The Big Night

Joseph Losey's The Big Night is a coming of age tale in the guise of a noir, a thiller that's ostensibly about revenge but is actually about a teen's desperate struggle for sexual and emotional maturity. George (John Drew Barrymore) is a weak young guy, a loser who's always getting kicked around, who seems so much younger and more innocent than his age. In the film's opening scene, he's beaten up by a group of guys who taunt him, pushing him towards a girl they're hanging around with, telling her to kiss him, but she just pushes him away, dismissing him as too immature. All of this happens, much to George's humiliation, beneath the watchful eye of his stern, tough father (Preston Foster), who looks on but doesn't intervene or say a word. It's obvious that the weakling George feels overshadowed by his father, which has helped to keep him immature. The boyish George soon shakes off this beating and bounds into his father's bar, fresh from a haircut, rubbing his smooth cheeks and enthusing that the barber said he needed a shave.

He's eager to be a man, but he still acts like a boy and he's still treated like one by everyone. His father throws him a birthday party, bringing out a cake and singing to him. But George can't avoid the look of disapproval in his father's eyes when he fails to blow out all the candles on his birthday cake, as though that one candle left flickering was a sign of his unmasculine weakness. Losey then makes sure that, throughout the subsequent scenes, the cake is often highlighted in the corner of the frame, that candle still burning in the foreground, a reminder of that small failure. George's journey into manhood will commence when he sees his father get beaten up by the sportswriter Al Judge (Howard St. John); George's father obediently kneels down for a caning, which Judge delivers with savagery while George and the other bar patrons watch. George is horrified to see his father, his icon of masculinity, lowered like this, and when his father seems willing to simply shrug the incident off and forget it, George grabs a pistol and runs off into the night, determined to track down Judge and get his revenge.

Despite this strong premise, the film is surprisingly aimless, with George stumbling into the dysfunctional family drama of the alcoholic journalism professor Lloyd Cooper (Philip Bourneuf), Cooper's girlfriend Julie (Dorothy Comingore), and her younger sister Marion (Joan Lorring). This trio provides a sounding board for George's tortured musings about his immaturity and his confusion about his father, who'd he always looked up to but who had disappointed him so profoundly. Barrymore delivers a sweaty, histrionic performance that's over-the-top but appropriate to this whiny teenager. Still, his endless agonizing quickly becomes tiresome, and the middle section of the film gets bogged down with an abortive quasi-romance between George and the personality-free Marion.


The film's momentum recovers during George's long-delayed confrontation with Judge, in which the sportswriter reveals that things are much more complicated than George had guessed. It's a tense and powerful meeting, and Losey enhances the suspense with striking compositions in which the two men seem to be stalking around one another, their shadows elongated on the walls. The film's noirish atmosphere, courtesy of cinematographer Hal Mohr, is effective in general, rendering the spartan sets with a shadowy, low-budget minimalism that often makes it seem that George is wandering through a wasteland whenever he ventures outside. The interiors are appropriately dingy, too, as George passes through the city's seedy dive bars, nightclubs and fighting rings in his quest for revenge.

One curious moment stands out as a great scene with little to do with George's quest. At a nightclub, he hears a black singer who really impresses him, and after the show he approaches her at the curb outside the club, telling her how much he loved her singing and how beautiful he thinks she is. But then he adds, "even if you're...," trailing off before he makes the unspoken reference to her race. But she gets it anyway, of course, and it's heartbreaking the way Losey highlights her face in closeup, transitioning from her warm smile of pleasure at being complimented, to a wounded expression that's also a look of recognition. It's obvious that she's heard this before, maybe many times before, but she's still hurt to be hearing it again, and from such a seemingly earnest kid no less. It's a moment of sociopolitical engagement that has Losey's fingerprints all over it: it's entirely unnecessary to the narrative, except perhaps as more evidence of George's immaturity, but it stands out as one of the film's best scenes.

Its uneven performances and sometimes slack narrative aside, The Big Night is a raw and interesting noir that's notable for its emphasis on adolescent angst and sexual undertones. It was one three thrillers Losey made in 1951, his last year in Hollywood before his exile, and though it's a flawed film, not as interesting as The Prowler or his remake of Fritz Lang's M, there's enough substance here to make it worth seeing anyway.

