Batty ‘bout THE BAT: Roland West

As I’ve posted elsewhere, I go prospecting in the rabbit hole, never knowing what I might find.

I haul a lot of junk out, never knowing which one might prove to be gold.

The story of Hollywood director Roland West is one example.

The Movies

When I started digging up info on the various versions of The Bat, Roland West’s named popped up quickly.

No surprise there since he adapted and directed the first two versions of The Bat, one a silent, the other a talkie.

But in my first bit of research, I found out he produced and directed The Monster (1925) with Lon Chaney first, doing so because the Broadway producers of the stage play of The Bat didn’t want to sign off on film rights while the play was still doing boffo b.o.

I’d seen The Monster years before.  It may not be a good movie but it isn’t an inept one.  Lon Chaney fans will feel disappointed because despite being one of the more outre’ movies he made, he employs very little of the make-up virtuosity that made him famous.

While The Monster is not the first mad scientist story (Poe’s “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” may be the great-great-grandaddy here), it appears to be the first film to incorporate all the now overly familiar mad scientist tropes found in cheap horror movies, pulps, and comics.

It can be viewed as West’s first run through of ideas he later filmed much more effectively with The Bat.  West made a total of 14 feature films in 15 years, averaging one movie a year although there are occasional one and two year gaps among them.  Several are now lost but all appear to be mysterious and melodramatic to some degree, with a frequent theme being the amoral duality of human nature.

As posted elsewhere, The Bat is a remarkable albeit not great movie.  Its dream-like quality helps it penetrate deep into the viewer’s psyche and it inspired dozens of similar movies and villains -- plus one superhero in the form of Batman.

West remade it almost shot for shot as a talkie, The Bat Whispers that’s not as good as the silent version but nonetheless shows off his dynamic directorial style.

Thanks to YouTube’s algorithms, Alibi (1929) soon popped up on my suggested films list and curious about West’s abilities as a director, I gave it a whirl.

It’s a powerful, impressive film, easily Roland West’s best.  With production design by William Cameron Menzies (a frequent West collaborator), it’s a hard hitting story focused on a young man (Chester Morris) just freed from prison, struggling to fit back into society despite police efforts to frame him.

…or so he says.

Morris’ character is charming and good looking, and we’re instinctively drawn to empathize with him when he falls in love with a police sergeant’s daughter and her father and a detective who pines for her scheme to break up the affair.

The movie veers quickly into James Elroy territory.  The daughter doesn’t want to marry a police officer because from experience with her father she knows she’ll not only be constantly worrying about his safety but he’ll also bring his work home with him no matter how hard he tries to keep it from tainting his personal life.

And the police in this movie are brutal, more than happy to frame crooks and threaten them with death if they don’t confess, and to employ undercover operators who get involved in criminals’ schemes. 

We root more and more for Morris’ character to come out on top, especially when he needs to find an alibi for a ten-minute period in which another police officer is murdered.

…so it’s pretty shattering
when it turns out he is
a murderous crook.

Alibi shows West’s flair for dramatic staging and camera movement.  He pulls no punches in showing both sides of the law are filled with pretty awful people, even if the awful people on the side of the law are trying to maintain order and see justice is done.

Especially interesting are two supporting characters, a wealthy fence and his wife, who share one of the most volatile love / hate relationships ever filmed.  In the space of just a few seconds they can ricochet back and forth from one extreme to the other, a textbook example of codependency.

While Alibi occasionally leans over into stereotypical 1930s melodrama, for the most part this is a really well executed picture, getting a best picture Oscar nomination for itself and individual nominations for Morris and Menzies as well. It has a very solid, very real feel to it, and while dated in style, it sure addresses a lot of very negative issues directly instead of skirting around them as most movies did.

Impressed, I looked forward to seeing West’s final film, Corsair (1931).

…and felt disappointed.

Alibi, The Monster, and the various versions of The Bat all look and feel like A-pictures despite their outlandishness, but Corsair feels more like a B-movie.

It’s an unpleasant movie about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things, and as West needed to film in real settings aboard various ships, it lacks the theatricality that marks West’s best work (he does get a few of his stylistic flourishes in, however).

Like Alibi, it examines human hypocrisy, in particular Wall Street interests that not only feel justified in cheating widows and orphans out of their investments, but profit off Prohibition by secretly funding rumrunners who smuggle illegal alcohol into the country.

