Notes on 1951's The Prowler: An overlooked film noir numbering among the best

Saturday 3/14/26

I recently downloaded a high-definition copy of Joseph Losey's 1951 film, The Prowler, starring Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes, with a script by an in-disguise Daulton Trumbo on account of his Hollywood blacklisting, and have been returning repeatedly to it.

The Prowler is one of our best noirs, and to me it's a much better picture than 1944's Double Indemnity, with which it shares some plot points. The latter is often cited as the best noir of all, though it's a movie I find laughable. I just can't take it seriously.

I've never thought well of it. Everyone is miscast, nothing is believable. The movie inspires no buy-in from me. And the whole thing with Fred MacMurray saying "baby" again and again...it's risible.

I thought that when I first rented the film in high school, and I've thought it the twelve or fifteen times I've seen it since. I look at it as being to noir as The Exorcist is to horror--films that make me giggle in how unconvincing they are, with The Exorcist also managing to look like it was shot inside of an ashtray.

The Prowler is far psychologically richer than Double Indemnity, and everything about it resonates as creditable. It provides a space for that buy-in that I need personally.

In The Prowler, Van Heflin plays a cop who is called in with his partner (John Maxwell) to investigate a supposed prowler spotting by Keyes' character, a wife home alone at nights while her husband performs on his radio program. He's very serious about this program we learn, even studying recordings of his own show so that he can improve.

(Cheekily, Trumbo performs the radio voice of the husband, which we hear at key intervals throughout the film; this voice plays a similar role to that of water in It's a Wonderful Life, and there's this great sign-off line that takes on a different meaning depending upon the situation in the film.)

I say "supposed" prowler because there's never much of one in evidence. Not that we have reason to think the wife is lying. But the idea of what we think of as a prowler--with our preconceptions for and expectations of the term--is dropped quickly and thoroughly. And yet, the title, of course remains, and was chosen for a reason. That's because we're talking a different kind of prowler.

This is what you want when you make art: For a teacher to be able to ask the people in the class a given question--like, "Why was that chosen, do you think, as the title for this film?"--and for the students to have those wheels turning, and be shooting their hands up to answer. Many of those answers will be different. There's much to think about. Grapple with and explore.

Van Heflin's character gets stuck on the wife, and though she's outwardly recalcitrant, he senses that she's becoming stuck on him, too. They spend nights together at the nice house she shares with her husband--who's infertile, by the way--who spends his long hours at the old night office.

We don't get a great bead on the Van Heflin character at first. He strikes us as an ass in some ways. For instance, he's the kind of guy who reads a magazine called Muscle Power. And he's manipulative; he knows how to withhold feelings and touch so that this woman comes to him the way he wants her to.

For her part, she says, "I love you so much that I'm afraid of you," which seems like a twisted line, but I bet it's one that many people can relate to, for myriad reasons. A quintessential noir line, too.

It looks like their relationship is coming to its natural end and neither party is crushed by that. She thinks it's for the best, and we tend to think, I'd say, that he does, too. He's just a dick who has moved on to whomever will follow.

He doesn't have a family, talks about his glory days in high school as a football player back in Indiana, where she's also from. Bonding over the past--albeit a past that wasn't directly shared, but only geographically--is a key theme of The Prowler. It's what keeps the relationship going at various points. It's fuel.

Nostalgia is like that, which is why, as I've written, nostalgia is a death trap. Nostalgia in noir? That isn't gonna go well for someone or some people.

But then our guy commits murder, staging it as this act of self-defense and mistaken identity, because he knows the widow will come back to him. Eventually she does, and they settle into what seems to be a happy enough union. One dares to say, a healthy-ish union. They're close to each other, kind to each other, and he doesn't seem like this bad guy.

The problem is that she's pregnant, and the math of that pregnancy doesn't check out. That is, her now-dead husband couldn't have been the father, which means--or this is what the film asks us to believe--that the now ex-cop-turned-motel owner who shot her husband knew her prior to the events of that night, which they both lied about in court.

You could say, "Nah, I was banging someone else," but it's a workable enough plot point that we don't need a ton of selling on this idea, especially with those times being what they were.

Murder is obviously an act of evil, but the film has these different moral gradations. For a noir, there are a heap load of grays here rather than blacks and whites. You think about this movie and about people outside of this movie. As in, what gets us to the final tally of a person, if that's such a thing.

I resolutely believe it is. And here I'd say that the things Van Helfin's character does makes him what he ultimately is. But the movie shows how easy it is for us to be misled along the way and in the ways in which we may know someone. Environment is such a dominant force. The person who has what they want is able to tuck away those base qualities and impulses sometimes that would be put into practice otherwise.

I think you'll see people in this world who have limited means and influence, and if those people had a financial fortune and people they could control, then you'd see how bad those people can be and are.

That's what Christ (the historical man) meant when he said you've got an uphill battle on your hands getting into the kingdom of heaven if you're rich. It wasn't a money thing. It was an "I know how you are and how people work" thing. And a "rare is the person who is a good person no matter what" thing.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (also a historical man, as in, person who lived) understood this when he told Ernest Hemingway that the rich were very different from them. And Hemingway, being a dick, bully, humorless, and a simpleton, said, "Yeah, they got more money," completely missing the point, which a far wiser man like Fitzgerald understood--a guy who at times was a rich person, dollars-wise.

The relationship between the two cops is easily relatable. We've all had a version of whatever you want to call this association between the two men. The one thinks something the other doesn't--and we've all had romantic relationships like that as well--and that second person doesn't want to disabuse the first. Not necessarily because they care so much about their feelings, but they also don't want to hurt them. That ambivalent strain of "friendship," which is also what passes for the whole--or nearly--of friendship in this era.

The older cop buddy has what he thinks of as the American dream. While his partner couldn't stomach that life for himself, in part because he thinks it's a lie that requires buy-in--which in this case would be a form of gullibility and denial--from the partaker.

Andre de Toth's Pitfall (1948) explores its own iteration of this idea, and though it handles the materials much differently, ends up at a not dissimilar place. You have to wonder how these directors would feel and think now, given how they felt and thought then, when even a cynic could entertain that there may have been some legitimate conceptual-if-not-actual aspect of an American dream, instead of a perpetual American nightmare state save for those born into wealth and connection, or else those too stupid and uneducated--and who play the dominant role in keeping themselves that way and finding others/overlords to oblige them in this--to recognize, let alone do anything about, the truth that they're penned beasts posting and bleating from besides their slop bowls and shit buckets about how free they are. The whistle blows, and there they are, time card in hand to punch the clock of doom.

The Prowler is a significantly superior to Double Indemnity. I'd say it's one of the half dozen or so best noirs of all. You can watch The Prowler a bunch. Keep coming back. This isn't some one-and-done picture. I think you can watch it, too, at different points of its life and have it speak to you as though it had honed in right on that spot in your own timeline, as if designed to, with the same being true at a later date.

You want a version of this with art. The more that this is the case and the longer it can go on, the better the art.