The Prowler

Never before available on home video, Joseph Losey's The Prowler (1951) is a film noir classic featuring a working-class Double Indemnity plot fueled by envy, greed, and brutal opportunism. Van Heflin is superb as Webb Garwood, an arrogant cop whose affair with Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes)—the young wife of an absent older radio deejay—leads to a plan (after Garwood gets a peek at the man's will) to kill the husband in a meticulously staged “accident.” Scripted by blacklisted writer Dalton Trumbo (behind the “front” name of Hugo Butler) and produced by Sam Spiegel (using the credit S.P. Eagle), The Prowler is an intelligent, understated, handsome production featuring rich social commentary interwoven with the crime melodrama. Heflin excels in the role of the born charmer who shifts approaches as the situation calls for it and yet sells the sincerity of every guise he takes on, whether it's the aggressive macho man or the wounded romantic. The result is a startlingly mature drama about the pathology of greed, and a cutting portrait of 1950s culture and the assumed entitlement of the American dream. Superbly mastered from a newly restored print, DVD extras include an excellent audio commentary by film noir scholar Eddie Muller, a retrospective featurette, and an interview with French film director Bertrand Tavernier. Highly recommended. (S. Axmaker)