Joseph Losey’s The Prowler was written anonymously by blacklisted Communist Dalton Trumbo. The subversiveness of noir can be overstated, but Trumbo comes as close as any writer to indicting America’s status quo capitalist rat race within the genre’s limits. As in the more famous Night of the Hunter, villainy is punished only after the worst villains are unmasked as the upholders of patriarchal law and order—those upholders being, in the American way, entirely, bloodthirstily, self-interested.
The first scene of the film positions you with an anonymous prowler looking through the window at a partially undressed Susan (Evelyn Keyes), who’s alone in the house while her DJ husband broadcasts. But the intro is a feint; the movie isn’t really placing you with the criminal, nor is it implicating you in the pleasures of voyeurism a la Hitchcock.
Instead, The Prowler is about the way that the supposedly antisocial stranger outsider is a lot less dangerous than the forces arrayed to discipline him. The forces are called in by Susan in the form of dashing cop Webb Garwood (Van Heflin.) After he’s uselessly wandered around the house to reassure the distraught housewife, he leaves—only to return again and again, first under the pretext of checking on her safety, but soon with openly sexual intent.
Cops do sexually harass and assault victims. In this case, though, Susan, after some hesitation, reciprocates Webb’s interest. Soon he’s pressuring her to leave her husband—and then he’s pretending to be a prowler so he can lure the husband out of the house and shoot him “by accident,” Cops aren’t often prosecuted for shooting people, so he’s free, and can marry Susan after she lets him convince her the shooting was unintentional.
Like Sam in Born to Kill, the homme fatale here is motivated by a sense of entitlement; Webb’s a high school athlete who thinks working as a cop is beneath him; he’s better, he believes, than his older salt-of-the-earth partner Bud (John Maxwell) who boasts about never firing his gun. Unlike Sam, though, Webb’s not a psychopath who kills indiscriminately, and his dreams aren’t megalomaniacal. He just wants to use Susan’s life insurance payout to buy and run a Vegas motel. Susan isn’t really attracted to his dangerousness and ruthlessness, as in many a noir. Her husband’s infertile, jealous, and even threatening; Webb, a Hoosier like her, seems to offer a path to the standard family life she wants. He even claims he never wants to use a gun again… though that too is a lie.
You might think his relative stability would make Webb more likable. But Van Heflin plays him as an untrustworthy lecher and liar from the beginning. From his first meeting with Susan where he insinuates that she’s imagining the prowler, he manipulates her for his own sexual and financial gratification, tipping the viewer off with sideways glances, hidden smiles, and a general air of hucksterism. He’s a petty scumbag, but that doesn’t make him any less of a scumbag. As he says in his final moments of desperation, it just means he’s willing to lie and murder for $62,000 while others hold out for millions.
It also means that Webb embodies a kind of normality. He isn’t a carney outsider and flim-flam man like Stan in Nightmare Alley; he’s not a down-and-out drifter like John in The Postman Always Rings Twice. He’s a sports hero and a cop who wants to better himself by starting a small business. This is what American virtue looks like, in all its brutal and entitled viciousness. Susan, when she finally realizes what Webb is, recoils in disgust, both at him and at herself for admiring him. You’re supposed to recoil too.
In the last scene of the film, Webb tries to scramble to safety up a desert hill. The sand keeps sliding away under him; the cops below shout at him that he’ll never make it. It’s a pointed metaphor for the petit bourgeoise’s capitalist aspirations. Webb’s desperately reaching for a summit he’ll never reach as cops wait to shoot him in the back. You don’t really feel sorry for Webb though, in part because he’s a murderer—and in part because he’s a cop. In The Prowler the criminal’s never caught; there’s no prowler. Capitalism is just cops all the way down.