Losey's personal favorite of his studio films offers a brilliant critique of the blind careerism of middle-class America. Van Heflin gives a revelatory performance as a corrupt police officer who is both predator and victim, the first in a long series of fractured, contradictory protagonists that recur throughout Losey's films. Co-written by uncredited blacklisted writers Hugo Butler and Dalton Trumbo (who, in an inside joke, speaks the role of the radio DJ), The Prowler's jaundiced view of structured family life is a quintessentially Loseyian depiction of human relationships as a perverse and sexually tainted game of power.