Batty 'bout THE BAT (1960 live TV version & 1978 German TV version)

I thought I’d put this series of posts to bed when I finished writing about the 1959 theatrical film version of The Bat but then Joseph Barney tipped me to the 1960 live TV broadcast of the play on The Dow Hour Of Great Mysteries.

I’d searched for this version on my own and didn’t find it because I was looking for it under the episode title instead of the series title; it can be found on the Internet Archive and YouTube.

There are two other TV versions of The Bat, one on the syndicated series Broadway Television Theatre which, despite being shot in 35mm for syndication, seems to be lost (not just their version of The Bat but the entire series!), the other a 1978 German TV version of the play entitled Der Spinnenmoerder.

The Dow Hour Of Great Mysteries (1960)

Let’s cut straight to the chase:
If you want to see what The Bat looked like in 1920, you’re not going to get much closer than this, the best version of the play among the five I’ve viewed, even though it’s the most truncated.

The Dow Hour Of Great Mysteries was a short lived series of live broadcasts in 1960 hosted and narrated by Joseph Nye Welch (yes, the guy who brought down Joe McCarthy six years earlier).  Judging from The Bat, their premiere episode, they did a really good job adapting full length plays into hour long live TV dramas, but Welch unfortunately died of a heart attack and Dow dropped the series rather than continue without him.

Which is a pity, because The Bat not only does a great job adapting a creaky old 1920s play to 1960s television, but it arguably shows the perfect format for mystery plays:  Live television.

Before we get into the actual adaptation, let’s look at what marks live TV drama as different from stage plays and filmed drama (drama here including all forms of enacted entertainment, including comedy and musicals).

Stage drama works with limitations.

You can only change costumes and sets so fast.  You can use all sorts of stylistic tricks to convey different times and places, but physically and temporally you’re trapped with what can be staged right in front of an audience (this is why Mary Roberts Rhinehart and Avery Hopwood were so careful to stage every scene in The Bat when writing it, so that no one could claim they cheated by having things occur faster than possibly in real life).

As such stage plays tend to be broken into acts and scenes, each lasting long enough in a single location to get all the necessary plot points across.  Spectacle is welcomed onstage, but it needs to be spectacle designed for the stage.

Filmed (or more properly now, recorded) drama is freed of such limitations.  There are no formal act and scene breaks unless the film makers desire them, scenes themselves are typically comprised of dozens of short bits, cut and assembled later to form a coherent narrative (Lawrence Olivier reported that between him saying a line in one scene in the movie Khartoum and Charlton Heston speaking in reply, one year of actual production time elapsed, even though in the final film they’re speaking face to face).

Filmed drama is not necessarily performed in front of a live audience (sit-coms tend to be, but as we’ll see those are more like old live dramas than short films).  It doesn’t need to go smoothly as it plays out the way a stage show needs to.  It can and often is shaped in post-production, and when shown to an audience it’s presented in its final form, not one being literally recreated every time it’s mounted.

Live drama is betwixt and between, borrow both strengths and weaknesses from live stage shows and filmed drama.

While bound by time (i.e., it needs to play out in a regularly scheduled slot), it’s far more open and expansive with space.

A stage play is limited to what can be put on a particular stage at a particular moment, but a live production can sprawl across several sets and even go from one studio to another and back again (not to mention enhancing the performance with pre-recorded scenes shot elsewhere, miniatures and matte paintings that couldn’t be shared with a life theatrical audience, etc.).

The Bat as a stage play occurs in two rooms:  
A living room and an upstairs room that opens to reveal another hidden room.

Everything else that occurs in the play happens off stage and needs to be told to the audience by the characters.

The various filmed versions ignore this limitation, of course, and typically start their stories elsewhere and earlier from the stage play.  We see the eponymous Bat at work, commiting crimes, eluding the police, and finally zeroing in on the Fleming mansion for nefarious purposes.

The stage play The Bat moves at a frantic pace, with characters dashing in and out of rooms, up and down stairs.

They have to, because it’s the type of story where forward momentum dare not lag for an instant and, being trapped on stage, can’t waste time with major set changes for brief scenes.