M (1951)

Fritz Lang's M is such an enduring classic that it's hard to imagine a Hollywood remake of it, but that's exactly what director Joseph Losey did, twenty years after Lang's original film about the hunt for a child killer. Losey's remake of M, made under the aegis of the original film's producer Seymour Nebenzal, is extremely faithful to its source, following more or less the same script and at times even recreating scenes virtually shot for shot. It would be easy to dismiss the film as an inferior copy of a classic, and many have: the remake was a flop at release and doesn't have much of a reputation even now. But, though it unquestionably does not match the power of the Lang film, it's still a compelling noir in its own right, transplanting Lang's richly ambiguous social parable to 1950s Hollywood at the height of Red hysteria, which is clearly a prominent subtext here.

For Lang, the film was an anti-death-penalty treatise, a somber and timely warning of the dangers of widespread fear and paranoia, and, of course, a plea to watch out for one's children. For Losey, it's a psychosexual thriller and a parable for the McCarthyite anti-Communism that would soon drive the director out of the United States for the remainder of his career. At one point, in a scene that also appears in Lang's film, two witnesses are arguing over whether a kid's dress was red or blue. Losey adds a key detail: the witness who insists the dress was blue angrily asks the other, "what are you, a Communist?" That loaded question, which was already being casually tossed around at the least pretext in the US of this era, hangs over the film, with Losey subtly reinterpreting Lang's persecution parable, replacing 1930s Germany with 1950s Hollywood to suggest a link between the rise of the Nazi party and the rise of McCarthy. The change in context resonates throughout the early scenes, as random innocent people are persecuted in the streets by a public worked up into hysteria by the child killings.

Losey also subtly changes the film's meaning by making the motive for the child murders implicitly sexual; the film is loaded with sexually charged symbols in a way that Lang's original wasn't. The opening credits show the killer (David Wayne), seen only from behind, approaching little girls, luring one with a string toy that he suggestively pulls and teases with his hands, the framing often hiding the toy altogether so that it's not clear what he's doing, just that he's walking up to a little girl with his hands pumping around at his hips. Another shot shows him turning on a water fountain for a girl, who bends over to drink, her head obscured by the mysterious stranger standing in front of her. Already, Losey, dodging the censors, is suggesting a transgressive sexual component to the murders, a creepy subtext that distances Wayne's killer from the more famous portrayal by Peter Lorre.


Indeed, Wayne plays killer Martin Harrow with a bland-faced intensity and mommy-fixated sexual dysfunction that prefigures Anthony Perkins' Norman Bates in Hitchcock's Psycho more than it looks back to Lorre. Most chilling of all is the scene of the killer sitting in the dark, his face shrouded in shadow, tightly grasping the dangling cord of the lamp hanging above him, wrapping it around his fist, breathing heavily and pulling his hand further and further up the cord. It's such an obviously sexual scene that one wonders how Losey got away with it, especially when the killer "climaxes" by finally pulling the cord and putting out the light. (That the cord is later revealed to be a shoelace taken from the shoes he collects as fetish objects from his victims only confirms the sexual metaphor.) This is immediately followed by a scene where he goes over to his desk, still panting breathlessly, and begins molding a clay sculpture of a child, wrapping a cord around its neck and squeezing to pop its head off, while Losey prominently highlights the photograph of a matronly older women behind the sculpture, a mise en scène detail that suggests the killer is a sexually frustrated mama's boy.

Such scenes proliferate throughout Losey's remake, suggesting that the killer instinctively makes a connection between masturbation and strangulation; at one point, he finds a wounded bird and picks it up between his fists, its head popping out between his fingers as he squeezes it, before letting it go and sobbing with guilt. His final confessional speech is significantly different from Lorre's version of the scene, too, as he talks about a childhood dominated by his mother's tyrannical insistence that all men are evil and need to be punished — a speech comically punctuated by his aside that she's "a good woman."

