Batty ‘bout THE BAT (1930 movie)

THE BAT WHISPERS (1930)

Roland West tried his best to recapture lightning in a bottle with The Bat Whispers in 1930, and while the film has a lot going for it, it doesn’t have enough.

He remade The Bat almost scene for scene, shot for shot.  The miniature work is impressive and must have been mind-blowing to audiences of the day, and the film (or at least one of three versions of it) was shot in an early 65mm widescreen process.

So wot hoppen?

The Great Depression, for one thing.  Audiences didn’t give up on frivolity altogether, but it was a harder sell.  When people fear being kicked out on the streets, they don’t have a lot of sympathy for wealthy dowagers being stalked by masked maniacs.

Sound movies, for another.  There is an unreal, dream-like quality to most silent films, even the ones set in supposedly real settings.

The lack of dialog and typically color makes the films more unreal, and as a result they slide into the subconscious more easily.  (There is ample anecdotal evidence that during the silent era and up through the arrival of inexpensive color film in the 1950s, most people who regularly attended movies only dreamed in black and white!)

But contrary to popular misconception, the revolutionary breakthrough of sound was not in Al Jolson singing “Mammy!” but in Al Jolson ad libbing a short bridge between two songs in 1927’s The Jazz Singer.

There had been synchronized music / sound effects films before, and more than a few short subjects of popular singers, dialect comedians, and Shakespearian actors orating, but Jolson’s ad libs were the first time an audience saw a movie with somebody who talked like them.

And while realistic films didn’t become the sole genre for talkies, they sure proved a strong support, and more fanciful plots found in silent films gradually succumbed to more naturalistic story telling.

No not all, not every, but enough to put the dampers on a lot of once popular genres.

West believed enough in The Bat that he paid for the cinematography out of his own pocket.  Three versions of The Bat Whispers were filmed and edited simultaneously:  A regular screen ratio domestic release, a foreign release version, and the big 65mm roadshow.

All three were presumed lost until the mid-1980s when the 65mm and part of the foreign release were rediscovered and restored.

They’re impressive to look at, and in a few places fix problems in the earlier version (Banker Fleming doesn’t fake his death but pretends to be out of the country at the time of the crime), but they never seem to capture the delirious mood of the 1926 movie.

In both films The Bat is captured when he carelessly steps into a bear trap that Lizzie sets out early on to catch him.

In 1926 it’s just another arbitrary off the wall plot point in a movie so filled with arbitrary off the wall plot points that the sheer ridiculousness of a super-villain along the lines of The Bat being captured so stupidly just doesn’t sink in at all.

But when ya start talkin’, then the stupid really shows.

They do up the ante with The Bat in this one; he’s not merely a ruthless master criminal but he’s also genuinely deranged, waging a sadistic war on the world.  They use that to directly address the audience and warn them not to reveal The Bat’s identity to others, but this time the gag doesn’t work.

The camera work and miniatures are again impressive, but oddly don’t work as well as the clearly theatrical ones Menzies designed.  (They worked well enough for Bob Kane to swipe them for imagery in his Batman comics, but then Kane swiped from everybody and everything.) 

The Bat Whispers is just too much.  The Bat got everything right, The Bat Whispers comes oh, so close…but doesn’t.

© Buzz Dixon