The Prowler
With Van Heflin, Evelyn Keyes, John Maxwell.
US, 1951, 35mm, black & white, 91 min.
Print source: HFA
An unnerving concoction of film noir, romantic melodrama, the woman’s picture, and the Western, Joseph Losey’s underappreciated postwar masterwork The Prowler might have been just the shape-shifter needed to stir an apprenticing Aldrich’s developing talents. The future genre chameleon served as assistant director on the film, which details the perilous seduction of Evelyn Keyes’ dissatisfied Los Angeles housewife at the hands of a sociopathic cop (Van Heflin, oozing virile menace). Adultery, institutional corruption and murder flank the scandalous tale, but Losey keeps everything to a disarming cool, downplaying psychological irregularities with elliptical cuts and treating exaggerated genre clichés—such as the couple’s desperate getaway to a desert ghost town—with a straight face. The result is a film that crystallizes the contradictory tug between materialism and humility, anxiety and hope, and faith and distrust that defined the national consciousness in the early postwar years.
Part of film series
Screenings from this program
Four Star Playhouse: The Squeeze, The Witness and The Hard Way
The Southerner
