New Picture

The Prowler (Horizon; United Artists) approaches its climax with a situation that moviegoers hardly expect from Hollywood: a bridegroom learns on his wedding night that his wife is pregnant. French and Italian moviemakers, who use the facts of life as story staples, might work such a situation for drama or comedy. Having ventured to deal with it at all, Hollywood typically uses it as a clever gimmick in a superior melodrama.

A California cop (Van Heflin), checking a routine complaint about a house prowler, takes a shine to the complainant (Evelyn Keyes), a nervously bored housewife whose well-to-do and aging husband works as an all-night disc jockey. Loyal but lonely, she resists Heflin as long as she can, finally succumbs to him in an affair carried on against the background of her husband's chirrupy voice plugging commercials on the radio.

But Policeman Heflin, a tinhorn opportunist, wants her husband's money, too. He engineers a way to kill him in the line of duty by mistaking him for a prowler. Then he succeeds in convincing a court, the dead man's brother and even the remorseful widow that the murder was a tragic accident. She consents to marry him. But when Bridegroom Heflin puts together the brother's knowledge that the dead man was sterile and his bride's happy announcement that she expects a child, he quickly realizes that the sum is more than scandalous; it is enough to break his alibi that he had never met the woman before her husband's death.

Unlike most melodramas, The Prowler makes its principals recognizable human beings who, despite some obvious dialogue and a few unnecessary twists of a sensational plot, stay consistently within their well-drawn characterizations. The cop is a sharp little study in malcontent, cupidity and vulgar taste; his fondest ambition is to own a motel so he can earn money even while he sleeps. Yet he is also a man in love and nagged by some decent urges. Actor Heflin fills the character to the last nuance. The woman, ably played by Actress Keyes, is a pathetic, guilt-ridden dupe who craves nothing more than a normal home life.

The picture is also a decided step forward for Director Joseph Losey, who made the raggedly effective The Lawless. Here, with a feeling for understatement as well as wallop, he shows more assured control of a naturalistic style that makes his best scenes look as if they had been caught by a candid camera.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.