are believed by the jury and Susan also feels compelled to lie in support of his evidence because to do otherwise could expose the fact that they were having an affair and she might be suspected of being an accomplice. A verdict of accidental homicide follows and so does Webb's next plan to convince Susan that he's genuinely innocent of the crime.

A short time later, after Webb has brought Susan around to the belief that he's innocent and he's finally left the job that he despises, the couple get married and buy a motel in Las Vegas but just at the point where he thinks that all his scheming has finally paid off, Susan tells him that she's four months pregnant and the implications of this information becoming widely known sends them into hiding in a desert ghost town before a series of further twists follow.

One of the creepiest features of "The Prowler" is the way in which John Gilvray's voice always seems to be present during the couple's affair and is even heard after his death when they're hiding out in the desert. His regular way of signing off his broadcasts with the words "I'll be seeing you, Susan" is similarly disturbing and makes her betrayal seem even worse. The insinuation of voyeurism that Joseph Losey's direction emphasises at the very beginning of the movie and the way in which Webb is then shown framed by the bathroom window a little later, are both wonderfully executed and inherently sleazy.

Webb and Susan were both dissatisfied with their lives and were desperate for something better but their union didn't ultimately achieve what they'd hoped it would. Van Heflin is totally believable as Webb and Evelyn Keyes does a great job in giving out the mixed signals that are symptomatic of someone who's in constant turmoil because her desires and her sense of guilt are constantly in conflict with each other.

As an actor Van Heflin rarely got his due. He has a passive, even recessive quality that nonetheless lets viewers see clearly into the roilings of his characters' restive minds. In The Prowler, he plays a disgruntled cop -- a disgruntled human being, really, who blames the world for everything that fate and his own shortcomings in the mental-health department have brought him. Called to investigate a peeping tom by Evelyn Keyes (another edgy presence) -- her well-to-do husband works nights as a radio farm-show host -- Heflin falls for her. Obsessed (now we'd call him a stalker), he woos her despite her initial reluctance (now we'd call her a born victim). After they fall in love, Heflin dreams up a scheme in which a phantom "prowler" would be a good scapegoat if her husband should happen to get dead all of a sudden. Losey, in his early career, displayed a sensibility that grows ever more forlorn and hopeless as Heflin and the now-pregnant Keyes go on the lam, first to a motel he owns near Barstow then to a ghost-town called Calico. The Prowler draws on a number of emblematic "noir" themes yet plays them in a new key.

I hope Van Heflin never comes to my door when I need a cop...he is pretty darned scary. Only actor who might be scarier in this role would be Robert Mitchum.

Not to be mean, but Evelyn Keyes had some big feet; just happened to notice this twice. Other than that, she does a good job as a restless housewife, Susan, who falls hard the local cop who responds to her call about a prowler, after learning they share a hometown in common.

Van Heflin makes a plan, causing Susan's husband to call the police for a prowler and sure enough, hubby comes out with a gun. In this way, he is able to create an "accidental" shooting scenario and later convinces Susan that is was in fact an accident. Hubby is dead and they marry.

Oh these fifties movies are so inane in some ways; right after she tells her new husband, Heflin, that she is four months pregnant (not in those words, of course) meaning from before the wedding, while her former husband was still alive (shocking enough for a "Code" movie, letting us know they actually were having an affair)-they tuck into twin beds on their honeymoon. The pregnancy is a problem in more ways than one; her late husband was apparently infertile or impotent, and also, Susan had testified at the hearing that she had never met Heflin before. So they have to leave their shiny newly-purchased motel in Vegas, and head out to a ghost town Heflin's cop partner had told him about. There, they set up housekeeping in a rough kind of way, to try to have the baby in secret. But nothing works out, when you are hiding a bigger secret...Heflin's loquacious former partner shows up at the motel to say hello to his old friend and decides to drive out to the desert to try to find and surprise them. Meanwhile, Susan goes into a dangerous labor and Hef heads to nearest town for a doctor. He has to flash his badge, which he kept after quitting, to get the old doc to come out. But even the doctor has a link to the ex-cop and they have to worry about him, too.

In his distress, Susan decides she no longer believes that her late hubby's death was an accident. Now she fears he will kill the doctor and anyone else who interferes with his plans.