In this way, Losey makes the material his own even while largely sticking to the template of the original film. He can't match the overwhelming formal beauty of Lang's film, but he has his own minimalist, low-budget aesthetic that gives his take on this material a rough, shot-on-the-streets realism very different from the shadowy expressionism of Lang's M. Losey shot a lot of footage on the streets of Los Angeles, and staged the climactic search for the killer in the instantly recognizable Bradbury Building, an iconic location for many movies, its angular staircases and multiple levels used well in the scenes of the city's criminal underworld tracking Harrow. Losey's austere aesthetic — only occasionally broken by diversions like the Hitchcockian cut from a mother worrying at home to a screaming, cackling clown — puts the emphasis on Wayne's increasingly unhinged performance and the slightly comic efforts of the police and criminals to catch him. Losey dared to remake a classic, and though the remake is not on the same level as Lang's masterpiece, it should be remembered as a noir classic in its own right, with its substantial differences from its source marking it as a worthy extension of Lang's themes.

The Lawless

Joseph Losey's second film, The Lawless, is an inelegant liberal polemic about racism in a small town divided between a middle class white community and a poor, ramshackle neighborhood of Mexican-American fruit pickers who work on the local farms. Tensions are high between the young white kids and the Latinos, and they explode at a dance in the Mexican neighborhood when a few white guys crash the party — they hate the Mexicans but aren't above hitting on their women, joking that "those tomato-pickers have some pretty tomatoes." In the ensuing riot, the young Mexican Paul (Lalo Rios), scared of what will happen to him, goes on the run, stealing a car and, through a series of increasingly unlikely mishaps, making himself look more and more guilty, like a guy on a crime spree.

It's an obvious message movie about the eagerness of white America to railroad a poor young immigrant who they're only too willing to believe is an incarnation of malice and violence. Tied up in this drama is the newspaperman Larry Wilder (Macdonald Carey, coming off as a budget Jimmy Stewart), who had once been a crusader for controversial causes and big stories, but had now abandoned that for the quiet small town life he thought he wanted. He struggles with his conscience, trying to stay out of it, as he watches the racist passions of his town inflamed by unscrupulous reporters, thugs and bullies, and hatemongers. The film's script (by Daniel Mainwaring, adapting his own novel) is on-the-nose and obvious, hammering its points in with a complete lack of subtlety. The performances are also, for the most part, flat and amateurish, contributing to the sense of a clunky drama that's got its heart in the right place but falters in the execution. Only Gail Russell really shines as the young Mexican journalist Sunny Garcia, who serves as the sweet, wide-eyed, sensual voice of conscience gently nudging the jaded Wilder back towards engagement and activism.

Still, it's an effective polemic, and at times also a genuinely interesting movie. Losey forgoes music for long stretches, letting much of the film play out in ascetic silence, a sure sign of a low budget, but he uses this spartan aesthetic very effectively. The scene where the fugitive Paul is tracked to a riverside farm by the police is stunning and tense, as the increasingly frenzied Paul stumbles and runs, growing desperate, while lines of deputies advance steadily in pursuit. The terrain is rocky, covered in gravel, and the soundtrack contains only the clinking sounds of footsteps kicking the pebbles around. The camera tracks across the open field, taking in the bleak, wasted landscape of rocks and dirt as the men with shotguns spread out on their search. Losey's compositions are simple but striking, like an unbalanced closeup of Paul, his face shunted to the bottom of the frame beneath a rock ledge, while the focus is wracked from his terrified face in the foreground to the pursuers closing in on him and then back again.

Later, after his capture, as Wilder goes to see if he can convince the police to let Paul's parents see the boy, Losey remains with the parents, waiting on a bench. Everything remains silent, and Losey's camera simply sits still and watches, until Paul's father, without exaggeration or melodrama, lowers his head into his hands, overcome by the fear and emotion of this moment. When Wilder comes out and says that they can see Paul, Losey's camera remains out in the hall, watching from a distance, through the frame of a doorway, as Paul embraces his parents, leaving some respectful space for this intimate moment. This scene is followed by a confrontation between Wilder and Sunny, as he says he's bowing out and she accepts it, saying she understands while her face subtly conveys her disappointment. As he walks away down the staircase, Losey shoots from behind Sunny, watching him from the railing above, until he disappears from view; the angle of the shot places the two figures briefly side by side even though they're separated by the stairs, moving apart. The quiet and simplicity of these shots only makes them more affecting, unshowy but powerfully staged.


