Pete Roleum and His Cousins + The Prowler
Viewed from today's perspective, the cinema of Joseph Losey, who passed away forty years ago, has something elusive about it. Far from the stylistic quirks and preferred genres that characterize many works, Losey's seems eclectic and multifaceted, which may have unjustly condemned a portion of his significant filmography to obscurity. From the 1940s to the 1980s, he ventured into psychological drama, fantasy, comedy, crime thriller, and historical film, with precision in character study, emotional intensity, and a constantly renewed sense of direction. A friend of Bertolt Brecht as well as an English adoptee after being driven out of the United States by McCarthyism, Losey patiently and confidently forged his worldview through a gallery of disparate characters, often sharing the common experience of being hunted, stigmatized, or isolated.
Commissioned by the oil industry exhibition at the 1939 New York World's Fair, Pete Roleum and His Cousins features a drop of oil who, in response to the voice-over, demonstrates with the help of his cousins the usefulness of black gold in today's world.
Two policemen go to the house of a woman who has seen a prowler, but he is nowhere to be found when they arrive. The next day, one of the policemen returns to the house of the woman he has met and fallen in love with. When he discovers that his lover's husband has an insurance policy, he devises a scheme involving the figure of the supposed prowler.
Joseph Losey
Born in 1909 in Wisconsin, Joseph Losey began studying medicine at Harvard before turning to theater. The 1929 crisis sensitized him to social issues, and he emerged in the 1930s as a committed theater director. He traveled to the Soviet Union where he met Bertolt Brecht, with whom he would later collaborate. Upon returning to the United States, he started directing while also becoming involved with the Communist Party, which led to scrutiny by McCarthyist authorities. Forced into exile in the United Kingdom, he subsequently made all his films in Europe. In the 60s, he met Harold Pinter, who would script three major works in his filmography: The Servant, Accident, and The Go-Between, which won the Palme d'Or at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival.
