Batty ‘bout THE BAT (1959 movie)

THE BAT (1959)

By the late 1950s Vinnie the P realized fate decreed he would be the next great horror star and so he decided to embrace the typecasting instead of fight it.

He made The Bat the same year he made The Tingler and The House On Haunted Hill and like Godfather 3, one of them has to be the least of the trio.

But the 1959 versions does something the 1926 and 1930 movies couldn’t do:  Suspend our disbelief.

Too often people use that term to describe colorful fantasies or overly complicated plots, but often it’s a very simple thing, just getting the audience to tacitly agree to accept what they see and hear for the next 90 minutes as real people facing real problems.

Written and directed by Crane Wilbur, the 1959 version of The Bat never strains our credulity.  Oh, it’s farfetched and melodramatic, but it stays within a human framework and scale.  The Bat is a murderous master criminal, but he’s dangerous not because he’s a maniac but rather a sociopath, absolutely capable of killing anyone who gets in his way.

Price plays Dr. Wells in this version, and by 1959 most movie goers had either never seen or forgotten what they knew about The Bat so when Price gets bumped off 2/3rds of the way through, it comes as a shock to find he’s not The Bat as everyone expected.  (He is a villain, however; when Banker Fleming tells Dr. Wells he stole a million in negotiable securities and needs help to fake his death so he can make off with the money, Price simply shoots him and goes looking for the securities himself.)

Wilbur’s screenplay is streamlined and modernized.  Agnes Morehead plays Cornelia Van Gorder only this time the character is a successful mystery novelist (apparently a nod to Mary Roberts Rinehart), renting the Fleming house to work on her new novel.  Her niece Dale is already married to Victor Baily, the clerk Fleming framed for the theft but is now out on bail, and Judy Hollander, another clerk who can vouch to Baily’s innocence, tags along.

Judy is played by former Our Gang sweetheart Darla Hood and when The Bat eviscerates her while scouring the house for the securities, it hits hard.

This movie ain’t screwin’ around, folks.

And while it lacks the stylistic flourishes that mark the 1926 and 1930 versions, it carries a gut level reality check they lack.

This Bat (a.k.a. Police Lieutenant Andy Anderson) could just as easily have been hammered out of the typewriter of Jim Thompson, and while the movie sticks to 1959 sensibilities re onscreen violence and gore, it’s still a pretty nasty piece of work.

Which makes Morehead all the more heroic in her efforts to get to the bottom of what’s going on.

It’s as if 1959’s The Bat is no longer part of the same cinematic universe as the previous two versions or the stage play that spawned them.

But if the 1930 version failed to adequately judge the era it was born into, the 1959 version gets it instinctively.

(It’s interesting to compare and contrast The Bat with The House On Haunted Hill; the latter is the mirror opposite of the former, completely over the top in high camp horror, but unlike The Bat the cast of House… are no innocents but rather know what they’re in for and are voluntarily going along for the ride.) 

© Buzz Dixon