In 1943, Columbia pictures released the first of two Batman serials. Unlike other serial adaptations of comic book characters, the cliff-hanger actually added some some things to the comic book mythos. The "Bat's Cave" underground headquarters debuted in the serial (directed by Lambert Hillyer) and became the Batcave of the comics. The secret entrance through the grandfather clock was likewise introduced in Columbia's Batman. Although Alfred the butler had already been introduced in the comic by the time the serial was released, he was redesigned to look more like the actor who portrayed him in the chapterplay.
The story line has Batman And Robin battling saboteurs on the home front. The main villain is the Japanese Dr. Daka, (J. Carol Naish), a weak-tea Fu Manchu type who operates out of a headquarters hidden below a chamber of horrors depicting Japanese atrocities. Naish is clearly having fun playing Dr. Daka--he basically does an imitation of Chinese Charlie Chan--but with slick backed hair, mustache and lipstick, he looks like a cartoon Oriental. At one point, another character assumes that Dr. Daka is merely an actor in the horror chamber. "Your accent is a little off, but your make-up is perfect," he says, in what has to be an in-joke.
Dr. Daka recruits Caucasians into his group of "dishonored men" known as the League of the New Order (of Hirohito). Most of these wronged men and ex-convicts are disenchanted enough with America to betray their country, but those aren't as forcibly submitted to the doctor's brain machine (it looks like a glorified dryer with wires), which turns them into zombies. Batman and Robin get involved when this happens to the uncle of Bruce Wayne's love interest, Linda Page.
Through fifteen chapters, the cold blooded Dr. Daka tries to dispose of his enemies and finalize his evil plans, but Batman and Robin are always there to thwart him. When Daka's men put a bomb on a trestle to destroy a cargo train, he later cackles with childlike enthusiasm: "Was the train wrecked? How many were killed?" He talks to his pet alligators as if they were dogs, and when he runs out of food for them he absolutely giggles at the thought of ordering one of his zombies to jump into the pit and be their dinner.
We first see the Batman (as most serial characters refer to him) sitting in his darkened Bat's Cave at a big desk, brooding, shadows of bats flickering him and overhead. Batman's relationship with Robin is more like that of two brothers than of a guardian and his ward. Robin thinks that the senior partner should drop the bored playboy facade. Commissioner Gordon doesn't appear in the serial; he's replaced by a likable, portly Irish cop, Captain Arnold.
The casting of Batman and Robin is excellent. Although Lewis Wilson has slight British pronunciations and a somewhat chunky body, he is very good and quite convincing as both Bruce and the Caped Crusader. He gives an extremely smooth portrayal of Bruce Wayne, and really shows what he can do in chapter nine when he disguises himself as "Chuck White". an illiterate pugilist which is far removed from Wayne--and Wilson--as possible.
Another talented actor, Douglas Croft, plays Robin. Croft was the Ronald Reagan character as a boy in Kings Row and was doing a serial after several "A" productions proved not to be a step upward to him. Nevertheless, Croft makes a spunky, boyish, believable Robin, and has an absolutely unruly mop of wild curly hair that fits his tough but cherubic personality.
William Austin is perfectly cast as Alfred the butler. As in the comics, Alfred works with Batman and Robin on occasion, sometimes in disguise. Most of the screenplay's welcome comedy relief centers on this character. During a frantic battle in chapter three, Alfred gets to the phone and shouts: "Get me Scotland Yard-Get me the police-Get me anybody!" He winds up shooting the whole place in his hysteria and nearly kills the Dynamic Duo along with the crooks.
The script follows the comics fairly closely, which at the time was relatively still "earth-bound," although Batman's leaving a black "bat-mark" on the forehead of captured foes was a device that was neither a carry over from the comics nor adapted into them later. There are no crazy props or zany- costumed villains--unless one wants to include Daka and his smoking jacket-- and no origin is provided. Some of the cliff-hangers concocted for the serial are pretty feeble, particularly the ones for the first two chapters. First, Batman falls from a roof (the process shot showing him waving and wiggling wildly as he falls past windows is hilarious) but lands anti-climatically on a
handy scaffold. The, he falls from a suddenly sparking wire across which he's carrying Linda, but the miraculous "save" consists of nothing more than the rope secured to his person holding and preventing the two from hitting the ground. Other cliff-hangers employ the "missing information" gambit: in one case, Batman turns out not to be under the falling, fiery, piece of ceiling after all; in another, we learn the following week he escaped the inevitable blast by going through a convenient trap door before the cabin could explode.Some cliff-hanger "solutions" depend on the characters having a propensity for survival that borders on Superman-like invulnerability. Two mechanic zombies are sent in the place of the real pilots to steal a special plane while Batman is aboard. When it subsequently is shot down by the authorities Batman simply survives without hardly a scratch. In chapter eleven, there is a vivid accident scene in which Daka's thugs drive a massive truck into a cab in which Batman (disguised a Chuck White) is riding. Although the car is SMASHED to a pulp, our hero is admitted to the hospital for only a few minor injuries and is almost immediately released.