West casts Morris as a stuck-up college football hero who gets a job at a brokerage, balks at cheating innocent victims, and sets himself up as a modern day pirate to plunder his boss’ fleet of rumrunners (bonus points for having the cojones to sell the stolen cargos back to his boss).

Ayn Rand would have loved this movie; one can see echoes of both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged in it.  It’s nothing but utterly ruthless, utterly selfish transactional relationships, not a shred of human decency anywhere. 

Give it credit for being fast paced and fun, but it’s exceedingly lightweight and the complexity of characterization West delivered in Alibi is nowhere to be found here.

Alibi gives you something to think about; Corsair makes you want to take a shower.

Why would a successful producer / director at nearly the peak of his power stop making movies?

Ah, that is the mystery…and to solve it, first we need to look at the man.

The Man

Roland West was born Roland Van Zimmer in a theatrical family in Ohio in 1885.  With his family background he soon began treading the boards himself, writing and directing vaudeville productions.

Savvy in both the show and business parts of show biz, West came east in 1915 to eventually become Joseph M. Schenck’s production manager.

Schenck worked in the movie business from the very beginning, starting out running amusement parks and arcades where movies were shown to distributing films to producing them.  From there he participated in the creation of MGM, United Artists, and 20th Century Fox, becoming one of the dominant powers behind the scenes in Hollywood for decades.  West’s early alliance with him, combined with his own talent and skill, gave him a tremendous amount of leverage.

Long before Frank Capra, West got his name above the title on his movies.

West, like many creative film makers, kept a coterie of actors, artists, and technicians he relied on heavily.

One of these was a young actress named Jewel Carmen, an attractive although not exceptional performer with a propensity for scandals and lawsuits.  Carmen burned through Hollywood in five fast years, retiring briefly when she married West in 1918, then making a comeback to the screen in West’s film The Silver Lining, playing a virtuous orphan raised by a family of thieves, a concept squarely in West’s wheelhouse.

The pair followed that with a mystery movie aptly titled Nobody, which is now so lost there isn’t even a synopsis of it available.  Carmen retired yet again, coming back one last time to play the ingenue in The Bat then retiring for good.

West himself would make only make four more movies before retiring from the business in 1931.

While Corsair wasn’t a blockbuster, West’s talent and resume’ should have kept him active for the rest of his life (he was 46 in 1931).

Why he quit can’t be answered with 100% certainty, but we can make an educated guess.

The Mystery

The West / Carmen marriage appears to have been contentious from the start, and with all the participants long dead, we can only scratch our heads at what the relationship must have been like.

West met actress Thelma Todd in 1930 and soon began a long term affair with her even though she, too, was married at the time.  Todd, almost a decade younger than Carmen, was a  notorious party girl but unlike Carmen, she possessed the comedy chops to keep her popular with audiences throughout her entire career.

Not only co-starring with comedians like Buster Keaton and comedy teams such as The Marx Brothers and  Laurel & Hardy, Todd also appeared in two successful series of comedy shorts, the first with Zasu Pitts, the second with Patsy Kelly.  The shorts feel like a cross between I Love Lucy and the Three Stooges, and were popular enough at the box office for her long time producer, Hal Roach, to provide a car and driver for her after she racked up a number of DUIs and minor accidents.

West cast Todd as the romantic lead in Corsair, changing her name to Alison Lloyd, his rationale being that as the star of a dramatic picture "no taint of comedy would cling to her skirts".  (Producer Roach countered by threatening to change her name on his productions to Susie Dinkleberry to guarantee "no taint of drama would cling to her skirts"; Todd resumed using her former screen name after that.)

West and Carmen began living separately though they didn’t divorce until 1938.  What is odd is that despite West and Todd sharing an odd co-habitation (they had adjoining apartments in a complex West owned and could enter each other’s rooms through connecting doors), Carmen lived in her own apartment nearby and on top of everything else, became business partners with them in a couple of real estate ventures, the most famous of which was a restaurant, Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café’.

If the West / Carmen marriage was contentious, the West / Todd affair appears far more confrontational.  Noted for notorious public spats, West by all accounts wanted to control Todd, and Todd would have none of it.

Like the volatile couple in Alibi their relationship careened back and forth on an almost daily basis.

On the weekend of December 14, 1935, West and Todd went out to a party at a Hollywood night spot.  West wanted to go home but Todd was having too much of a good time.

According to testimony, he told her to be back at their mutual apartment/s by 2am; Todd told him she’d be back when she was damn good and ready.

