Batman (1943) starring
Lewis Wilson, Douglas Croft, J. Carrol Naish, Shirley Patterson Directed by Lambert
Hillyer. Screenplay by Victor McLeod, Leslie Swabacker, Harry L. Fraser. Based
on Batman by Bill Finger (uncredited) and Bob Kane. Produced by Rudolph
C. Flothow Run time: 260 minutes. Black and White USA Superhero
There’s a long list of actors who
have played the Batman character on television and in movies: Adam West,
Michael Keaton, Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Afleck and
Robert Pattison come to mind. But the first actor to don the mask and cape was
Lewis Wilson, who starred in the first serial based on the DC character, Batman.
The Batman character was first
introduced in the 27th issue of the comic book Detective Comics on March 30,
1939. Created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger, Batman has become one of the most
iconic characters in popular culture.
Columbia Pictures had been making
serials since 1937, with their most successful ones based on comic strip or
radio characters, including: Mandrake the Magician (1939), The Shadow
(1940), Terry and the Pirates (1940), Captain Midnight (1942) and The
Phantom (1943) before Batman.
More than any other chapter play
released by the studio, Batman provides an example of the studio’s
approach to serial production, which involved light-hearted, gentle spoofing of
the subject matter, according to Fifty Years of Serial Thrills, a book
by Roy Kinnard. At that time, the Hollywood studios were not taking comic
books very seriously, and neither, apparently, was Columbia. The screenplay for
the serial bypassed any character background and motivation. We don't know Batman's or Robin's backstory, which might have been nice as an introduction for people new to the story.
The story of the serial had
little to do with the actual comic book. Besides the main characters, the
villain was new and, because of World War II, was Japanese, but played by a
white actor, J. Carrol Nash.
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| Rather than the Batmobile, Batman and Robin are driven around in this 1939 Cadillac Fleetwood 75 Convertible Sedan. |
Given Columbia’s reputation, at the time, being a low-budget studio, there is no Batmobile, which had been introduced in the comics in Batman #5 in 1941. And Gotham City, a stand-in for New York City, looks very much like Los Angeles at the time.
Told in 15 chapters, the serial has Batman/Bruce Wayne (Lewis Wilson) and his ward Robin/Dick Grayson (Douglas Croft) working for the U.S. government as special agents. Following Pearl Harbor, the government has become aware of a pro-Japanese sabotage group operating in Gotham City. While Batman being a special government agent comes up in the serial, he usually coordinates capturing crooks with the local police.
Chapter
1 - "The Electric Brain" Released on July 16, 1943 Run Time: 27
minutes
The chapter opens with a montage
of Batman (Lewis Wilson) and Robin (Douglas Croft) fighting various bad guys. They
end up leaving two thugs handcuffed to a light pole with a very special calling
card. They use a police call box to call Captain Arnold (Charles C. Wilson) of
the police.
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| Villains tied up and ready for the cops. |
Later, Bruce Wayne and Dick
Grayson go to meet Bruce's girlfriend Linda Page (Shirley Patterson). Bruce
plays up the lazy playboy angle a little too much for Linda's liking, leading
Dick to ask Bruce why he doesn't confide in her. He says, "On account of our special assignment
from Uncle Sam, our success depends on our keeping our identity a secret."
But that plot point gets put aside pretty early on.
Linda asks Bruce to take her to
meet her uncle, Martin Warren (Gus Glassmire), the next day when he
gets released from prison from what would later be proved to be trumped up
charges. However, before they arrive, Warren's old cellmate meets him
and takes him away. Linda and Bruce give chase in Bruce's car, but the bad guys
get away, thanks to a special gas that changes the color of their car.
Martin is taken to a House of
Horrors carnival ride in Little Tokyo, which the narrator tells us is now
practically a ghost town "since a wise government rounded up the
shifty-eyed Japs." (Warning: the serial is dated in its attitudes, and
because this is during World War II, a little more than slightly racist.)
The bad guys take a ride through
the House of Horrors, which features wax figures of Japanese soldiers torturing
white men and menacing demure white women. Their car stops halfway through and
they enter a secret door, being buzzed in by Dr. Tito Daka (by J. Carroll
Naish), a spy for Hirohito, and introduces Warren to a group of fellow
ex-cons/traitors to their country. But Daka needs an industrialist, which is
why he’s had Warren brought to him.
When Daka asks him to join with
him, Warren replies, "I'm an American, first and always, and no amount of
torture conceived by your twisted Oriental brain will make me change my
mind." But Daka does not believe in torture and instead says he will turn
Warren into an electro-zombie. But first he uses truth serum to determine the
location of radium used by the Gotham City Foundation.
Daka needs the radium to power a ray gun. With the large amount of radium from the Foundation, he can construct a large enough ray gun to bring the U.S. to its knees. But first, his thugs must use the small ray gun to blow open the safe holding the radium.
