Talk about crossover appeal. Roland West’s The Bat (1926), now on Blu-ray from Undercrank Productions, speaks not only to silent film buffs and horror fans but also foreshadows the modern superhero genre. The titular villain runs around in a bat costume, and Bob Kane reported that it was among his inspirations to create Batman in the comics. The influence is clear now that we can see this film in a lovely presentation that’s not a fuzzy public-domain eyesore.
By a curious and wonderful coincidence, The Bat was issued on disc around the same time that a different company released a beautiful Blu-ray of West’s talkie remake of the same story, which he retitled The Bat Whispers (1930). West’s talkie goes wild with the camera, emphasizing speed and camera moves in defiance of the idea that talkies had to remain stable for the microphone. PopMatters reviewed The Bat Whispers here.
The Bat, in its original silent film version, makes a fascinating comparison because West had been equally stylish without moving the camera all over the place. While Arthur Edeson’s camera is mostly stable, West uses bold design choices with eye-catching angles to stage the action. With the help of master designer William Cameron Menzies, much of The Bat presents Expressionist and Art Deco ideas, like using “negative space” to block off parts of the screen for elements like diagonal staircases and geometric frames.
A good index of the difference between the silent film and the talkie version is that The Bat opens with two glowing lights in the darkness of the screen, and we gradually see that these are the eyes of a stylized artificial bat. Then, we see a fabulous model of a city with a fake bat flying around a skyscraper and a bell tower with a clock. The camera is static as it presents these eye-popping images. By contrast, The Bat Whispers opens on a model skyscraper with a clock, and then the camera takes a dramatic plunge down to the street as if we have become the diving bat.
Aside from visual choices, the two film versions often follow each other closely. The Bat opens with a scene in which millionaire Gideon Bell (Andre de Beranger) has his fabulous Favre Emeralds stolen at midnight under the noses of the police. The Bat nearly pulls him out of the window during this crime, and the same scene would be staged in The Bat Whispers.
The difference is that The Bat, in the manner of the best silent films, emphasizes wonderfully atmospheric Expressionist designs in its shots, such as the closeup of the glowering Bell, the jagged shadow he creates on the floor of the huge room, and the scene introduced with an abstract superimposed window that vanishes. The Bat Whispers eschewed some of those extravagant designs in favor of a dizzying sense of movement.
Both versions then move to a bank robbery, as witnessed overhead through the skylight. In the talkie, we see the Bat’s shadow waving balefully in the corner, while the silent film emphasizes the Bat in his costume peeking in. As in the previous scene of The Bat, the location is introduced by a fabulous establishing shot using models with a bat flying around them.
The main plot of The Bat takes place in an old dark house rented by a gun-toting older woman, Cornelia Van Gorder (Emily Fitzroy). Her scaredy-cat maid Lizzie, played by popular gangly comedienne Louise Fazenda, tosses a bear trap out the window in hopes of catching the Bat with it. Cornelia has rented the house, and various characters want her out of it. The array of interlopers engage in all kinds of jiggery-pokery as they appear, disappear, search for hidden rooms, and behave in confusing and suspicious manners. One gets himself shot on the stairs.
Supporting players include Jewel Carmen (Mrs. Roland West) as Cornelia’s niece, Jack Pickford (Mary Pickford’s little brother) as her troubled boyfriend, Tullio Carminati as the police detective, and Sojin Kamiyama as a Japanese butler made up to emphasize his already emphatic cheekbones and fitted with unfortunate false teeth. Generally known simply as Sojin, the Japanese actor was quite busy in the 1920s and played Charlie Chan in that character’s first feature film, Paul Leni’s lost silent film, The Chinese Parrot (1927).
One curious aspect of The Bat is that Cornelia and her niece are better detectives than the men. Continually knitting in the most fraught situations, Cornelia calmly deflates the males around her. In her case, “sticking to her knitting” signifies method and logic. Her blasé estrangement from the excitement puts everyone on edge. Even Lizzie, though she serves as comic relief, saves the day amid her shrieking slapstick. The male characters are either crooked, ineffective, or both.
The story of The Bat was greatly modified from Mary Roberts Rinehart’s bestselling novel The Circular Staircase (1908). The novel is a seminal work in the Had-I-But-Known school, in which a usually female narrator is an ordinary person who relates baffling and frightening shenanigans in a breathless style full of forebodings, such as “Had I but known what extraordinary terrors awaited me, I would never have opened that door.”
The Circular Staircase has a corpse, stolen money, and masqueraders, but nobody in the story is dressed as a bat. That element was added when Rinehart and Avery Hopgood adapted the novel into a 1920 play called The Bat. Its tremendous success defined a genre that thrived on Broadway and the movies during the ’20s and ’30s: The Old Dark House tales. These stories served up comedy and thrills by combining the modern craze for whodunits with a throwback to Gothic suspense. The genre’s popularity begat 1920s plays of Frankenstein and Dracula, both of which were filmed in 1931. The Bat, therefore, is not only a compelling silent film but also an important piece of stage and horror history.
Funded by a Kickstarter campaign, Undercrank’s Blu-ray is a 2K scan of the UCLA Film & Television Archive‘s 35mm restoration, and it looks clearer and more beautiful than modern viewers have ever had access to. Silent film accompanist, historian, and presenter Ben Model has composed a new score in organ tones.
The disc has two extras: a short profile of West’s career as a highly visual specialist in crime tales and a wacky slapstick short, Scott Pembroke’s A Fraternity Mixup (1926). Elements in the short include a dark and stormy night, people in their underwear, men in drag, and an escaped gorilla.