That's enough spoilers for any one review, without giving away the ending. If you get a chance to see this film, it keeps moving at a good clip, has a noir feeling about it, and holds the interest. Maybe it was considered a "B" or a programmer, not sure, but it is a pretty good flick.

Van Heflin plays Webb Garwood, a grumpy and unhappy cop who is called to investigate a suspected prowler at the home of Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes). Garwood is smitten with the young and attractive woman from the off, and sensing her marriage to a late night radio personality is far from happy, he sets about wooing her, obsessively. It's the start of a coupling that is going to travel down a particularly dark road.

The film opens quite brilliantly with a quick shift of tone, Susan Gilvary is pampering herself in her bathroom, we see her from the window, domestic contentedness. This shot is accompanied by jaunty and jolly music, but then in the blink of an eye, she spies something out the window (it's us you know), a scream, the music becomes troubled and she draws the blind. Welcome to Joseph Losey's creepy skin itcher, The Prowler.

Very much a two character piece, The Prowler flips the favoured femme fatale formula around to great effect. Here it's the male protagonist that is the seducer, a cop no less, the abuse of power hanging heavy over proceedings like, yes, some "prowler" lurking in your back garden. It's made clear to us very early on that Garwood is troubled, he's up to no good, with a snarl here and a shifty smirk there, we just know that poor Susan is under threat from a man meant to protect her. Yet in a perverse piece of writing, Garwood surely does love Susan, but the bile within and the skew whiff way he now views the world-and his place within it, has ultimately made him a most dangerous anti-hero. It's evident that the makers here are wryly observing, but without preaching about, the shady underbelly of the American dream, the social differences of the two characters a most intriguing aspect of the story. As is the shift from the affluent setting of the Gilvray home in the first half of the piece, to the finale played out amongst the ghost towns in the Mojave Desert. The desolation of the landscape has rarely been so apt in a noirish world.

Technically The Prowler boasts high quality. Losey's direction is tight and holds the viewer in a vice like grip, while the art direction from Boris Leven is superb, particularly in that first quarter as the bright Gilvray house is cloaked in sparse darkness. But it's with Heflin, and to a lesser extent, Keyes, that the film reaches its high points. Keyes' character frustrates immensely, her decision making annoys and her surrender to Garwood is at first hard to swallow. But this is a testament to the good work that Keyes does, that she can induce these feelings for the character is surely a job well done. Heflin, tho, is a different kettle of fish. A criminally undervalued actor in his generation, Heflin serves notice here that he could play a bad guy convincingly, almost terrifyingly so too. His shift from meek, almost puppy dog love yearner, to conniving bastard is handled adroitly and gives film noir one of its best homme fatales.

Back on release big hitting critics such as Manny Farber and Wallace Markfield unreservedly praised the film. While pulp writer supreme James Ellroy is quoted as saying it was one of his favourite films. So it's somewhat surprising that it took until late 2010 to receive a DVD release, that, much like the machinations of Webb Garwood, is very much a crime. Moody, bleak and corrosive in its telling, this is a must see for noir and Heflin purists. 9/10

There's been a slew of bad cops in film noir, but none quite like Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) in "The Prowler." He's the cop no woman ever wants to call when she needs help. You might say he's a prowler cop, or better still a glorified stalker.

But alone at midnight in her big hacienda, and frightened by a possible peeping tom, it's Susan Gilvray's (Evelyn Keyes) fate to call for the police. This is Garwood's Entry. Cocky, smug, indifferent, intimidating, womanizing, his looming presence and prowess accentuated in the dead-of-night shadows by his tight-fitting black uniform, he comes on more like a sneaky Nazi than a law enforcer.

It's obvious that Garwood is not Frank Chambers (John Garfield) in "The Postman Always Rings Twice," whose single motive, despite the plot twists in the end, is to win over the beautiful wife of a much older, doddering, roadside burger joint owner. No Garwood here almost instantly sizes up the whole situation in a few minutes. His master plan is for the possession of a wife, the defeat of her rich, radio celeb husband, who he immediately names a wimp to his rescuing knight, and to seize from him the means of financing his dream Las Vegas motor court.

And unlike Frank Chambers, too, he gets no help at all from the young attractive wife. Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) here is the precise opposite of Lana Turner's femme fatale in "Postman." She is genuine inside and out and incapable of plotting her way out of her marriage. To boot, she is most powerfully herself whenever she sees through and stands strong against Garwood's wiles, intents, and lies. In fact, mostly her relationship with him is underwritten by varying degrees of resistance. If she's a pushover, a dupe, or ingratiating at times, it's either because her character mode has been switched over to plot mode., or because she's up against a man who is well-practiced in the arts of romantic deception, and masculine manipulation.

