Stranger on the Prowl Blu-ray Review
Joseph Losey, neorealist?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, March 31, 2014
Joseph Losey was actually relatively sanguine about having been blacklisted just when his film directing career was set
to shoot into the stratosphere. Late in his life he expressed no regret, averring that had he not been blacklisted he no
doubt would have been a millionaire many times over, but one without a soul. Losey was a self made exile for the vast
bulk of his directing career, choosing to emigrate to Europe rather than face the hostile intrusions of the House Un-
American Activities Committee. Interestingly, his proto-neorealist film
Stranger on the Prowl (released in Italy as
Imbarco a mezzanotte) was not made during his long period in England, but instead during a relatively brief stint
in Italy, where Losey had gone to escape an impending HUAC subpoena. Losey actually returned to the United States
after this film was released, only to find out his career in his native land was completely dead.
Stranger on the
Prowl traffics in a lot of the same cinematic vocabulary of better known neorealists like Roberto Rossellini or Vittorio
De Sica, and Luchino Visconti. Like the best known works in this genre,
Stranger on the Prowl depicts the
travails of a poor vagrant stumbling through the ruins of post-World War II Italy, a landscape that in its destitute,
bombed out state seems to echo a similar "geography" of the focal character's psyche.
Stranger on the Prowl
also utilizes a trope that informed one of the best known neorealist films, De Sica's
The Bicycle Thieves, by
pairing an older man with a younger child. However, despite a surface similarity to many iconic neorealist outings,
Stranger on the Prowl never quite works up the emotional heft of some of its genre siblings. The film is notable
for having provided the inestimable Paul Muni with a very rare appearance during this era, and it's certainly never less
than entertaining, but
Stranger on the Prowl utilizes a few too many plot devices for its own good and ultimately
seems a bit too contrived to warrant the "realism" label in neorealism.
Underneath the credits, a scuffle of some sort breaks out, though it's not initially clear what's going on. Paul Muni's
character is credited only as "The Man" (some online sources list the characters as The Stranger With a Gun—more
about
that in a moment). The Man, it soon becomes apparent, had been attempting to stowaway on an outbound ship when
he
was caught by some of the crew. When thrust before the ship's Captain, The Man begs to be allowed to stay on the
journey, and that he will pay for the privilege. A bit of tense negotiating ensues, with a cost of 25,000 lira finally being
arrived at. The Man sets off to try to come up with that impossible sum before the boat leaves at midnight.
It turns out that The Man has one valuable asset—a gun (hence that other moniker for the character). As he wanders
through a still war torn Italian countryside, he attempts to find someone who will purchase the pistol for enough money
to
get him his passage on the outbound ship. The Man meets with failure virtually everywhere he goes, and Muni's large,
doleful eyes (which Losey and his cinematographers Henri Alekan and Antonio Fiore repeatedly isolate with lighting
effects)
seem to convey that The Man is used to this kind of disappointment in life.
Meanwhile we're introduced to an adorable young waif named Giacomo (Vittorio Manunta), a doe-eyed boy who plays
(sometimes a bit roughly) with his friends amid the rubble, but whose fondest dream is to attend the carnival that's in
town. Giacomo's mother (Luisa Rossi) is obviously an overworked and overstressed woman, one who does laundry for
a variety of clients but who is barely able to scrape together enough cash to feed her children, let alone buy them
tickets to a meaningless entertainment like a circus.
The final character in this story which ends up interweaving most of its threads together is Angela (Joan Lorring), a maid
in an actually pretty well to do environment, though her physical comfort can't disguise the fact that she feels isolated
and afraid. When The Man's continuing efforts to unload his pistol finally end in tragedy, a calamity that tangentially
involves Giacomo, both the elderly vagrant and the young boy band together to go on the lam, a decision which
ultimately brings them into contact with Angela, one of Giacomo's mother's clients.
Stranger on the Prowl is best when it details the sweetly affectionate bond that gorws between The Man and
Giacomo. We get a little of The Man's back story, something that at least helps to illuminate his character to Giacomo, if
not to provide any really salient answers as to what exactly has gone so wrong for The Man for so long. The film
however undercuts its authenticity with its reliance on a melodramatic plot device (the aforementioned crisis), as well as
a few too many convenient coincidences as things tumble along to the predictable denouement.
Losey captures a lot of what made neorealism such an exciting force during this era of film, and a lot of what helps
Stranger on the Prowl work—when it
does work—is its gritty locations. It's easier to believe in the plight
of these downtrodden people when you're confronted by their squalid living conditions, and the film also utilizes a lot of
native villagers in bit parts, something which further aids the verisimilitude. There's absolutely no denying that, despite
its faults,
Stranger on the Prowl offers a showcase both for Muni, who was almost inexplicably (and criminally)
underutilized at this stage of his life, as well as for little Manunta, certainly one of the most adorable tots to populate
early fifties' films.
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