6.9 | / 10 |
Users | 5.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
When Susan Gilvray reports a prowler outside her house police officer Webb Garwood investigates and sparks fly. If only her husband wasn't in the way.
Starring: Van Heflin, Evelyn Keyes, Dalton Trumbo, John Maxwell (IV)Film-Noir | 100% |
Crime | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-2
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.34:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: LPCM 2.0 Mono (48kHz, 16-bit)
BDInfo verified
English SDH
25GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (B, C untested)
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
One of the seemingly ineluctable tropes of film noir is the (often but not always blonde and sultry) femme fatale. The paradigmatic example is no doubt Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s iconic Double Indemnity. Stanwyck’s character Phyllis is a scheming, machinating “rhymes with witch” whose unhappy marriage comes to a rather calamitous close after she meets up with clueless insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). The Prowler, a strangely underappreciated noir from 1951 takes several elements from the basic setup of Double Indemnity but then turns them on their head. In this particular case the blond(ish) seducer is not in fact a wily female, but prevaricating cop Webb Garwood (Van Heflin), a guy who’s called to the home (or “hacienda” as the film terms it) of a panicked woman named Susan Gilvray (Evelyn Keyes) after she spies a titular creep gazing into her bedroom window one night. That (maybe, maybe not) serendipitous meeting sets off a cascading set of events where the married Susan finds herself becoming further and further ensnared by Webb’s allure and, ultimately, plans for the future, plans that obviously do not include Susan’s husband.
The Prowler is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of VCI with an MPEG-2 encoded 1080p transfer in 1.34:1. The elements utilized for this transfer were part of an evidently massive restoration process undertaken by the Film Noir Foundation and the UCLA Film and Television Archive. There is some noticeable fluctuation in clarity and sharpness, perhaps the result of cobbling together a useable master (contrast screenshot 2 with screenshot 16 for just one example). Grain structure is also slightly variable at times, but overall looks organic, though rather thick. Gray scale is impressively modulated and blacks look deep. VCI's continued use of MPEG-2 "technology" is debatable (I've been on the receiving end of some pretty emphatic emails from a VCI compressionist insisting MPEG-2 is "as good as" AVC and VC-1, a contention I'll leave for others to discuss.) What is at least as problematic as an outdated codec is this disc's rather anemic bitrates, which tend to hover in the low 20s a lot of the time (there are occasional but transitory forays into higher bitrates). Whether a newer compression regimen coupled with a healthier bitrate could have at least incrementally increased levels of detail here is another debatable issue, but at least bears mentioning. All of this said, The Prowler certainly enjoys a substantial uptick in detail over the DVD, and the restorative efforts and subsequent work have not deprived the film from looking like film. My one general concern here is that this looks to me to be a bit too dark quite a bit of the time. It's fine for a noir to exploit shadows and chiaroscuro lighting techniques (two things The Prowler does), but here on occasion even normally lit scenes can offer crushed blacks and murky to nonexistent shadow detail.
The Prowler features a rather robust sounding LPCM 2.0 mono soundtrack which capably supports the film's dialogue and enjoyable score by Lyn Murray. There's really nothing in the way of age related damage here, and fidelity remains convincing throughout the presentation.
The Prowler so smartly topples noir tropes while at the same time evoking a near perfect noir ambience that it's a little amazing this film hasn't generated more interest through the years. Trumbo paints two desperate characters swirling the drain of destitution together, and Losey paces things very smartly. The Prowler would make a fantastic double feature with Double Indemnity, for home theater enthusiasts interested in looking at two sides of the same noir coin. While some may continue to at least wonder at some of the encoding work VCI does on its Blu-ray releases, generally speaking technical merits are very good and the supplemental package is great. Recommended.
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