The Prowler (1951, Joseph Losey) (Patreon)

76/100

Second viewing, last seen at the Walter Reade in 2004. Is this the tawdriest noir ever made? Everything about it makes me want to jump into the shower, starting with Van Heflin's uniquely unsettling visage—the guy just looks vaguely rotten here, as if his pores leak endogenously produced battery acid. This makes Susan falling for Webb, in the conventional sense, a bit hard to swallow, especially since the film's utterly devoid of witty, flirtatious, Indemnity-style banter; watching her succumb is more like observing a case of Stockholm syndrome, and things just keep getting uglier from there. Indeed, The Prowler's chief irony is that, while there really is a prowler in the opening sequence, setting the plot in motion, we never learn who that person was or what he wanted. It's one of the two responding police officers who prowls his way into Susan's damaged heart and life, using his unearned authority to get through barriers that would otherwise have remained locked. The toughest scene to endure (hence the most thrilling) sees Webb persuade Susan that his killing her husband was a line-of-duty accident by confessing that he wanted to commit the murder, in order to be with her permanently, and might very well have done so had circumstances not made it needless; that we saw him painstakingly engineer this "accident" (as she correctly suspects) makes his practiced, genuinely convincing lie, rooted in false honesty and meretricious vulnerability, a real skin-crawler. Losey knows his way around shadows but unexpectedly shifts the action to dusty daylight toward the end, predicating Webb's comeuppance upon Susan's ability to finally see through his self-serving bullshit. I do wish the ending were less abrupt, though—it feels dictated by ancient MoMA patrons who head for the exit as soon as the plot's clearly been resolved. Funny to coincidentally revisit this not long after seeing Naruse's Scattered Clouds, as The Prowler blithely skips past that film's entire thorny dilemma (viz. the propriety, both private and public, of a widow keeping romantic company with the man who accidentally—well, "accidentally," in this case—killed her husband). It plays into the (legit) concern that Webb will be recognized if he goes for a doctor, but that's about it.