Garwood is not only in stark contrast to Susan, but to his police partner, Bud Crocker (John Maxwell), his wife Grace, Susan's in-laws, and almost all the characters he encounters. They're generous-spirited and almost saintly by comparison. But, ironically, it is he who lives in the Hotel Angela. Here he has a large muscle-builder poster on his wall (he drinks milk rather than booze), and a dominant black shooting target with a bullet-riveted torso from his champion sharp-shooter days. In this room, he lazes about in self-absorption, toys with his plots, as he does with things like shavers and phone receivers—and Susan herself, whose defeats he celebrates by tossing spitballs into the light globe above his bed, reminiscent of his heroic basketball days.

In short, he's a snark despite his expansive front. He peeps in Susan's windows, he repeatedly alarms her with his police search lights, and he pops into her life on the merest whim. She is nothing more to him than a conquest and a medium to defeat her prestigious husband. The murder he accomplishes and the one he attempts are both too vile for words. And when Susan utterly exposes him, this self-pitying bore can only answer: "I'm no worse than anyone else." In the end, unlike Frank Chamber's (Garfield) "dust you are" lover's death in the presence of a forgiving priest, Garwood gets buried ignominiously in dust. Susan, unlike Cora Smith (Turner), who dies along with her unborn baby, in a car accident, emerges from a traumatic childbirth with a new baby girl companion, the baby that Garwood assumed would be his son. Ha!

Last 20 minutes of the film Van Heflin wears a raincoat for no discernible reason.

This is the kind of film noir that has its foot rooted in the 'B' tradition. What I mean is Losey and his writers (including blacklisted Dalton Trumbo) are keeping their aims low, and scoring high within their limitations. They're not working with big stars, or even through a big studio. Van Heflin, its main marquee star name, was known later for westerns like Shane and 3:10 to Yuma. And its story, while based on a novel, seems to ring a bit much from The Postman Always Rings Twice, albeit with some obvious differences (the wife in this case becomes attracted to the man after he imposes himself on her, but is still wary, even after the death of her husband by the lover's hands).

But in terms of what a 'film noir' might mean, in its characters and mood and setting, it rarely gets more 'noirish' than this. The themes presented, of characters (or just a character in Webb Garwood) in an existential tailspin to oblivion, and of the danger around sex and murder, not to mention one's place in a society, are made paramount by Losey. He'll take some of those given dark shadows on a street or especially outside of Susan's house at night, where the prowler of the title lurks. But it's at the scope of the characters, how Webb finds his way into this woman's life, for better or worse (actually, usually, worse), that makes it consistent and interesting.

Seeing the body language and how the actors Heflin and Evelyn Keyes act towards one another is one aspect of its success. In a thriller of the period, with infidelity and high drama and murder and greed, we need characters to connect to, even in the most unlikely of circumstances. We know from almost the start that Webb's intentions are rotten, that he wants to insinuate himself into Susan's life, and to be her's alone, since a) it's easy to push over an average though domineering middle-aged husband who can't give her kids, and b) there's thousands in the will if he gets bumped off 'accidentally' as it were.

And yet, somehow, I got wrapped up in what would happen to this guy Webb. His plan seems so diabolical, and he is a kind of male femme fatale in a way (or is that 'masculine fatale'?), but his every action leads towards a psychological mean. Susan is played by Keyes as a woman who is smart and aware, but, being really a small town girl from Indiana (also where Webb is from, small world, huh), she lets her emotions get the better of her. Keyes is believable because she's not at all twisted in her plans, though does decide after her husband's death, and knowing what was most likely the truth, to stick with Webb (also, third act twist, she's been pregnant four months, which adds another level of anxiety and suspense to their situation).

Sure, some of the things in the film don't quite hold up over time, like how Susan ends up giving birth in that ghost town. But its faults are few and far between. I loved seeing Helfin's desperation but also his charisma; he's like a second-rate (though still impressive) James Cagney, if only in the sake of this part, as he's deceitful and perhaps more than a little cruel, but alluring, which is just right for what is essentially a corrupt cop. Also admirable is Losey's use of symbolism and cinematic affectation. When we hear the sound of Susan's husband coming out of the radio, during his late-night broadcasts, it's the closest thing to a God in this little world were laws seem to be able to be pushed aside.

