The Prowler (1951)

Film: The Prowler (1951)

Stars: Van Heflin, Evelyn Keyes

Director: Joseph Losey

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 5/5 stars

Throughout the month of June we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

The concept of a "deep cut" is definitely one of my favorites when it comes to classic cinema.  With all of Golden Age Hollywood, but especially things like film noir where B-studios and Poverty Row would crank out movies, it's basically an infinity sign that you'll never actually see all of the movies, but the further you get away from the tried-and-true classics, the less likely it is you'll find an undiscovered gem that you didn't know existed.  So far this month, while I'd had some good movies come up, none were quite in the same league as Laura and Kiss Me Deadly, film noir giants.  But today we get to such a movie, a film I had never really heard of before adding it to our list of deep cuts, and I leave a changed man, absolutely in love with this twisted film noir, a gender-swapped Double Indemnity homage called The Prowler.

(Spoilers Ahead...though you should really see this one if you haven't) The movie starts with Webb Garwood (Heflin), a corrupt cop who is investigating a peeping tom at the home of Susan Gilvray (Keyes).  Webb takes a quick shine to Susan, and initially you'd be forgive for thinking that this is just a case of a married woman being enamored with a single, brooding man.  But as the film progresses, we come to learn that Webb isn't what he seems.  Beneath the veneer of respectability afforded him by his cop uniform is a nasty, greedy bastard, one who is intent on taking the insurance money afforded to Susan if her husband dies for himself.  He begins an affair with Susan, and then uses the pretense of the prowler to kill her husband in the line of duty, which Susan is aware is probably murder but can't say anything for fear of revealing her affair.  Things get crazy afterward when they wed, with a disproportionate amount of press following them, but there's a problem-Susan's pregnant, and since we know that her husband was infertile (as does his brother), it'll be clear that she got pregnant before the murder, and that she & Webb knew each other before (which she's stated wasn't the case under oath).  They run out to a ghost town, where they can have the baby in secret, but when there's complications, Webb hires a doctor, one he intends to kill...but Susan catches on and gives the baby to the doctor & tells him to flee.  Webb is on the run, but dies in the chase, Susan left behind, her baby safely out of reach.

The movie is grand, and even by film noir standards, is black as pitch.  The way that Heflin's character unfolds, you don't entirely know in the first 15 minutes or so that he's an actually rotten villain and not just a guy trying to score with a married woman.  But that's the impressive thing about Heflin's work here.  He uses our expectations about a police officer of this era to be noble, or at least obviously corrupt, to the story's advantage, showing just how rotten he is as the movie continues.  It's clever writing (Dalton Trumbo, writing under a pseudonym, penned this story), but it's aided by a masterful piece-of-work from Heflin, better here than even his Oscar-winning turn in Johnny Eager.

Also strong is Evelyn Keyes.  Keyes is best-known to modern audiences for her work in Gone with the Wind, playing Suellen O'Hara, Scarlett's bratty younger sister.  She never really took off as a leading woman despite a few opportunities in high-profile movies (including The Jolson Story and The Seven Year Itch), but this movie showed she has the goods to do it.  Rather than playing Susan as a damsel-in-distress or as a femme fatale that's in on the murders, she instead plays her as a lonely, incredibly horny housewife, someone who has wanted adventure & sex from a man (which her husband has not given her), but whose moral compass knows that Webb is wrong for her even though she can't help coming back for more.  Like Double Indemnity before it (which this is a spin on, with Heflin taking on the Barbara Stanwyck role and Keyes playing the part of Fred MacMurray), this movie is smoldering & sexually-charged on top of an ace thriller that keeps you guessing right up until the end.