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The Bat
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - The Film Detective Review written by and copyright: Eric Cotenas (14th August 2016). |
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The Film
 Celebrated novelist Cornelia Van Gorder (Bewitched's Agnes Moorehead) rents out The Oaks mansion outside the town of Zenith the season in search of atmosphere, but she does not expect to find herself embroiled in a real-life murder mystery. Abandoned by the superstitious staff, Cornelia has only the company of her longtime maid Lizzie (Castle in the Desert's Lenita Lane) and recently-engaged chauffeur Warner (Return of the Fly's John Sutton) during the stormy nights with rumors of the return to the area of the killer known as "The Bat" who rips out the throats of his victims with steel claws. Cornelia and Lizzie are present at the town bank when young chief cashier Vic Bailey (Revenge of the Cheerleaders' Mike Steele) discovers that over a million dollars in securities are missing from the vault to which only he and bank president John Fleming (Sergeant York's Harvey Stephens) have access. With Fleming recovering from a nervous breakdown in the mountains with his personal physician Dr. Malcolm Wells (The House on Haunted Hill's Vincent Price), Vic is left to take the fall for the embezzlement. That, of course, was Fleming's plan as he informs Wells that he is responsible for taking the securities, converting them to cash, and hiding them in his country house The Oaks. Thinking nothing of Bailey's predicament, Fleming offers Wells half of the money to help fake his death and provide a too damaged to be identified body just in case the court acquits Bailey and comes after him. Wells, however, decides he would like more than his share and takes advantage of a forest fire to do away with Fleming. Returning to Zenith, Wells socializes with Cornelia at The Oaks and discovers that Bailey's former secretary-turned-wife Dale (The Curse of the Faceless Man's Elaine Edwards) and his current secretary Judy (former Little Rascals child star Darla Hood) – who is set to provide the court with damning evidence against Fleming – are staying as guests. Wells is not alone in urging Cornelia to leave The Oaks for fear of The Bat; there is also too-kind Lieutenant "Andy" Anderson (The Bride of Frankenstein's Gavin Gordon) who is narrowing down the identity of the clawed criminal, and also Fleming's charming realtor nephew Mark (Walk on the Wild Side's John Bryant) who has come to suspect like Cornelia and Dale that Fleming was the real culprit and the purloined properties are somewhere in the house. The Bat has also lighted upon this notion and makes nightly visits down the corridors, killing anyone who crosses his path and narrowing down the list of possible suspects. Based on the 1920 play by novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart and playwright Avery Hopwood - novelized in 1926 by Rinehart, the same year it as first filmed by Roland West as The Bat (and then later refilmed by West as the talkie The Bat Whispers) – and cited by Bob Kane to have been an influence on his Batman comics, The Bat was even more of an antiquated property by the time it was brought back to the screen by scripter Crane Wilbur (The Story of Molly X) helmed it as his penultimate directorial effort (cinema got much more mileage out of adaptations and riffs on the play's contemporary old dark house alternative The Cat and the Canary from John Willard). Wilbur had had previously adapted Mystery of the Wax Museum into House of Wax followed by the original The Mad Magician as Price vehicles, and the star thought the play – which had terrified him as a youth – could be revised and brought up-to-date*; but Price can do little more thank skulk around ambiguously like one of his later TV guest roles. A few changes have been made from the play and novel, but not all for the better. Making Cornelia a mystery novelist rather than just a spunky and adventurous socialite being forced to wind down by her maid Lizzie and niece Dale gives Moorehead something to sink her teeth into, but making Dale the wife of the bank cashier means transforming another character into even more obvious a red herring than he was before. Price is too obviously a red herring no matter how much verbal sparring he exchanges with Anderson as they try to throw suspicion upon one another, and the script is at its most contrived when it had to come up with excuses to give each of the suspects the same telltale injury inflicted upon the fleeing criminal when Cornelia nails him in the back of the neck with a fireplace poker. Sensing that the film is going to run overlong, the third act uses scenes of Cornelia dictating her novel to Dale to cover the exposition; but in doing so, suddenly and abruptly turns the climax into a flashback with the fact that Cornelia has lived to tell the tale scuttling any suspense as to her survival when she is shut up in an airtight secret passage or directly threatened by The Bat. These framing scenes also seem as though they might have been written around scheduling issues as Dale disappears from the climax and is replaced by former red herring housekeeper Jane when it would seem to better pander to the audience if at least one of the climax's three damsels in distress were not middle-aged. The old dark house creakiness, as flatly realized by seasoned DP Joseph Biroc (It's A Wonderful Life) does indeed look like a horror-themed episode of a TV sitcom while the comic interplay between Moorehead and Lane barely raises a chuckle no matter how hardly they try to engage with the material. Regardless of those shortcomings, the game presences of Price and Moorehead do grant the film the sort of nostalgic guilty pleasure value of more contemporary but equally dated and creaky theatrical old dark house consigned to daytime TV like Terror in the Wax Museum or House of the Seven Corpses.
Video
A longtime VHS and DVD public domain staple from such companies as Goodtimes, Alpha Video, and Diamond among others, The Bat got its first legitimate release by The Roan Group/Troma (in a non-anamorphic 1.66:1 letterboxed transfer double billed with The House on Haunted Hill) in 1999 followed by a superior fullscreen 1999 DVD from Anchor Bay. An HD-mastered transfer first appeared on DVD through Film Chest Media, and that same master seems to have been the source for The Film Detective's high-bitrate 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer. Apart from light surface vertical scratches, the black and white image is clean, crisp, and free of overt digital noise reduction. The heightened resolution actually makes the film look cheaper in many respects thanks to the lighting and half-hearted attempts at gothic mansion interiors (the exterior miniature is even more obvious in the opening shot). This is certainly the best the film has looked. The Blu-ray master includes the opening Allied Artists presentation card along with the start of jazzy "The Bat" theme while some earlier transfers started abruptly with the title optical.
Audio
The sole audio option is a clean, lossless English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono in which the jazzy theme is given full-bodied presence from the brassy highs to the bassy lows, sounding less dated than the film looks. The optional English SDH subtitles ably transcribe the dialogue for the most part, aside from being unable to distinguish "rabid" from "rapid" in context of the dialogue.
Extras
There are no extras.
Overall
A old dark house suspenser given an HD upgrade highlighting the sterling facets of its guilty pleasures.
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