He also manages to pull off something visually that could be obvious, but works just right. In a nearly hypnotic moment, Webb tries in a last ditch effort to escape the law at the end, and tries to climb up a sandy hill. For every step that he takes he loses a bit more ground, and at the end, it's no use anyway. We know how this story will end, perhaps, from the start, as it was the given at the time (bad guy dies, good people, more or less anyway, live). But it's the presentation of the images, the stark landscape, the individual crushed by himself in the scope of its fatalistic outcome, that gives Losey the edge here.

The Prowler is a near-forgotten semi-classic of the B film-noir catalog, and is just about essential for anyone studying the form and characters... or just want an entertaining infidelity thriller. 9.5/10

***SPOILERS*** After being called to investigate a prowler by Susan Gilvray, Evelyn Keyes, L.A cop Webb Garwood, Van "Hef" Heflin, tries to hit on her knowing that she, a former showgirl,is all alone in the house at night with her crabby husband John, Sherry Hall, away spinning records on radio as L.A's premier night owl D.J. It isn't long after, about two hours, that Webb makes his move on Susan by again showing up at her home to check out things that he might have overlooked the first time that he and his partner Officer Bud Crocker, John Maxwel, were there.

You can see right away that Webb is a real piece of work in how he gets to work on Susan by forcing himself on her without the slightest fear of being reported to his superiors for his gross and unethical,for a law enforcement officer, conduct. What's even more surprising is that Susan after first rebuffing the brute falls madly in love with Webb for reasons known only to herself. You soon realize that what turned Webb onto to Susan, besides her good looks, is an insurance policy he found, while looking for matches, in her house on her husband John for $62,000.00 if he dies of anything other then natural causes!

Setting John up for the kill Webb fakes being a prowler that has John, who must have had the night off, run out in the night in his pajamas and and gun in hand to check things out. Hiding in the bushes Webb blows John away and also shoots himself in the left arm with John's, what looked like, cap pistol to make it all look like self defense! Now with Susan free and the big payday, the $62,000.00 in insurance money, at hand Webb marries her as well as quits the police force, with a disability pension, knowing that his and Susan's future is financially secure. That's until Webb finds out that Susan is four months pregnant, with his baby, just a week after the two were married!

***SPOILERS*** With the fact that Susan lied about not knowing Webb to the newspapers as well as under oath, at Webb's departmental trial, and that her late husband John was unable to have children if that fact were to come out Webb would find himself in deep you know what with both the L.A police and justice department! It's then that Webb concocts a plan for Susan to have their baby in secret and later, after it was given to an orphanage, adopt it. The only problem is that can the doctor who eventually delivers the child be trusted to keep his or her mouth shut!

Exciting final in the ghost town of Calico in the Mojave Desert as Webb's "fool proof" scheme completely unravels together with him as he's hunted and gunned down when he's desperately trying to climb a mountain. What Webb expected to find on the mountain's summit, it couldn't have been freedom, only he knows but he's in no position, by being dead, to tell anyone!

P.S By the way the voice of John Gilvary was that of black listed writer Dalton Trumbo who, under an assumed named, co-wrote the movie's screenplay.

Why did they shoot him dead at the end. It's almost like they just had no way of ending the film. They perhaps they thought it was a fitting end as some sort of justice. I thought it was just weird. It makes no sense at all. He'd done nothing wrong, they didn't say stop Piggies or anything. Totally random ending to an otherwise solid picture. The two leads had zero chemistry between them either. It was like we're supposed to believe they're in love somehow. Where was the passion she'd been missing in her marriage. What was the reason for her to ruin her perfectly comfortable marriage with this passionless bitter guy. The whole movie lacked that and it makes it all highly unbelievable. If she thought he was guilty of murder like she said as an outburst in the hearing, how come two minutes later she says she never knew him. All she had to do was tell the truth about things, but she didn't. He wasn't a straight up guy to begin with, all the signs were there i.e. He's a COP!!!!!!! And therefore not to be trusted by definition. He's also a total sleaze coming on to a married woman behind her husbands back. So ultimately the ending is payback for him being such a louse. They just to me, didn't set that whole scene up properly. Hence I say, "Weird Ending".