In other scenes — incidental moments, really — Losey is charmingly attuned to the low-key sensual pleasures of small town life, the things that make places like this so appealing when they're not self-destructing in orgies of racist violence. In one scene, Wilder and Sunny walk down an empty suburban street at night, and pass an old man burning autumn leaves by the curb. They stop briefly to watch, with Wilder cheerfully inhaling the smell and relishing it, then stroll on, seriously discussing the loss of Wilder's journalistic drive. But as they walk and talk, the fire lingers in the background, glimpsed in a reflection in the windows of the shops along the street, its smoke drifting into the frame over the heads of the two journalists.

There's also a surprising sensuality to a shot of Paul walking into his backyard, the camera following him, looking out past the clothesline to the freight train running past on the nearby tracks, then following him back to the crude shower hidden behind some scrap wooden boards by the house. Losey then cuts to a silhouette of a young man seen through the frosted glass of his shower, while a woman offscreen tells him to fill the ice bucket. It's a pointedly ironic cut, juxtaposing the poverty of the Mexican neighborhood, where what modern conveniences they have are jerry-rigged, against the wealth and luxury of the white neighborhood, which might otherwise have been taken for granted. The house in the white neighborhood is utterly ordinary, the kind of basic suburban home that might appear in countless other Hollywood movies without anyone thinking twice; Losey's class conscious juxtaposition of this everyday luxury against the poverty of those on the other side of town is a radical gesture for its time, as is the choice to tell such a racially charged story in the first place.

These racial themes explode most wildly in the scene where Paul supposedly assaults a young white girl, but in fact simply startles her by his mere presence — and presumably his race — causing her to turn around and start to run so blindly that she slams her head off a wooden beam. It's a darkly comical and jarring slapstick bit, delivering a sad joke about race and sex, and about the unsettling potency of stories about dark-skinned men assaulting white women. At the film's tense climax, all these prejudices finally erupt into exactly the lynch mob that seemed to have been simmering into formation all along. The destructive finale is then tempered by, refreshingly, just a hint of hope, a suggestion that the willingness to speak out against injustice is the first step on what's sure to be a long and difficult process of change. As an early effort from Losey, The Lawless is rough and sometimes clumsy (as in a fight scene where everyone is very obviously not landing any punches) and most of its cast is undistinguished. It wears its B-movie production values on its sleeve, alongside its bleeding-heart politics, but it's an interesting little film that already suggets the director's political interests and his keen photographic eye.

The Boy With Green Hair

The Boy With Green Hair is a moving, unique fable that deals with the aftermath of World War II through the perspective of a young boy whose life had been irrevocably altered by the war. Peter (Dean Stockwell) was orphaned by the war, although nobody bothered to tell him; he was passed from one relative to another, each of them eventually having some reason why he could no longer stay with them, all of them perpetuating the illusion that someday his parents would return from Europe and he'd be reunited with them. Finally, he goes to stay with Gramp (Pat O'Brien), not his real grandfather but some older relation or friend of the family, one more place for Peter to live, for however long. With Gramp, Peter finally starts to settle down, to realize that he might have a semi-permanent place to stay and be happy: Gramp is a perfect companion for a little boy, a former entertainer who's always cheerful and always has far-fetched, fanciful stories to tell. But the war's grim reality still haunts the boy, and when he finds out that his parents are actually dead, that he's a war orphan just like the poor children that his school class has been helping with donations and fliers, it shakes him and changes him in a strange way.

He wakes up one morning and his hair has turned green. The film then becomes a parable dealing with the effect of war on children, as Peter faces ridicule at school and fear from adults, who wonder if the effect is contagious and might spread to their own children. Peter has been marked out as different, because subconsciously he wants to be noticed, he wants people to know that he's different, that he's a war orphan, someone marked in a very profound way by the war. At one point, he imagines that he is haunted by other war orphans — obviously projections of his own mind — who tell him that it's good to be noticed, that it's good to have people paying attention to him. Because, of course, so many of these tragically affected boys and girls are not noticed, their plight forgotten. Peter cannot be ignored in this way, and though he's initially horrified by the green hair, he soon comes to think of it as a sign with great meaning, a visible reminder of the horrible effects of war.

