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The Prowler (1951), Joseph Losey’s long-unseen Noir masterwork, will run at Film Forum from Friday, March 19 through Thursday, March 25 (one week). Virtually unseen since the 1950s, this rediscovered gem, restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, has not been seen theatrically in decades and has never been on VHS or DVD. Showtimes daily are 1:10, 3:20, 5:30, 7:40 & 9:50.
“I’m not any worse than anyone else,” protests Van Heflin’s uniformed cop Webb Garwood (“as gabby and depraved as a Jim Thompson character” – Philippe Garnier). But when he and his partner take a prowler call and find neglected wife and failed actress Evelyn Keyes (Scarlett’s sister in Gone with the Wind and the then-Mrs. John Huston) alone in an echoing Spanish house, even as her DJ hubby declaims on late night radio, Heflin suddenly has law-breaking on his mind. But after her husband has been eliminated in an “accident” and Heflin’s got the girl, the money, and that motel he’s always dreamed about, she’s pregnant with... whose baby? (Censor Joseph Breen complained of the picture’s “extremely low moral tone, with emphasis on almost animal-like instincts and passion.”) The Prowler was shot fast — 17 days — with its finale in a Mojave Desert ghost town, where the dead man’s voice — on a forgotten tape — echoes eerily.
The third of five films Losey made in Hollywood before being blacklisted (and his personal favorite), The Prowler was co-scripted — uncredited — by blacklisted writer (and convicted member of the Hollywood Ten) Dalton Trumbo; designed uncredited by (later blacklisted) John Hubley; shot by three-time Oscar winner Arthur Miller (How Green Was My Valley, The Song of Bernadette); and produced by Sam Spiegel (The African Queen, Lawrence of Arabia).
This new 35mm restoration of The Prowler has been preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, with funding provided by the Film Noir Foundation and the Stanford Theater Foundation.
Author Eddie Muller, founder and president of the Film Noir Foundation, will introduce the 7:40 show on Friday, March 19
Press screenings (held at Film Forum):
Thursday, March 4 11:00 am
Wednesday, March 10 11:00 am
To RSVP, contact Jenny Jediny at (212) 966-0730 or email jenny@filmforum.org
“ONE OF THE BEST FILMS OF 1951. A tabloid melodrama of sex and avarice in suburbia, out of James M. Cain by Joe Losey, featuring almost perfect acting by Evelyn Keyes as a hot, dumb, average American babe who takes up with an amoral rookie. Sociologically sharp on stray and hitherto untouched items like motels, athletic nostalgia, the impact of nouveau riche furnishings on an ambitious ne’er-do-well, the potentially explosive boredom of the childless, uneducated, well-to-do housewife with too much time on her hands.”
– Manny Farber
“[This restoration] brings back Losey’s most successful American picture in all its primal, glorious ooze.”
– L.A. Weekly
“This hallucinatory film noir is still, for me, Joseph Losey's best film. A film with a vivid sense of entrapment as well as a cool, critical intelligence. Heflin, cast in the Losey line of male hysterics, gives his most impressive performance.”
– Dave Kehr
“Losey’s first deeply personal and unmistakable film, a bleak parable on the restless urge in postwar America to get ahead... the fusion of Film Noir with an adult intelligence. The first Losey film in which we feel a keynote of vision: the interaction of place and character, and the way in which the camera can move through space with the human figures.”
– David Thomson
92 min | 1951 | b&w
For more information, links and showtimes, visit www.filmforum.org
Film Forum is located at 209 W Houston Street, between 6th Avenue & Varick, in New York City.
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