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| Using a ray gun to blow open a safe. |
But before they can escape, they are intercepted by Batman and Robin. There is a huge fight, and Batman is thrown off the roof of the building.
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| It looks as though Batman was falling to his death. |
Chapter
2 - "The Bat's Cave" Released on July 23, 1943 Run time: 18 minutes
As with most serials, a new
chapter starts with covering the cliffhanger ending of the previous chapter.
Batman falls, but lands on a handy painters' scaffold. From there, he climbs
back up to the roof, just in time to capture one of the thugs as he is leaving
with the ray gun.
 |
| Robin (Douglas Croft) and Batman (Lewis Wilson) bring one of Daka's men back to the bat cave. |
Batman and Robin bring him back to the Batcave. They threaten to leave him alone with the bats unless he talks, which he instantly does. They then head to the mansion, where they use the ray to scare Alfred (William Austin), Bruce Wayne’s butler and a helper/chauffeur with Batman and Robin’s escapades.
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| Dick Grayon (Douglas Croft) and Bruce Wayne (Lewis Wilson) play a joke on Alfred. |
Meanwhile, back at his lair, Dr. Daka aka Prince Daka dismisses the Batman as a "bungling amateur" and is furious that the radium gun has been lost. It doesn't occur to him for a second, though, that Batman might have laid hands on it. Instead, he sends his thugs to capture Linda Page (who works at the Foundation) to see if she knows where the radium gun is. Bruce and Dick try to keep an eye on Linda, but she is captured as Dick is looking the other way.
So, Batman and Robin follow up on their only other lead, a boarding house named by their prisoner as a place where one of Daka's other thugs hangs out. Luckily, this is where Linda is being held. They attempt to rescue her, but during the scuffle, a jar of acid is broken. Batman, Robin, and Linda exit through a window to escape the fumes and try walking on tight wire connecting two buildings. When Daka's thugs swing down a live electrical wire, it causes the wire to burst into sparks as Batman is walking it. As a result, he falls.
Chapter
3 - "Mark of the Zombies" Released on July 30, 1943 Run Time: 18
minutes
Chapter 3 starts with Batman
catching his bat-rope and descending safely.
The crooks speculate that Prince-Doctor Daka will be angry, but head thug Forster (Robert Fiske) declares, "I'm not afraid of any squint-eye."
When the thugs report their failure to Daka, he is furious. "Batman is a
rank amateur," he declares, not like the members of his League of the New.
Daka then decides to give Warren the zombie treatment. Daka tells him,
"Resistance is useless, Warren. I suggest that you adopt an attitude of
fatalistic resignation."
Then he lowers a device that resembles a diving helmet thing over Warren's head
and activates his equipment. Sort of like Frankenstein’s workshop, there is
much smoking and electric zapping and Warren is turned into a zombie.
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| Warren (Gus Glassmire) is turned into a zombie controlled by Daka (J. Carrol Naish). |
Forster enters the hideout past the caveman guard and shows Daka a newspaper ad that basically says, "Found: one ray gun." Daka realizes it’s a trap set by Batman, but tells his men to show up an hour early to catch Batman by surprise. He then orders them to use the newly-retrieved ray gun to destroy a railroad bridge before a supply train crosses. He also gives them a bomb to use as backup.
At 9:00, the thugs arrive at the rendezvous and send one man to scout the area. Robin follows him and gets conked on the head.
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| Forster (Robert Fiske) holds a gun on Alfred (William Austin) in disguise. |
Robin chases the guy who hit him up to the roof while the other thugs go to claim the ray gun. There, Forster confronts Alfred in disguise, while Batman lurks unobtrusively outside the window.
Robin and the
guy he’s fighting crash in through a skylight, and the fight is on. The Dynamic
Duo are getting the worst of it, when Alfred picks up a dropped pistol, closes
his eyes and fires blindly all around the room. The crooks flee, but not before
Batman strips Forster's coat off with the map showing where they're to blow the
train bridge.
Even though he
didn’t actually hit any of the thugs, Alfred is still excited.
Alfred: How many did I kill?
Batman: Seven.
Alfred: But there were only four.
Robin: You killed three of them twice.
Batman and Robin examine the map and race to the train bridge, where they fight
the thugs again. Forster doesn't finish setting the charge before Batman
interrupts him, and has to flee as the train is bearing down on them. One of
the thugs throws a wrench that hits Batman in the head, and he falls on the
tracks as the train approaches.
Chapter 4 – “Slaves of the Rising Sun” Released on August 6, 1943 Run Time: 19 minutes
This chapter opens with Robin saving Batman and jumping into the water just before the train passes.
The thugs, though, believe that the duo have drowned.
