Prowler
Directed by Joseph LoseyWhen a patrol car responds to a reported peeping tom in a quiet Los Angeles suburb, Officer Webb Garwood meets Susan Gilvray, a restless, unhappily married woman whose husband is a late-night radio personality. Garwood is handsome, calculating, and acutely aware of everything he does not have – money, status, a way out of the uniform. Susan is lonely in a particular American way, stranded in a comfortable house with a man she has stopped loving. The call should have been routine. For Garwood, it becomes an opening.
Garwood engineers a return visit and then another, and the two begin an affair conducted in the negative space of her husband's broadcast schedule. When he proposes marriage and Susan hesitates, Garwood's patience gives way to something colder. A late-night shooting – ruled justifiable homicide, Garwood the hero cop who killed an intruder – removes the obstacle. He and Susan marry quickly, and the plan that was never quite spoken aloud appears to have succeeded. But Susan is pregnant, the timeline is wrong, and the couple retreats to an abandoned Nevada ghost town to wait out the birth in hiding, far from questions neither of them wants answered.
The Prowler belongs to that strain of postwar American noir in which the crime is not passion but premeditation, and the true subject is class resentment wearing the costume of desire. Losey frames the American dream itself as the motive – Garwood does not want Susan so much as he wants what Susan represents. The film presses steadily toward a reckoning that has the quality of inevitability rather than surprise, and it earns that quality honestly.
