Batty ‘bout THE BAT (1920 stage play)

It’s the rare creative work with two legendary lost films associated with it, and rarer still the one where both lost films are rediscovered.

Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood’s murder mystery melodrama, The Bat, has been filmed three times (five, if you want to count subvariants, as we will see), turned into radio and TV dramas, and even today casts a long shadow can be seen in as varied forms as Knives Out and Scooby Doo, Where Are You?.

As mentioned elsewhere, I do a lot of prospecting down the rabbit hole.

Decades ago I saw the 1959 film version on TV.

Suffice it to say I was underwhelmed at the time.

I saw the 1926 silent film version on TCM a few years back, mostly curious about the film’s art design by the legendary designer / director William Cameron Menzies.

I was impressed with the look but not the story.

A short while ago, while looking up old pre-code mystery movies on YouTube, I found the 1930 widescreen version was available.

Well, color me curious.

And when I’m curious, I open a lot of doors and peer inside, not so much wondering what I’ll find as what I’ll ask.

Case in point:
What in the world did original audiences think they were seeing when they first saw The Bat?

THE ur-BAT

Mary Roberts Rinehart is called the American Agatha Christie but that’s unfair.

Christie is the British Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Rinehart beat her to print by well over a decade and her first mystery novel, The Circular Staircase, hit the best seller list on publication and stayed a perennial title on bookstore shelves for decades.

While Rinehart is most famous for her mysteries -- and they are her most enduring works -- she wrote a lot of popular fiction, novels and short stories, including several very funny ones about feisty older women refusing to fit into the role society tried to force on them.

She also wrote a lot of what might be called Jazz Age fiction, though truth be told not with the same impact and verisimilitude as Ben Hecht or Damon Runyon, much less F. Scott Fitzgerald.

But her mysteries remain satisfying, even when she uses tropes that have since turned into cliches (her novel The Door was the first the finger the butler as the killer).

The Circular Staircase isn’t the first novel of its type (i.e., a woman -- alone or with younger family -- stuck in a remote, mysterious house with spooky goings on until All Is Revealed in the end to be a villain’s evil machinations), but it sure defined that sub-genre and cemented Rhinehart’s reputation to the form.

While filmed in the early silent era, that version of The Circular Staircase is lost, but it also turned into a nasty legal battle over who controlled the remake and stage adaptation rights.

Rinehart -- no slouch as a novelist savvy to the publishing business -- figured out an end run to the rights issue and, with Broadway playwright Avery Hopwood as her co-writer, renamed the characters, added a more colorful villain, and called the final effort The Bat.

THE BAT (1920 stage play)

A smash in its Broadway debut, The Bat ran more than two years and spawned no less than six touring companies that took it around the country.

A copy of the play may be found in the University of Pittsburgh’s digital archives, and before going further into the play itself, this script -- apparently specially typed up for the stage manager and lighting crew -- is fascinating in and of itself. It goes into lengthy and excruciatingly detailed set / prop / costume / lighting / sound effects descriptions with every on stage move and position of each character carefully noted.

The actors’ script probably lacked this attention to detail, but the dialog and characters are there and they help us visualize what early audiences saw while watching The Bat.

The plot, while convoluted and frentic, can be followed with careful reading.

Cornelia Van Gorder, a spinster, rents the Fleming mansion for the summer for herself, her niece Dale, and servants Lizzie and Washington (the play apparently changed this character’s name and ethnicity at some point, but the U of P text refers to him as Washington; he comes across stereotypically although not the worst example of the era).  The owner, bank president Courtleigh Fleming, reportedly died several months earlier.

During the night Cornelia, Dale, and Lizzie are frightened by various strange things happening in and around the mansion.  A notorious criminal, The Bat, is reported in the area and apparently targeting the mansion.  Brooks, a gardener, shows up to apply for a job in the middle of the night and this is the sort of play where nobody bats an eye (Ouch!  Sorry!) at his late arrival and simply hires him and assigns him a room.

