“In the eye abides the heart,” American composer Stephen Foster wrote so long ago, voicing a truism about human nature that was both passionate and cynical and still holds up a century and a half later. Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (1951), an early film for the maverick director but a late entry in the waning film noir canon of crime films, begins with two radio car cops responding to the complaint of a prowler on the grounds of a sprawling Hollywood home. Finding no evidence of an intruder, Officers Bud Crocker (John Maxwell) and Webb Garwood (Van Heflin) advise the distraught Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes, then freshly divorced from John Huston) to keep her shades drawn and depart, chuckling condescendingly. Yet Webb can’t get his mind off of the high-strung but drop-dead gorgeous Susan, whose beauty took hold of him the moment he saw her framed in her own bathroom window, vantage point of the alleged prowler. He returns later that evening to “check up” and learns this lonely younger wife of a successful middle-aged radio entertainer is from his Indiana hometown – albeit from the other, moneyed side of the tracks. Susan’s beauty and elegance make Webb hate his workaday life, exciting his desire for better things. Bumming a cigarette from the absent Mr. Gilvray’s desk, Webb catches sight of the man’s insurance policy, which sets him to thinking…

Almost any Joseph Losey movie could get by with the title The Damned, and the principals of The Prowler are among Losey’s most pathetic wretches. While Webb might be Van Heflin’s most unflattering hour (Webb’s only redeeming quality is that he looks good in uniform), Evelyn Keyes matches him note for note with a sustained performance of dewy vulnerability alternating with shrill resentment. To the audience’s horror, Susan actually falls for the resolutely unappealing Webb, seeing in him the reflection of her own thwarted ambitions as a dancer who didn’t have the talent to succeed. As they beguile one another with come-ons, bluffs and ultimatums, it’s difficult to say which one of these two is the scariest. Losey intended the film to be a cautionary tale of false values, a pitter pill to be shoved down the throat of postwar America as a prophylactic against the burning desire to possess at any cost. Catapulted headlong by ambition and musk into an imbroglio of infidelity, murder and high stakes profit, Webb and Susan fill a slot on the doomed lovers-on-the-run continuum somewhere between and Joseph H. Lewis’ Gun Crazy (1950) and Arthur Penn’s postmodern Bonnie and Clyde (1969). That Webb and Susan are pointed towards no Happily Ever After is evident early on, but it is fascinating watching them pack for the trip.

The original story and screenplay for Cost of Living by European ex-pats Robert Thoeren and Hans Wilhelm was passed to Joseph Losey by producer Sam Spiegel, impressed with Losey’s work on The Lawless (1950). Losey hated the script and had it altered by Dalton Trumbo (who had also written Gun Crazy). Losey and Hugo Butler reworked Trumbo’s pass into the shooting script, which came to be called The Prowler in postproduction. (Both Blacklisted at the time, neither Trumbo or Butler received onscreen credit but Trumbo’s voice can be heard in the film, over the radio.)  Given their common reputations for vaulting ego, the Spiegel-Losey union was an unlikely one that nonetheless worked because both men were, like Webb and Susan, desperate for a measure of success.  Although Spiegel attempted to exert his influence on the set, Losey threw him off of it, insisting on the autonomy that Spiegel ultimately allowed him.  Losey prepared for the production in his own way, by indulging his actors with a generous rehearsal period, and finished the entire film in 19 days.  Spiegel had the last laugh, though, withholding a third of Losey’s fee for three years.