“MAY BE THE CREEPIEST OF CLASSIC NOIRS!
A tawdry tale of sexual power relations.”
– J. Hoberman, The Village Voice
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“NOT TO BE MISSED! A remarkable blend of shadowy Noir stylistics and sharp sociological realism... Remains startling for its sexual frankness but also for its openly skeptical attitude toward institutional authority.”
– Dave Kehr, The New York Times

“From the start of this Noir the forces of order are bursting the buttons of their uniforms. With his starkly shifting visual perspectives and chilly, hands-off com-positions, Losey sees through the pretenses of civility to the mediocrity, disappointment, venality, gullibility, duplicity, and boredom that pass for daily life. Heflin’s unctuous performance comes off as a model of cowardly villainy—and a portrait of the American dreamer caught in a plasticized nightmare.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

Click here to view critic Matt Zoller Seitz's video essay on The Prowler

“A GENDER-REVERSED DOUBLE INDEMNITY! Another rare Noir recently restored, but The Prowler is truly one apart... As a stylized, long take-heavy Noir by an expat career formalist, The Prowler is comparable to Kubrick's The Killing. Losey brings the same rigid, symbol-rich mise en scène and fluid camerawork as Losey's British collaborations with Harold Pinter, particularly The Servant (another masterpiece of interiors). ”
– Justin Stewart, The L Magazine
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"ONE OF THE BLEAKEST NOIRS EVER MADE! Van Heflin and Evelyn Keyes provide two sterling performances of American indolence and greed."
– R. Emmet Sweeney, MovieMorlocks.com
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“[This restoration] brings back Losey’s most successful
American picture in all its primal, glorious ooze.”
– L.A. Weekly

(1951) “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 d.j. hubby declaims on late night radio, Heflin suddenly has law-breaking on his mind. But after hubby has been eliminated in an “accident” and Heflin’s got the girl, the money, and now 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.”) Co-scripted uncredited by blacklisted Hollywood Ten member Dalton Trumbo, designed uncredited by (later blacklisted) John Hubley, shot by three-time Oscar winner Arthur Miller, and produced by Sam Spiegel (Lawrence of Arabia, etc.), 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. Preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Funding provided by the Film Noir Foundation and the Stanford Theater Foundation. Special thanks to Eddie Muller and David W. Packard. Approx. 92 minutes.

“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

“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