Review of The Prowler

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.