It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

An Exercise In Nonsense

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

The film creates a perfect balance between action and depth of basic needs, in the midst of an infertile atmosphere.

This is a really good and sadly overlooked film noir. No happy endings are to be found here, just good performances and writing and a close to perfect example of the film noir genre.

Webb Garwood (Van Heflin), a dissatisfied LA police patrol officer, answers a call about a prowler with his partner, "Bud" Crocker (John Maxwell), a desert enthusiast who explores abandoned mining towns along the desert drive from LA to Las Vegas. Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) had been in the bathroom of her upscale home when she spotted a prowler peaking through the window. Heflin's Garwood sizes her up and returns later to put the make on her. She's married to local radio personality who's at least twice her age, and it doesn't take long for her to fall for Heflin. It's a hard decision to make between who's better, Heflin or Keyes. Heflin had the capacity to play the cowardly types up against the macho man's world of the postwar better than any actor ever. And Keyes excels in each scene along her route of discovery of Heflin's true nature. The entire affair between him and Susan is extremely sordid for 1951, but the director, Joseph Losey and the studio, Eagle, were camped far out on film noir's fringe.

The most unsettling thing about THE PROWLER is the way Van Heflin inhabits the role of a corrupt police officer who worms his way into the life of an innocent woman (Evelyn Keyes), a bored housewife trapped in a loveless marriage with a jealous older man.From the very first scene, we know that Heflin is going to set a trap for this woman and that eventually she'll succumb to his dubious charm merely to break the cycle of loneliness she's used to. The plot sustains interest up until the cliffhanger of an ending in which all hell breaks loose.But along the way, there are several glaring faults in the script. Keyes falls in love much too quickly, needing him at her side so desperately that he concocts an accidental shooting to get rid of her hubby. And from then on, her motivations for lying at the inquest are shaky, to say the least. Credibility begins to slip as we lurch toward a very effective ending which won't be revealed here.In the meantime, the performances are professional, with John Maxwell excellent as a loyal friend and Wheaton Chambers fine as a reluctant doctor. Joseph Losey gets all the suspense he can out of the script, but in the end the bleak low-key photography and sparse sets gives it the feel of a hurried programmer rather than an A-film.

I hope Van Heflin never comes to my door when I need a cop...he is pretty darned scary. Only actor who might be scarier in this role would be Robert Mitchum.Not to be mean, but Evelyn Keyes had some big feet; just happened to notice this twice. Other than that, she does a good job as a restless housewife, Susan, who falls hard the local cop who responds to her call about a prowler, after learning they share a hometown in common.Van Heflin makes a plan, causing Susan's husband to call the police for a prowler and sure enough, hubby comes out with a gun. In this way, he is able to create an "accidental" shooting scenario and later convinces Susan that is was in fact an accident. Hubby is dead and they marry.Oh these fifties movies are so inane in some ways; right after she tells her new husband, Heflin, that she is four months pregnant (not in those words, of course) meaning from before the wedding, while her former husband was still alive (shocking enough for a "Code" movie, letting us know they actually were having an affair)-they tuck into twin beds on their honeymoon. The pregnancy is a problem in more ways than one; her late husband was apparently infertile or impotent, and also, Susan had testified at the hearing that she had never met Heflin before. So they have to leave their shiny newly-purchased motel in Vegas, and head out to a ghost town Heflin's cop partner had told him about. There, they set up housekeeping in a rough kind of way, to try to have the baby in secret. But nothing works out, when you are hiding a bigger secret...Heflin's loquacious former partner shows up at the motel to say hello to his old friend and decides to drive out to the desert to try to find and surprise them. Meanwhile, Susan goes into a dangerous labor and Hef heads to nearest town for a doctor. He has to flash his badge, which he kept after quitting, to get the old doc to come out. But even the doctor has a link to the ex-cop and they have to worry about him, too.In his distress, Susan decides she no longer believes that her late hubby's death was an accident. Now she fears he will kill the doctor and anyone else who interferes with his plans.That's enough spoilers for any one review, without giving away the ending. If you get a chance to see this film, it keeps moving at a good clip, has a noir feeling about it, and holds the interest. Maybe it was considered a "B" or a programmer, not sure, but it is a pretty good flick.