This was the first film for director Joseph Losey, an unlikely but also somehow appropriate start to his career. This bright, blunt children's movie is unique in that it focuses so intensely on the perspective and inner life of a child, privileging his reactions and his thoughts about his own experiences. The adults in the film, even the well-meaning Gramp and a kind teacher (Barbara Hale), try to understand but can't fully grasp what this boy is struggling with, and eventually even Gramp, who tries to put a good spin on the new hair color at first, gives in to the community's pressure and encourages the boy to shave his head. This is a great betrayal, a failure to recognize how much this symbol means to Peter, how much it means for him to be able to embrace his difference and use it to spread his anti-war message. The head-shaving scene is staged with the townspeople anxiously looking on, and the mood is tense and melancholy, with each lock of green hair that falls from Peter's head increasing the somber mood in the observers, who seem deeply ashamed of what they've done by the time Peter's scalp has been shorn to a shiny bald cleanness.


The film's message is bluntly delivered but nonetheless affecting, perhaps because the war was still so fresh when Losey made this in 1948. In one scene, Gramp and Peter reflexively flinch when they hear a plane go rattling by overhead. Gramp reassures the boy by saying that it's just a mail plane that must have a heavy load, but he doesn't seem so sure, and his words hide the fear, rational or not, that the plane's cargo is actually a bomb. In another extraordinary scene, Peter, before his hair turns green, goes to the grocery store and overhears two women talking about the war and their fears that there will be more wars to come. As is often the case in this film, the adults are filmed from the shoulders down, so that Peter, below their level, can't see their faces. It's a good way to convey the child's eye perspective of a boy scurrying about, unnoticed, while the adults converse, unmindful of the effect their words are having on Peter. It's as though they don't even know he's there, but their terror about nuclear war and more young people being sent off to die is affecting him deeply, especially when they explicitly reference him, expressing their fear that his generation will also grow up to be sent off to war. Peter, startled by this grim speculation about his future, drops the milk bottle in terror, but the adults don't realize what has happened, and they only laugh affectionately at his clumsiness.

This adult obliviousness is a big part of the film. Peter, in his youthful naïveté, wants to break through the adults' seeming certainty that war is inevitable, to convince them that there's no reason to go to war and kill more young people and their parents. He's the logical one, the one who reacts to the horror and losses of war with the common-sense proclamation that there shouldn't be any more wars, but he's met with head-patting condescension and blank stares when he delivers this message. He can't understand: why does nobody else seem to agree with him that war could or should be stopped?

The film's polemics provide a hint of what was to come for Losey, who would never flinch from politically engaged cinema, a fact that would send him into exile following the McCarthyite purges of Hollywood. But The Boy With Green Hair was different, both from Losey's later work and from virtually everything else in Hollywood, because it was so focused on these issues as they pertain to children. Because of that focus, it can approach complex, emotionally fraught issues with the simplicity and directness of a child. The film's aesthetics mirror that simplicity, cutting away the excess to emphasize Stockwell's naïve performance in tight closeups. Stockwell delivers a very charming performance, capturing the extreme shifts in mood that the confused Peter goes through; in a more unguarded moment, he makes funny faces in the mirror, but more often he's overcome with wide-eyed fear. As a children's parable about war, loss, and hope, The Boy With Green Hair is a memorable and moving work that uses its surreal central conceit to explore some surprisingly weighty emotional subtexts.

Films I Love #54: Mr. Klein (Joseph Losey, 1976)

Joseph Losey's Mr. Klein, made in France during the director's long post-blacklist exile from the US, is a chilling (and chilly) parable about identity, fascism, exploitation and oppression. Set during World War II in occupied France, the film centers around the titular Robert Klein (Alain Delon), an art dealer who exploits the situation in his country by buying cheap paintings from fleeing Jews, who are mostly looking to get just enough money to escape the increasingly restrictive Nazi regulations. Klein is indifferent to those he exploits, caring only about his own luxurious life, until one day he receives a Jewish newspaper addressed to him. He realizes, soon enough, that there is another Robert Klein in Paris, a Jew disguising himself as a collaborationist Frenchman, and he becomes obsessed with ferreting out this other Klein, this mirror image alter-ego. This, in turn, attracts the attention of the Vichy police, who become suspicious of this Klein as well.