One or two of the cliff-hangers are more effective, however. At the end of chapter three, Batman tries to retrieve a bomb from a railroad trestle while battling Daka's henchmen but is knocked out before he can do so. Despite the obvious back projection, the sight of the oncoming train rushing toward the Batman's unconscious body is rather thrilling. Another hair-raiser shows Batman thrown down an elevator shaft while a freight car slowly descends. Chapter thirteen has a great pair of concurrent cliff-hangers: Linda is put under the mind device and about to be "zombie-ized" while Batman and Robin fall into a pit outside Daka's headquarters, the closing walls of which are punctuated with a multitude of spikes. The final cliff-hanger, in which we assume Batman has been captured, placed in a box, and dumped into Daka's alligator pit, features some permissible "cheating". (Guess who's not really in the box?)
It all ends happily--except for Dr. Daka. When an associate hands him the day's take for his Chamber of Horrors, Daka says with prescience, "If I was in this for profit, I'd say this was a very bad day." Bad day, indeed. Daka is not only hog-tied by Robin, but, while trying to escape later, falls into his own alligator pit and is heard from no more.
Batman is an entertaining and amusing serial with more than its share of delightfully dopey moments. Daka can see through the miniature cameras he has placed in his zombie's heads, for instance, but how is he able to see on his TV screen the very zombies who are supposedly projecting the image? At one point, he orders a zombie to "leave the roof." The zombie takes it literally and jumps off the side of the building!
In an early chapter, Linda Page is kidnapped when responding to a bogus message supposedly from her missing Uncle Martin. Yet she stupidly goes off alone again to "meet Uncle Martin" when she later gets another (Bogus) message from him. In chapter five, Dr. Daka receives a shipment from Japan
containing a messenger who is in suspended animation. The man revives, delivers his message, and dies. Surely there are easier ways of passing information than sending boxes of frozen delivery boys across the ocean in submarines. The dumbest moment occurs in chapter fourteen, when Daka's men see Robin getting into Bruce Wayne's car and follow it, hoping to corner him. Batman and Robin change into Bruce and Dick in the back seat, and when the hoods catch up to them, Bruce gets out and "fools" them while Dick hides. It seems incredible that the two could ever hope to keep their identities a secret when they use the same car whether in their guises as Wayne and Grayson or Batman and Robin--and Alfred is the chauffeur in either case.When the serial was released on video cassette by Goodtimes, changes were made in the narration, apparently to make it less offensive to Japanese Americans. When the Japanese section of town is shown in the opening chapter, the narrator originally described it as resembling a ghost town because the inhabitants had been rounded up and placed in internment camps, with anti-Japanese slurs and reference to wise government decisions added for good measure. The new narration, substituting "hoodlums" for Japanese, is hardly an improvement, as it makes it seem as if the entire Japanese-American community consists of nothing more than criminals.
Writing in Cinefantastique, David Scapperotti noted: "The revisions aren't aren't surprising when you consider that Columbia is now owned by Japan's Sony Corporation. It appears that some of Daka's operatives escaped Batman's justice and were rewarded with positions in the new George Orwell dept. at Columbia. Perhaps rather than worrying about the feelings of the modern-day Japanese-Americans, Columbia/Sony just doesn't want to remind
anyone of past history. However, even the "revised" Batman serial makes it pretty clear who was fighting who during WW II.In 1949, Columbia pictures came out with a second Batman serial. entitled Batman and Robin, directed by Spencer Bennet of the Superman serials. The first chapter gets right into the action with the montage of a rampant crime wave. One of the thefts is of a machine which "any moving vehicle can be put under control and guided to wherever the operator desires." (The demonstration with a toy train and truck isn't very convincing, however.) The machine requires diamonds to run, and a mysterious masked and cloaked villain named the Wizard appears to mastermind an operation to steal some. The Wizard's headquarters can apparently be reached only by taking a submarine on automatic pilot from a hidden grotto to an underground cavern.