Daka happily feeds his pet alligators, Ojonojo and Sakosako, who live in a
secret pit beneath his meeting room floor. He is about to throw Warren in as
well when he is interrupted. Forster arrives and proudly announces the death of
Batman. Daka is not pleased, however. The train got through unscathed, and he
still has no ray gun. He castigates Forster, who replies that he's sick of
working for a Jap anyway. He knows who's going to win the war, and it's not
going to be the New Order. Daka calls in a couple of his zombies.
But Forster shoots one, so Daka calls Warren off. Forster holds his gun on Daka
and says he's leaving. Daka says that of course he can leave. "That's the
kind of answer that fits the color of your skin!" Forster says and heads
for the door. Then he falls into the still exposed alligator pit.
Linda calls Bruce and tells him that there's a new radium shipment coming in to
the Gotham Foundation and asks Bruce if he wants to come along with her to
pick it up. Only she has to stop off along the way to see a mystic swami at
1120 Front Street who claims to have information about Warren. Bruce is
suspicious and heads to see the swami first.
The Front Street swami is, of course, a front for Daka's gang. Ironic! Bruce
knocks out the swami and takes his place. When Linda arrives, he tells her to
leave quickly. Unfortunately, there's one of Daka’s boys waiting for her in the
lobby. He grabs her and knocks her out. Bruce, Dick, and Alfred find Linda
moments later.
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| Alfred holds up Linda Page (Shirley Patterson) while Bruce and Dick look on. |
The thugs take off in an armored car and Batman and Robin give chase. Batman jumps onto the roof of the armored car and uses the radium gun to blow a hole in the roof. Then he attacks the driver. The armored car loses control and goes off a cliff.
This chapter opens with Batman jumping out of the armored car just before it rolls off the cliff.
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| Batman leaps from the armored car before it goes over the cliff. |
Meanwhile, Daka gets a call from a Japanese submarine. The sub has a package for him that it will deliver at Smuggler's Rocks.
Back at Wayne Manor, Bruce gets a special coded letter. In his lab, he demonstrates for Alfred and Dick how to make the invisible message appear. It's a special assignment from Washington to guard an experimental plane.
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| Dick and Alfred look on as Bruce reveals an invisible message. |
At Daka's place, the special package turns out to be a coffin. Inside is the body of a Japanese soldier. In his lab, Daka explains that the soldier is not dead. "This brave Son of Heaven is under hypnotic influence, or what is commonly known as a state of Animated Suspension.”
Daka reanimates the soldier, who tells him to steal the experimental plane and
fly it to Pelican Island. He pulls a button off his uniform and says that
details are in there. Then he dies.
Bruce and Dick go undercover as airplane factory workers, communicating by
radios hidden in their pockets, while Daka zombifies two mechanics from the
plant and tells them to steal the plane. The mechanics beat up the pilots and
Robin takes the plane, with Batman riding along. He tells Robin via radio
that he's just going to ride along to see where they take the plane, then he
promptly gets into a fight with the zombies as the Army shoots the plane down.
Chapter 6 – “Poison Peril” Released
on August 20, 1943 Run Time: 17 minutes
Batman survives the plane crash without a scratch. He grabs the zombie headpiece off one of the mechanics and runs away before the soldiers arrive.
Daka reports the failure to the submarine, and says they'll try to steal the plans to the plane instead, but then the Navy destroys the sub.
Daka orders one of his men to plant a secret microphone at Linda Page's place because she seems to have some connection to Batman. Daka hopes they'll learn his secret identity. When one of the henchmen speculates that maybe Linda's boyfriend, Bruce Wayne, is Batman, Daka says, "Don't be absurd."
Meanwhile, Linda calls Bruce to say that an old friend of theirs, Ken Colton
(Charles Middleton), is in town looking for her uncle Martin. Bruce visits
Colton at Linda's place, and Colton pulls a chunk of pitchblende out of his
pocket. Colton has discovered a radium mine.
Daka needs to know the location to the radium mine, so he sends thugs to
Colton's hotel room, but Batman and Robin appear and fight them off. The thugs
flee, and Batman and Robin give chase down the fire escape. But the thugs
escape.
Bruce calls Colton the next day to see how he is, and Colton mentions he has gotten a call from Martin Warren, asking to meet him. Bruce, knowing Warren has disappeared, tells Colton he will investigate to make sure it's not a trap.
Alfred gets pressed into service again, disguised as Colton this time. The thugs threaten to drop him in a vat of acid if he doesn't tell them where the mine is, and when that doesn't work, they try the age-old torture method of yanking his beard, which comes off.
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| Robin and Batman fight Daka's thugs, again. |
Batman and Robin attack and get the worst of it. Stray bullets pierce the acid tank, and wires are ripped off the wall, and when the electricity gets into the acid, there's one huge explosion.