Losey's mise en scène is methodical and austere, evincing a cold distance that suits the abstract story of a man losing himself in a doppelganger he never quite meets. The multiple shots of Klein standing alone in a tightly wrapped overcoat and hat, isolated even in crowd shots, deliberately echo the hyper-cool image of Delon from his iconic role in Le samouraï. He wanders around, earnestly staring with his cold blue eyes, encountering various mysterious figures who fail to aid him in his search — with an impressive supporting cast populated with the likes of Jeanne Moreau, Juliet Berto, Francine Bergé, Michael Lonsdale and Rivette muse Hermine Karagheuz. The film's most stunning scene, however, is its first, a seeming non sequitur in which a doctor examines a naked female patient, clinically reciting various attributes that suggest an "inferior race." The cold horror and bureaucratic precision of this scene sets the tone for the remainder of the film, immediately establishing Klein's milieu as one in which human beings are treated like animals, their teeth examined like racehorses — an association recalled in the next scene, when Klein's pampered mistress examines her own teeth while applying lipstick. Losey's unforgettable film is concerned with this matter-of-fact horror, and with the oblivious mindset that ignores such things, insisting that everything is normal, everything is OK, even in the face of tremendous evidence to the contrary.

The Prowler

Joseph Losey's noir The Prowler opens with a shot that immediately tweaks the audience by placing the viewer in the voyeuristic position of a creeping pervert. The first shot of the film gazes through a woman's bathroom window as, inside, she dries herself off after a bath, putting on a robe. Her body remains teasingly just out of view beneath the window's frame, which functions like a cinematic frame within the frame, and Losey's camera, tracking slowly in to get a closer look, heightens the voyeuristic sensation of leering in. Then, the woman seems to notice the camera, looking out the window with concern and horror as she realizes that someone is watching her, and she quickly pulls the blinds shut, cutting off the view. It's not the camera she actually sees, of course, but a peeping tom whose perspective the camera had been taking. The titles roll then, and in less than a minute Losey has effectively signaled that, like all films about voyeurism, this too will be about the cinema, about those people out in the audience, watching eagerly from their hidden spots in the dark. The black humor of this set-up is made even more apparent when, after the credits, a pair of cops visit the frightened woman, and one insinuates that maybe she shouldn't have tempted the prowler by offering herself up for view like that, framing herself in the movie screen of the open window. After all, for a culture growing increasingly acclimated to the cinematic experience, peeping in on such living movies is second nature (and the woman herself is a failed actress, used to being watched).

But the real voyeur of the film turns out to be not the unseen prowler outside the window but one of the cops, Webb Garwood (Van Heflin), who is immediately attracted to the prowler's victim Susan (Evelyn Keyes) and begins aggressively courting her at night, after his shift is over. When Webb and his partner Bud (John Maxwell) first come to investigate the incident, Budd questions Susan while Webb remains outside, prowling through the bushes, looking into the house. The compositions suggest that he too is a voyeur, peeking through the windows, watching Susan from afar, and when he appears at the bathroom window, he startles Susan every bit as much as the original prowler had. Webb represents law and order in his crisp police uniform, but really he's an outsider, discontented with his life, feeling like he's watching other people's happiness and success while he's had nothing but "bad breaks."

Susan, it turns out, is from his hometown in Indiana, but while that fact draws the pair closer together, it also awakens a reserve of bad memories for Webb. He'd been a star athlete in high school, but his college scholarship had ended early after a quarrel with a coach, and his youthful dreams evaporated at that time. Unlike Bud, a model of contentment who loves being a cop, loves his wife, and loves his mind-numbingly dull rock-collecting hobby, Webb wants something more and can only dwell on all the missed opportunities and bad luck he's had in his life. Above all, he had the bad luck to be born poor and to grow up poor; while Susan grew up rich and married an even richer man, Webb was from the wrong side of the tracks and had to watch his poor father squander countless opportunities for improvement, settling for stable middle class mediocrity instead. Webb is an outsider in the spacious mansion Susan shares with her radio announcer husband; he looks in and sees the life he wants, the comfort and security he wants, maybe even the woman he wants.