Vicki Vale is the nominal love interest in this story, and her brother Jimmy has gotten in with the wrong crowd-the Wizard's gang. He causes a lot of mischief as Batman and Robin try to foil the nefarious plots of the Wizard-and generally succeed. A late development has the Wizard using a device meant to neutralize the stolen machine to create a beam that can turn him invisible. This was borrowed from the 1941 Dick Tracey Vs. Crime Inc. chapterplay with its invisible villain, the Ghost.
The serial manages to work up a lot of suspense over the true identity of the Wizard. Is it Professor Hammil (William Fawcett), who goes around in a wheelchair in public, but actually has a device that "energizes" him and allows him to walk? Is it the radio announcer Barry Brown (Rick Valin) who predicts the Wizard's crimes even before they happen? Or could it be that private detective who's always in the way? There are a couple of clever twists before the secret is disclosed, but the sharper viewers should figure out the ending before Batman does. When the Wizard's right hand is injured in a battle, all three main suspects show up with wounds in that same spot. Batman eventually uses infrared light to unmask the Wizard, just as Dick Tracy did to uncover the Ghost. The screenwriter's took a cue from Agatha Christie when they concocted the surprise conclusion.
Batman and Robin is an engaging serial, but has little of the atmosphere of the early comic stories. Everything seems to happen in broad daylight, with Batman rarely if ever engaging in nocturnal activity. Batman and Robin themselves are grim, humorless, and businesslike in their various guises, but this just makes them more dull than "dark." They drive a rather ordinary looking dark convertible in their wanderings. Robert Lowery, a Victor Mature look-alike who appeared in a variety of "B" movies, makes a passable Bruce Wayne/Batman. John Duncan, who plays Dick Grayson/Robin, is not a kid but a short young man in his twenties. He has the stocky build and flattened features of a pugilist and is hardly the boyish scamp of the comic books.
James Adams, as the photographer Vicki Vale, is interchangeable with a hundred other serial heroines, calling on Bruce Wayne for inexplicable reasons, as the plot demands. Veteran actor Lyle Talbot, who was Lex Luther in Atom Man Vs. Superman, plays Commissioner Gordan. Talbot is bland and lacking in authority and does his acting with his belly.
Besides having a mediocre musical score, Batman and Robin is cursed with some truly lame cliff-hangers. At the end of chapter two, Batman is fighting a hood atop a train (with the obligatory back projection) as it races toward a tunnel. But the Batman never seems to be in any danger. As the following chapter shows, all he has to do is either duck or move to one side.
Chapter three has him falling over a cliff (more like a hill actually) and simply landing on a tree, not far below. In chapters five and six, Batman and Vicki escape from water which has flaming gasoline on it by merely climbing onto the dock and up a ladder--not really the "death-defying" escape we would expect from the Caped Crusader. When Batman is left unconscious, surrounded by fire, at the end of chapter eight, he simply gets up and steps through some cartons in the following episode. Only on rare occasions does he use any special devices or have to show some ingenuity. He employs breathing tubes and an acetylene torch to get out of a CO2 trap in chapters six and seven.
The one decent cliff-hanger occurs at the end of chapter ten, in which Batman falls from a very high window only to thump hard on the ground behind a truck. There can be no denying that he fell this time and hit the sidewalk. How could he have survived? Of course, he didn't. Because it wasn't Batman in the costume but Jimmy Vale, trying to make up for his past wrongs by decoying the villains away from an unconscious Caped Crusader. Like the final cliff-hanger in the first Batman serial, this withholds information from the audience but is undeniably effective.
Batman and Robin has its share of inane moments, too. When Vicki is captured by the crooks and manages to repair a phone and call for help, she doesn't dial the Police with her location but instead contacts Alfred. This would have made sense if she new Batman's true identity, but what does she expect the unheroic Bruce Wayne--or his butler to do? In an earlier sequence when Batman is confronted by three hoodlums, he dives for the two unarmed men instead of the guy with the gun! Smart thinking Batman; this is one guy who definitely has luck on his side.
After their initial showing in the 40's both were re-released in the early 50's and even made it to foreign markets using over dubs to get the story across. In the 70's, they once again surfaced and were available on 8mm through magazine ads. Today, they are readily available on video cassette.
Overall, both serials are well worth watching if only to sit there and pick them apart for the absurdities that they present. No Oscar performances here folks, just some good Saturday morning adventures. So even though most of us weren't even born yet, just sit back, get the popcorn, and loose yourself in some early Bat-history.