Batty 'bout THE BAT: The Knockoffs
As noted earlier, Mary Roberts Rinehart’s The Circular Staircase wasn’t the first old dark house mystery, just as Rinehart’s and Avery Hopwood’s stage play revamping* of that novel as The Bat wasn’t the first mysterious masked criminal story, but they sure proved to be category definers.
The success of The Bat on Broadway in 1920 opened the door for many more variations on the theme, including numerous versions of The Cat And The Canary and The Gorilla, the James Whale film The Old Dark House, more serials than you can shake a cliché’ at, and even animated TV shows such as Scooby Doo, Where Are You? (which spawned a much-imitated sub-genre of its own: Three kids and a nyah-nyah**).
We’ve finished with the existing official versions of The Bat, so before moving on to our final entry (which involves a real life mystery) let’s look at three films that took =ahem!= “inspiration” from Rinehart and Hopwood’s seminal play.
THE MONSTER (1925)
As soon as The Bat became a Broadway hit, other theatrical troupes wanted to imitate it and Hollywood wanted to film it.
Roland West, a successful theater impresario at a young age who rose to producer-director status in the early days of silent cinema, wanted The Bat from the very beginning.
The bulk of his film oeuvre falls into the mystery-thriller category made popular by Alfred Hitchcock. West, a strong visual creator on his own, made a successful string of films that anticipated Hitchcock’s approach but with their own unique stylistic look.
Possessing the chops and reputation to turn The Bat into a successful film (and as noted earlier, he did -- twice!) West pitched the idea in the early days of its Broadway run, but neither Rinehart not Hopwood wanted to sell the movie rights and undercut the revenue from various companies touring the US with it.
At the same time, another talented young actor named Crane Wilbur began branching into writing stage plays, and in the wake of The Bat wrote a play called The Monster.
I haven’t been able to track down any information on the stage version of The Monster but Roland West, eager to do an old dark house story, snapped up the rights when Rinehart and Hopwood turned down his request to do The Bat.
The Monster is an oddly structured film, starting up with a weird cloaked character (not the eponymous Monster) causing a car crash with a large mirror (a gag echoed 40 years later in Goldfinger) and kidnapping the victim.
The story then shifts to the small town dry goods clerk who pines for the town beauty and takes a mail order detective course. There’s a lot of time spent on small town Americana with people wondering what happened to the missing accident victim but otherwise carrying on business as usual. There’s a lengthy dance social where the hero gets shut out by the ever present town bully, then finally it’s off to the local insane asylum in the middle of the night.
Here at long last is where the story gets into gear, plunging straight into Edgar Allen Poe territory. Lon Chaney finally appears as Dr. Gustave Ziska, an insane medical doctor who wants to “transfer souls” because, hey, science!
Chaney’s appearance is a disappointment in this film, and I can’t help but suspect he did it only for the paycheck. None of the imaginative make-up that marked his roles as Quasimodo or the Phantom of the Opera or the faux-vampire of London After Midnight, just grey tint to his hair.
His mannerism and expressions seem oddly familiar, and while watching the film a second time I realize they’re similar to Bela Lugosi’s style of performance. This is the only film of Chaney’s I’ve seen where he adopted such mannerism, and I don’t know enough about Lugosi to say if his mannerisms came naturally or he was influenced by Chaney; let’s just chalk it up as interesting observation and move on.
Dr. Ziska, now in control of the asylum that once imprisoned him, runs things with the help of several former inmates. It goes without saying that as colorful a lot as they are, they reflect prejudices and attitudes of the era, and in no way resemble genuine mental patients.
There are a number of spectacular stunts in this part of the film worthy of Buster Keaton or a Hong Kong action film, there’s some risqué business with the heroine about to fall under Ziska’s clutches, and enough mad lab proceedings to set the tone for similar scenes for generations to come.
Not a good movie, but the first horror film (technically comedy-horror) to crack the top ten at the box office. West uses a lot of set ups and stagings he returned to in later films (particularly his two versions of The Bat in 1926 and 1930).
While Crane Wilbur continued acting for several years, more and more he shifted over to writing and directing. While he never wrote or directed anything that could be considered a deathless classic, his name is on several solid, recognizable films from the 1940s / 50s / 60s including The Adventures Of Casanova, The Amazing Mr. X, He Walked By Night, I Was a Communist for the FBI, The Miracle of Our Lady of Fatima, House Of Wax, Solomon And Sheba, and Mysterious Island.
His career eventually came full circle regarding The Bat when he wrote and directed the Vincent Price version of the story in 1959, an updating that removed the most dated elements of the play and smoothed over a lot of logic leaps.
THE PHANTOM (1931)
No, not that Phantom…or that one…
This Phantom is a hastily produced independent low budget mash-up of The Monster and The Bat Whispers from writer-director Allan James (directing under his birth name, Alvin J. Neitz).