Todd’s studio provided chauffeur dropped her off in front of the apartment complex where she lived with West, then drove her car a short distance away to the apartment where Carmen lived and parked it in a garage Todd and West used there.  He closed the garage door but didn’t lock it and went home.

Todd went to her apartment and found it bolted from the inside.  She then went down to where her car was parked, opened the garage door, got in her car, and started the engine.

Monday morning her cleaning lady came, intending to move Todd’s studio provided car onto the street so she could park her own in the garage.  She opened the garage door and found Todd slumped over dead from carbon monoxide poisoning in the front seat of her car.

A lot of wild rumors and speculation followed, including organized crime trying to put the muscle on her, a jealous ex-husband, and other unfounded ideas, but the mystery boiled down to this:

1. Why was her apartment door not just locked but bolted? 

2. Why was the door to her garage closed when she started the car? 

Todd left her apartment keys at home that night so she couldn’t have gotten in without waking West to admit her.  West claimed he never heard her come back, but had bolted the doors because of reports of prowlers in the area.

One can easily imagine Todd, in a fit of pique at West, not trying to roust him and heading down to her car, intending to spend the night there.

One can also easily imagine West, angry at her defiance, deliberately locking her out and refusing to admit her no matter how hard she pounded on his door.

(This sort of thing had occurred in the past with Todd once breaking a window trying to get West to open up.)

Todd may have closed her garage door to keep warm, not realizing when she turned on the engine that the space would quickly fill with carbon monoxide (police tests showed it could have taken as little as three minutes to use up all the oxygen, causing the engine to stop; Todd would already be unconscious if not dead at that point).

In the end, despite the rumors and speculation, the coroner’s inquiry ruled Todd’s death to be accidental.

West never made another movie.

He became reclusive and suffered from a variety of physical and mental health issues.

He and Carmen divorced in 1938.

He remarried in 1946 to actress Lola Lane and stayed married until his death in 1952.

Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café re-opened and was sold a few years later to another owner who ran it successfully for decades.  Since then it passed through numerous hands, resting empty for several years, but currently reopened as Vibe Surfside. 

Chester Morris soon faded as an A-list actor but found a steady gig playing the reformed jewel thief turned detective Boston Blackie in a series of B movies in the 1940s.  He stepped down from starring roles in films after that though he appeared frequently on TV and Broadway.

Morris remained friends with West until the director died from complications of a stroke.  Morris reports West made a death bed confession to him, that he bolted the doors to keep Todd out, that she demanded to be let in and he refused, that she said she’d get in her car and go to another male friend’s home, and that West followed her to the garage, closing the door on her and bolting it to prevent her from driving off.

Morris then reported West told him he went back to bed but got up early Sunday morning with the intent of letting Todd out only to discover to his horror she’d suffocated in the night.  He closed the garage door and feigned ignorance of her whereabouts until her cleaning lady discovered her body Monday morning.

Was Morris bullshitting or not?

It certainly sounds plausible, but then so does the version where Todd shut the door herself to keep warm, not realizing the danger it presented.

There are certainly others who report hearing from people who were close to West and Todd at the time that the police initially thought that’s what happened, one source even claiming West confessed to the cops about what he’d done.

But Joseph Schenck is part of the equation, too.  Schenck, once Fatty Arbuckle’s producer, vividly remembered the scandal that threatened Hollywood in the wake of Arbuckle’s notorious wild party that left Virginia Rappe dead.  At the time of Todd’s death, famed director / choreographer Busby Berkley was undergoing a second degree murder trial for killing three people while driving drunk; Schenck and other studio heads wouldn’t want another major scandal hitting the town at the same time.

Did strings get pulled? 

Was pressure applied?

Who knows?

And while it’s certainly plausible a very powerful studio head could persuade police to issue the most benign report possible, it’s also equally plausible that it really happened just that way, that Todd contributed to her own death by not trying to rouse West and by shutting the garage door to stay warm.

We’ll never know.

But Todd’s death certainly struck West hard, that can be seen in photos of him at the inquest.  And even if she forgot her keys and decided not to knock on the door but go down to the garage instead, he’d still have to live with the knowledge that by bolting the doors shut, he made it impossible for her to enter and sleep safely in her own room.

Roland West made movies about moral and ethical ambiguity, with seemingly good characters actually terrible villains, and villains not even loyal to their own.

It’s the height of irony that he ended up spending the rest of his life juggling that duality in his head.

Somebody should make a movie about it.

© Buzz Dixon