The films are also fast paced, but literally generations of conditioning have taught film audiences that unless demonstrated otherwise, a cut between two locations also implies a passage of time.

The Bat’s fast pace on stage carries a sense of urgency the film versions can’t recapture, simply because the audience mentally paces the story out every time the action moves from one room to another.

But The Dow Hour Of Great Mysteries’ adaptation circumvents this with a live production that actually follows the characters as they move from one room to another.

It’s the only adaptation of the play that feels like it was shot in an actual mansion (it wasn’t) and not a stage set.  The architecture of the house makes sense the way none of the film versions do, and as a result the fast paced goings on play out much more plausibly than the two earliest film productions.

Another thing is that it jettisons at least half of the original stage play, and thanks to writer Walter Kerr’s adaptation, this vastly improves the story (Kerr was a dramatist and critic who later won a Pulitzer prize for his critical essays).

He gets rid of an enormous amount of extraneous simulated humor, trims down several supporting roles, cuts to the heart of the crucial scenes a lot faster, and despite The Bat’s goofy costume still manages to create a villain who makes more logical sense than any of the previous versions (there are still a few plot holes but they’re less noticeable because of Kerr’s trims).

All of this boils the previous two hour produce down to a brisk 50 minutes, and keeps the physical pace fast without overtaxing the viewer.

Director Paul Nickell worked a lot in early live TV and is clearly up for this job.  He’s not the stylist Roland West was but for this version of The Bat he’s just what’s needed.  The story flows visually, everything links up, and while melodramatic, never goes over the top the way the stage and early film versions did.

And the cast!  I agree Agnes Morehead and Vincent Price are the best casting of any of the film versions, but how can you top Helen Hayes, Jason Robards Jr., and Margaret Hamilton?  

Hayes, IMO, plays the best version of Cornelia Van Gorder, the central character, and will forever define that role for me.  She’s not the mindlessly knitting enigma of the first two movies but a sharp thinker who’s not about to let the hysteria around her force her into any rash decisions.

She delivers lines that elsewhere sounded smug and condescending with a quiet, dignified humanity, and manages to keep the story focused on her rather than let the younger leads take it over.

Jason Robards plays Detective Anderson (a.k.a. The Bat) straight from the film noir school and again, this is a choice that helps hide the thinness of the story in several places.  He’s appropriately menacing even when we assume he’s a good guy, and thanks to Kerr’s editorial trims, his capture and unmasking at the end isn’t muddled with a bunch of false climaxes as often happens in the movies but rather plays out straight forward and satisfactory.

Margaret Hamilton inherits a pretty thankless role that basically requires her to scream and point while shouting “Look over there!”  Kerr cut way back on Lizzie the maid’s comic relief to change The Bat from a mystery comedy to a mystery with a few bits comedy.

Good call, if you ask me.

Der Spinnenmoerder (1978)

The only version shot in color, Der Spinnenmoerder (German for The Spider Killer since any German audience tuning in to a program entitled Die Fledermaus would be expecting something entirely different!) is as best I can tell a well done version of the play.

I couldn’t find it with English subtitles but having seen the other four versions and read the 1945 revival script, I was able to follow the story fairly well.  The performances all seem to be good, and the production values adequate, although the sets seem very claustrophobic and dimly lit even before the power is cut off to the house.

This version certainly takes a few liberties with the plot and characters (judged by what they do as opposed to what they say), but tones down the villain’s outrageous costume, making him a more ordinary but far more plausible (and hence, more terrifying) killer in a ski mask.

While there’s nothing onscreen to specifically set the time, judging from the costumes and props it’s meant to be taken as a period piece, not a contemporary story as with all the previous versions.

It’s presented as a live TV version of a stage play with no exteriors, cutaways, stock footage, or other scenes taking place outside of the house.

I enjoyed it, but of the five versions I’ve seen, this would be tied for third place with The Bat Whispers (1930) and The Bat (1959).

For your enjoyment, I suggest viewing The Dow Hour Of Great Mysteries episode first, then the 1926 silent version.

There are a couple of radio versions of the play as well, but I’m not interested enough to track them down.

© Buzz Dixon