The film's script, by Hugo Butler and an uncredited Dalton Trumbo, isn't exactly a model of sedate realism: it winds through multiple twists and turns and dramatic shifts in mood. The story is melodramatic and blustery, and its central romance goes through so many unconvincing reversals that it's hard to know what to think of the weepy, malleable Susan. A late revelation suggests that maybe this tonal confusion, too, is purposeful, since even Webb doesn't seem to know what he wants. Heflin, with his big, expressive eyes and perpetual hangdog look, is perfectly suited to Webb's chronic dissatisfaction and the sinister undercurrents that occasionally come bubbling up from deep within him, but Keyes delivers a much less satisfying performance that leaps wildly from one emotion to another. The film's shifts in locale and tone, however, are handled adroitly by Losey, whose direction of this lurid, intense material locates the proper balance of absurdity and tension.

Losey has an especially keen grasp of background diegetic sound, which he uses to comment on the images and foreground events of a scene. Susan spends her nights listening to her radio announcer husband, who ends every broadcast with the cheery sign-off, "I'll be seeing you, Susan." This turns out to be very convenient once Webb starts spending his nights with Susan while her husband is at work, since as Webb says, they always know where he is. The two budding lovers canoodle on the couch, lounging around together, laughing and kissing, and all the while the husband's voice murmurs away in the background, his words offering sly commentary on what goes on at his own house while he's at work, unaware. He describes the pleasure he feels when relaxing on an evening at home, being served a snack by his wife, and as he sets the scene, Susan lays out a tray of sandwiches for Webb, who leans back and lights a cigarette, the first tendrils of smoke wafting up into the foreground of the frame just as the announcer describes smoking his own first cigarette of the evening. Webb seems spooked, joking that he feels like the guy is watching them.

The announcer likes to babble on about his wife on the air, describing her cooking and their domestic contentment, and his happy words overlay the images of Susan and Webb having their fun in the time before that final sign-off indicates that the husband is on his way home. Later, the announcer's voice, played back on a record, has an even more sinister meaning, his affectionate sign-off now interrupted with the violent scratch of the turntable's needle being yanked out of the grooves.


It's obvious enough where all this is heading, but the inevitable homicide merely marks the film's halfway point, and the script has plenty of surprises left. Though the shadowy noir cinematography (by Arthur C. Miller) is effective and eerie in the Los Angeles scenes, the film really becomes interesting when the action shifts away from these typical noir locales. At one point, Losey signals the couple's decision to retreat into the desert with a fade to black, which is immediately followed with a gorgeous, haunting image of a car, isolated in the middle of a blank wasteland, kicking up dust in its trail as it cuts through the sand. The rocky western ghost town where the couple holes up is far from the usual noir haunt, and instead of shadows and grimy interiors (like Webb's cheap apartment from earlier in the film, with a silhouette target forebodingly hung on the wall) there's a grim, barren wasteland where nobody visits, "not even the coyotes" that are nevertheless heard howling plaintively at the film's climax. The way that Losey frames scenes of domestic idyll and hopefulness against this rocky and desolate setting suggests just how short-lived the film's cheerier moments are destined to be.

The Prowler is a rich and idiosyncratic noir that explores the archetypal noir themes — greed, violence, ambition — in some unusual ways. The actual prowler of the opening, it turns out, is incidental to the story, a plot device and a red herring. The real prowler, the real creep, is the outsider who so desperately wants what he can only look at from afar, the guy who waits in the darkness, watching and desiring but separated from what he sees by seemingly insurmountable barriers. Webb's voyeurism is a matter of class, primarily; he looks at the wealth and success of others and he wants what they have. Perhaps Losey is suggesting that the cinema works similarly by presenting visions of glamor and beauty to dazzle audiences, who watch from the darkness, voyeurs who desire the purity and wonder of what's up on the screen, the window through which they peer.