The Bat Comes to Blu-ray

Holy silent gems, Batman! 

By Don Stradley

In their continuing effort to preserve and present classic films from the silent era, Undercrank Productions has cranked out another winner. Roland West’s The Bat (1926) is just about as good as it gets, and not only because of the furry, oversized ears worn by the title character. Granted, the strange “bat burglar” at the center of the movie is a remarkable little imp, nimble and weird and slightly scary looking, but he’s just one small part of why Undercrank’s Blu-ray of The Bat is such a treat. Not only is it a great new restoration that looks cleaner than polished silver, but it’s a chance to celebrate a forgotten chestnut of the “old dark house” genre.  

The Bat has more to offer than just a creaky plot about a mystery man stalking a house full of eccentrics. The stellar cast includes Keystone comedy favorite Louise Fazenda as a skittish maid. She fears every person she meets might be The Bat. Fazenda, whose shrieks can even be heard in a silent film, steals the show. She has competition from Emily Fitzroy as the wealthy spinster whose mansion is targeted. The stoic Fitzroy continues with her knitting even as bodies are dropping all around her. There’s also Jack Pickford – Mary’s brother – as the film’s well-meaning male ingenue. He’s a dead-ringer for Timothy Hutton.

Like Todd Browning, director West began his career as a teenager in vaudeville. Also, like Browning, he had a penchant for lurid crime films – he even directed Lon Chaney in the Browningesque The Monster – but behind the camera he was more like early Fritz Lang, his compositions as arid and sharp as anything coming out of Germany in those days. And the sets are impeccable – the mansion staked out by The Bat has ceilings and doorways that appear to be a mile high. The massiveness of the set underscores the strength of West as a director. The film was based on a popular Broadway play, and West’s genius is in his expanding of the script to include painterly exterior shots, or the way he pulls the camera back to show the cast moving through the enormous house, scrambling along the roof, or down endless spiral staircases.

Even if the old tropes of sinister Asian butlers and master criminals feel dated, there’s a quality in The Bat that makes one understand why the genre was so successful in the 1920s. Rather brilliantly, the movie never quite smacks us in the face with the masked villain. He’s parceled out to us in tantalizing bits: a creepy profile in a window, a dim outline in the fog, his scurrying figure making an escape. Many images in West’s movie would be borrowed by the Batman comic and TV series, including a searchlight effect with a bat silhouette, which will look familiar to anyone who remembers the old “Bat signal” over Gotham City. We also see The Bat scaling walls and swinging from ropes, much like Batman. According to comic book lore, Batman creator Bob Kane credited The Bat as an influence, but it's only when viewing the movie that you realize how much Kane lifted. For that matter, there’s another crook in the film who resembles The Shadow. Visually speaking, it was probably obvious to somebody that these masked men were darkly appealing and could be refashioned as crime fighters.

That’s part of what makes The Bat so fun. It seems strictly of its time, a slickly produced entertainment from United Artists, but we can also see the future of filmmaking in every shot. This is partly thanks to the slick camera work by Arthur Edeson, a three-time Oscar nominee who would later shoot Frankenstein, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca. His assistant? Greg Toland, who would also become a master. Once again, Undercrank’s Ben Model provides a beautiful, energetic score for the film, his organ seeming as breathless and panicky as the movie’s characters. West is an underrated director – he’s more known for being involved with Thelma Todd at the time of her mysterious death in 1935 – but he deserves to be appreciated. The Bat is a perfect place to start.

For those keeping score, The Bat  Blu-ray is presented by Undercrank Productions in a new 2K digital restoration from 35mm film elements preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive. The Bat runs 86 minutes, but the disc also includes two tasty special features. One is a brief retrospective of West, and the other is A Fraternity Mix-Up (1926), a slapstick short about a girl’s dormitory that is overrun by men in dresses and a “man-eating gorilla.”