Lizzie the Irish maid gets hysterical as more and more odd things happen.  The local coroner, Dr. Wells, arrives (because of course the coroner would arrive on a dark and stormy night) to tell them a clerk from Fleming’s bank may have embezzled a million dollars and hid it in a secret room in the house.  Detective Anderson arrives, summoned by Cornelia to protect the house and search for the money.  Richard Fleming, the purportedly dead banker’s nephew, shows up looking for the blueprints that reveal the secret room and of course he gets plugged posthaste.

Dr. Wells comes back to examine Richard Fleming’s body (it’s the sort of play where a corpse is left laying just out of sight and nobody comments on it further).  Richard Fleming’s lawyer shows up and fingers Brooks as Baily, the clerk accused of stealing a million dollars; Baily, who is Dale’s fiancé (because of course he is) claims he’s trying to find the secret room to prove his innocence.  Dr. Wells gets fingered (no, not literally) by Anderson; Wells knocks Anderson out, but before he can find the secret room a badly beaten Unknown Man shows up, claiming to have amnesia.

Then blah-blah-blah, something something something, the dead banker is discovered moldering away in the secret room (because again this is the sort of play where a corpse stuffed in a room for 72+ hours doesn’t decompose at all), and Anderson is revealed to be the infamous Bat while the Unknown Man turns out to be the real Detective Anderson, beaten up and left unconscious by The Bat (who for reasons unknown simply didn’t kill him or Dr. Wells when he had the chance).

Like I said, I want to know what the original audience thought they were watching.

Were they laughing with the play, the way we laugh with Stephen Sondheim’s The Last Of Sheila? 

Or were they laughing at the play, the way we’re encouraged to laugh at Clue, a literal linear descendent of The Bat?

It makes a difference, because if The Bat was presented as a straight mystery with comedic elements, lordie, does it ever suck wet farts out of dead pigeons.

But if it’s a send up of the sub-genre, we can feel a little more comfortable about our ancestral audience, excusing the exercise as an Airplane-like spoof.

Rinehart and Hopwood certainly took the plot seriously enough to carefully figure out the time it would take characters to engage in various off stage shenanigans so that no one could accuse them of producing a play with an impossible to perform timeline (the movie versions, relying on cinematic techniques such as editing which can extend or compress the amount of time between scenes, never face this problem).

And the U of P text ends with an option for the production to use the standard ending or an alternate climax that presents itself as a shade more realistic (albeit it still miles from plausible).

Whatever Rinehart and Hopwood’s intent, it’s clear The Bat was a crowd pleaser, no doubt because it was crammed with frantic characters rushing madly about, trying to solve a mystery that grew more and more outlandish with every turn.

It also seems to be an early, if not the first, user of the “don’t spoil the ending” style of advertising campaign where audiences were admonished not to reveal the big plot reveal re Detective Anderson being The Bat (the play’s 101 years old; the spoiler statute of limitations has long passed).  This caution would be repeated with the filmed versions of the play, and later expanded upon by legendary schlockmeister showman, William Castle.  Rinehart and Hopwood were so intent on preserving the mystery that the play was rehearsed up to the start of the very last scene, and the last few pages were withheld from the actors until shortly before the first dress rehearsal, surprising Harrison Hunter who thought he was playing the hero!

The Bat inspired several imitations on stage just as the film version would inspire several on screen.

© Buzz Dixon

Added November 28:
I’ve learned the stage manager’s copy of the script in the University of Pittsburgh’s online archive is from the 1945 revival of The Bat and since World War Two was still raging at the time, the character of Billy, a Japanese servant in the original, was swapped out for Washington, an African-American. Most filmed versions of The Bat retain Billy as Japanese (the 1978 German TV version has him played by an actor who squints a lot, so I have no idea if he’s supposed to be Japanese in that version or not); the 1959 version recasts him as an Anglo-American character.