It’s a movie with nothing but plot holes, so ineptly done one is half tempted to write it off as a parody of bad movies. James was a lackluster writer-director for Gower Gulch (as the old poverty row B-Westerns used to be called) with a few side forays into writing and co-directing serials (for most audiences, the only recognizable film he ever worked on was the original Dick Tracy serial).
In story and execution, The Phantom is a hodge-podge. It starts with what looks like stock footage from a silent prison film, showing guards preparing an electric chair for use then a condemned convict -- our eponymous Phantom -- climbing prison walls and leaping atop a fast moving freight train passing right by the prison.
An all points bulletin is issued to take the Phantom in dead or alive. The Phantom sends threatening notes to A Very Important Guy, and a dum-dum police detective shows up to protect the VIG. They set up guards in a mansion just like the one in The Bat and encounter the same kinds of red herring characters, then suddenly everybody decides to go traipsing off to a local insane asylum to see if they might have a solution to the mystery. Hijinx ensue and finally the Phantom is caught, revealed to be a character who absolutely could not be the escaped convict!!!
In the words of Dave Sim, this sucks wet farts out of dead pigeons. To make matters worse, not only do the actors perform in what is now an archaic style (and indeed within a couple of years would be banished from American screens as too phony) but James cast Western stars Guinn "Big Boy" Williams and Allene Ray as his two urbane urban leads.
In the words of me, “…dahfuq…?”
First off, Williams was a good actor in his limited range, appearing of dozens of B-Westerns and more than a few A-movies as well, though there always in a small supporting role. He came across as a big amicable goof but managed to sell that personality to audiences who made him one of the minor stars in the B-Western galaxy. He wasn’t good enough to be convincing as a smart (in every sense of the word) newspaper reporter in The Phantom, but he does have his charm turned up as high as it can go. While we can only shake our heads at his horrible miscasting, at least he isn’t painful to watch or listen to.
But Ray? Oy, vey! A very attractive woman and an expert horse rider, she starred in numerous silent Westerns and serials where a pretty face and an ability to do your own stunts got you steady employment. The moment she starts talking, it’s Jean Hagen from Singin’ In The Rain. She can’t act, she can’t talk, all she can do is stand there looking like somebody just smacked her upside her head with a 4-lb mackerel. The Phantom was her last starring role. She dropped out of the Hollywood rat race, became a seamstress, got married, became a real estate broker, and by all accounts did well.
Sheldon Lewis, who played dozens of villainous roles in silent movies (including a masked villain in the 1916 serial The Iron Claw) is “the Thing”, a standard slouch hat / dark cape / walks-stooped-over low budget serial villain who is also not the Phantom?
(Who is The Phantom? It’s Williams newspaper editor boss who won’t let him have time off to marry Ray because he has designs on her as well; we never find out what happened to the escaped convict).
The sole bright spot in this production is Violet Knights (born Violet May Neitz, sister of Alvin J. Neitz a.k.a. Allan James). As Lucy the maid she’s lively and funny and the only entertaining thing in the movie. She had a lengthy career in silent films, dropped out of movies for 16 years, came back to do a handful of minor films then retired for good.
As a movie The Phantom resembles a poorly constructed Frankenstein monster, which each component easily identifiable and never quite fitting with its adjoining piece.
Why James opted to do this film is a mystery, but from his staging of scenes it’s clear he’d seen The Monster and either one or both of Roland West’s versions of The Bat.
James is reported to have once said, “While some people might fall from the big time and end up on Poverty Row, nobody on the row makes it to the big time, or should even try.”
In his case, truer words were never spoken.
WHO KILLED WHO? (1943)
Nobody likes Debbie Downer, so let’s end this installment on a high note: Tex Avery.
If you know who he is, no introduction is necessary. If you don’t, he was one of the wildest and funniest animation directors back in the 1930s, helping define the personas of dozens of characters including Daffy Duck and Bugs Bunny (in fact, “What’s up, doc?” was originally one of Avery’s personal catchphrases).
Who Killed Who? is a 1943 MGM cartoon Avery directed that sent up the entire old dark house genre. It’s as surreal and as silly as anything Avery did during that period.
One might argue it doesn’t really belong here since it’s parodying an entire genre, but I’m zooming in on the big reveal at the end. Exposing the masked villain as an authority figure goes straight to the original stage version of The Bat, and that’s good enough for me!
Next:
The real mystery
of Roland West
© Buzz Dixon
* Sorry, couldn’t help myself…
** So named by Joe Ruby himself, co-creator of Scooby Doo along with Ken Spears. Yeah, the original Scooby Doo cast has four kids, but Joe realized you could easily pare that number down by one and save a significant hunk of change in the budget.
