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The Prowler

The Prowler is a 1951 American film noir directed by Joseph Losey, in which a Los Angeles patrolman who answers a prowler call at a lonely housewife's home seduces her, murders her husband for his life insurance money, and sees his material ambitions collapse. It stars Van Heflin as patrolman Webb Garwood and Evelyn Keyes as Susan Gilvray, was produced by Sam Spiegel (credited as "S. P. Eagle") for Eagle Productions and Horizon Pictures, and was distributed by United Artists on 25 May 1951.¹

Key fact	Detail
Release	25 May 1951, United Artists; black and white, 91–92 minutes, 10 reels¹
Director / producer	Joseph Losey; produced by Sam Spiegel as "S. P. Eagle" with John Huston's Horizon Pictures¹
Screenplay	Credited to Hugo Butler; co-written uncredited by blacklisted Dalton Trumbo, whose credit the Writers Guild restored in 2000¹
Story origin	Original story "The Cost of Living" by Robert Thoeren and Hans Wilhelm, bought for $50,000 by Spiegel and Huston¹
Leads	Van Heflin (Webb Garwood), Evelyn Keyes (Susan Gilvray), John Maxwell (Bud Crocker)¹
Censorship	PCA head Joseph I. Breen required the adulterous affair and pregnancy to be kept to a minimum; contemporary reviews noted the adulterous woman goes unpunished¹
Restoration	Restored in 2007 by the Film Noir Foundation and the UCLA Film & Television Archive, the first film rescued by that partnership²

Spoilers

Plot

One evening, policemen Bud Crocker and Webb Garwood answer a prowler report at 1918 Orchid, Los Angeles. The homeowner, Susan Gilvray, is alone because her wealthy, middle-aged husband John is a late-night radio disc jockey. The older, friendly Bud advises her to be careful; later that night his younger partner Webb returns for a check-up call. Susan recognizes Webb as a once-famous Indiana high school basketball player, and he recounts his bad breaks since high school and his dream of owning a motel court.³

On further visits Webb jimmies a desk drawer for cigarettes, finds John's will, and learns that Susan's marriage has left her without what she really wanted, a baby. He seduces her and an affair begins, conducted in secret and timed around the husband's radio show and its sign-off, "I'll be seeing you, Susan."³^•⁴ By literally becoming the prowler, Webb sets in motion a chain of events that ends in the husband's shooting death, with Susan as his unwitting and unwilling accomplice; the husband appears on screen only at the moment he is killed.⁴

With the insurance money Webb realizes his ambition of owning a Las Vegas motel, but each step in the relationship brings a decline in living standards, from the opulent Spanish-style villa to a travelers' pit-stop. When Susan is found to be four months pregnant after only a few weeks of "officially" knowing Webb, and her late husband was known to be sterile, the couple flees to a desert ghost town to give birth in secret, hoping to fudge the child's birth date. There the dead man's radio voice follows them.⁴

Production and the blacklist

The project began when independent producer Sam Spiegel, then working under the name "S. P. Eagle," and his partner John Huston contracted the original screen story from writers Robert Thoeren and Hans Wilhelm. Spiegel, admiring Losey's The Boy with Green Hair and The Lawless, hired him as an up-and-coming director available cheaply. Losey found the existing screenplay "pretty awful" and handed it to Dalton Trumbo and Hugo Butler to improve.⁴

Trumbo's hidden hand. Trumbo, one of the Hollywood Ten, had been jailed in 1947 for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, so his contribution was concealed under Butler's name; Butler was himself soon blacklisted but managed to take this screen credit first.⁴^•¹ While making the film, Losey had to meet his already-blacklisted screenwriter under cover of darkness so as not to jeopardize himself.⁵ Spiegel and Losey nonetheless thumbed their noses at the blacklist by having Trumbo supply the disembodied voice of Susan's radio-announcer husband, for which the writer received $35.⁴ The Writers Guild of America officially restored Trumbo's credit on the film in 2000.¹

Censorship. Memos in the MPAA/PCA Collection at the AMPAS Library show that PCA head Joseph I. Breen objected to the film's low moral tone and insisted that details of the adulterous affair and the pregnancy be kept to a minimum. Breen accepted the script on 10 April 1950, and assistant director Robert Aldrich consulted him throughout production on scenes where the moral tone was in question, including acceptable visible signs of the pregnancy. A 4 June 1951 Los Angeles Times item and other contemporary reviews warned of the adulterous material and noted the censorship problem that the woman who commits adultery is not punished in the end.¹

Production began in early April 1950 at Motion Picture Center Studios, with portions shot on location in Calico Mines, California, a ghost town near Barstow. Keyes was borrowed from Columbia for the production.¹

Style and themes

Losey called the film "a film about false values," about "the means justifying the end and the end justifying the means," in which "'100,000 bucks, a Cadillac, and a blonde' were the sine qua non of American life at that time and it didn't matter how you got them."⁴ Where his previous films, The Boy with Green Hair (1948) and The Lawless (1950), were social critiques of mob psychology, The Prowler is a focused character study of one man whose psychological cracks are his own; the other patrolman in the story is portrayed as a gentle old coot.⁴

An inverted noir. Instead of a femme fatale, the film delivers an homme fatale: the Encyclopedia of Film Noir calls it one of the most relentlessly tough and uncompromising of all classical film noirs, creating in Webb Garwood an impressive portrait of that type.⁶ Comparisons to Double Indemnity (1944) have often been made, and Losey acknowledged the debt, but whereas Billy Wilder's film indicts both lovers, Losey's follows Webb on a path of self-destruction that drags others down with him.⁴ Richard Brody, the film critic of The New Yorker, notes that the opening shot, of a woman in a towel seen through a bathroom window from the Peeping Tom's point of view, announces the furious desire and desperate envy on which the plot runs, and that the real threat to Susan is not the stalker but the officer who answers her call.⁷

Losey assembled a first-rate crew, including cinematographer Arthur Miller, a multi-Oscar winner who was eager to show his skills adapted to the faster pace of lower-budgeted productions, art director Boris Leven, and the animation pioneer John Hubley, hired uncredited because he was blacklisted, to craft the sets. Hubley devised a wry visual comment for the wedding scene: as Webb and Susan marry in the foreground, a funeral takes place at an adjacent church.⁴^•⁸

Reception and afterlife

The film was largely dismissed by critics upon release, though hipster critics praised its ambience; Manny Farber picked it as one of the best films of 1951, calling it "a tabloid melodrama of sex and avarice in suburbia" and "sociologically sharp."²^•⁹ In France it became a cult hit: Cahiers du Cinéma dedicated an entire issue to Losey's films and singled out The Prowler as the moment he became a true auteur.⁴ It is now regarded as one of Losey's best American films.²

Losey's exit. Not long after the film's release, Losey left Hollywood for Europe, beyond the reach of the Red Scare panic; the FBI had compiled a file on him as thick as 750 pages. In Europe he used The Prowler as his calling card, screening it for potential backers, and it won the enthusiasm of Olive Dodds, head of artists' contracts at England's Rank Studios, who called it "extraordinary, brilliant."⁴ Losey never worked in the United States again.⁷

Restoration. Because the film was produced independently, no studio preserved it and it was considered an orphaned work; after only one deteriorating print remained, the Film Noir Foundation and the UCLA Film & Television Archive partnered to restore it in 2007, the first triumph of what became a long-running partnership.¹⁰^•² A restored 35mm print screened at the Noir City Hollywood Film Festival on 16 April 2022, and the film circulates on streaming platforms including Prime Video and Tubi.¹^•¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Film noir and neo-noir films › Released 1940 to 1975

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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