Chapter 7 – “The Phoney Doctor” Released on August 27, 1943 Run Time: 16 minutes
Robin and Alfred come stumbling out from the other room they got locked in during the fight to find Batman alive under a couple of ceiling beams that had fallen against one another to leave a space underneath.
Meanwhile, Colton is upset that
the male nurse assigned to watch him doesn't play cards. He gets dressed and
decides he needs to start packing heat. He shoves a huge revolver down his
pants and hides a derringer up his sleeve attached to an elastic cord. Then he
tells the nurse to beat it.
Bruce has apparently reported to
Captain Arnold that he witnessed the men assaulting Colton. He looks at mug shots and recognizes one of the men. Arnold identifies the man as Sam Fletcher
(John Maxwell), a disgraced civil engineer, and says he'll get a warrant issued
for his arrest.
Meanwhile, Fletcher is in
Colton's room, posing as a doctor. He knocks Colton out with chloroform and
takes him to Daka's secret base in a fake ambulance. When Bruce arrives a
little later, the only clue is the handkerchief Fletcher used to drug Colton.
Bruce examines the handkerchief in his lab and discovers it has a Japanese
laundry mark, and by coincidence, there just happens to be one Japanese laundry
in the city.
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| Colton (Charles Middleton) is subdued by Daka's Caveman guard (Jerry Frank). |
At his secret base, Daka
threatens Colton with death unless he divulges the location of his radium mine.
Colton pretends to be scared before he pulls out his derringer and forces Daka
to open the exit door. But as Colton is exiting the door, he is knocked out by
the caveman standing outside (Jerry Frank), pretending to be a wax
figure on exhibit in the Cave of Horrors.
That night, Batman and Robin
visit the Japanese laundry to look for clues, and run into the thugs who are
there to retrieve Daka’s mining equipment stashed at the laundry on the third
floor. The Dynamic Duo drop in on the thugs from the skylight and launch into
yet another fistfight that they end up on the losing end of. Robin is knocked
silly, and Batman is dropped down an elevator shaft, three stories straight
down to land face-first on concrete.
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| Batman lying at the bottom of the elevator shaft. |
Then the thugs send the elevator down to crush him.
Chapter 8 – “Lured by Radium”
Released on September 3, 1943 Run Time: 17 minutes
After having been knocked unconscious, Robin comes to and stops the elevator just in time. Then he runs down to see if Bruce is all right. Batman has survived the three-story fall onto concrete, without injury.
They hear sirens and decide to
beat it, because as Robin says, "We don't want the police to find us in
these outfits."
Daka tortures Colton in the
zombie chair. Colton, who acts like a huge tough guy, screams for mercy after
about a second in the chair. Seriously, he's the only one in the entire serial
who wusses out before the zombie procedure is complete. He tells Daka that
he'll take the men to his mine the next day.
Linda visits Bruce, worried about
Colton, and says she wants to visit the mine to see if he's there. Bruce agrees
to take her there.
The next day, Colton rides to the
mine in a car along with six of Daka’s thugs.
Meanwhile, Bruce and Linda stop
to talk to an old Indian at a trading post who offers to sell them pottery made
from pitchblende.
The thugs go straight to the
mine, while Bruce, Linda, Dick, and Alfred go to Colton's cabin. Bruce and Dick
head up to visit the mine while Linda has lunch with Alfred. Bruce and Dick
spot the crooks' car outside the mine and change into their alternate
personalities.
Meanwhile, Colton makes a break for it, heads down a secret shaft and emerges through a trapdoor into his cabin, ruining Linda's sandwich. He grabs some dynamite to blow up the mine. Batman and Robin fight the crooks in the mine, while others assault the cabin from outside, knocking out Alfred. Linda flees down the trapdoor and into the middle of a raging fistfight. Someone falls on the plunger and the dynamite goes off.
Chapter 9 – “The Sign of the Sphinx“ Released on
September 10,1943 Run Time: 17 minutes
Daka tells his men to start
recruiting.
Meanwhile, Batman has Marshall
tied to a chair in the Batcave, only Marshall doesn't scare as easily as the
first guy. So, Batman leaves him alone in the cave. Marshall quickly slips his
bonds and runs to the phone so he can call and warn Fletcher and his men.
However, it's a trick. Batman purposely let Marshall escape his bonds so that
he could see the number which Marshall dials using a huge phone dial display on
his wall.
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| Batman and Robin watch the number Marshall dials. |
Batman poses as the guy on the other end so Marshall doesn't get wise to the trick.
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| Batman poses as Chuck White at the Sphinx Club. |
Batman figures out that the number Marshall dialed was the Sphinx Club down by the waterfront. After they drop Marshall off at the police station, Bruce decides to go undercover and disguises himself as Chuck White, ex-boxer, and low-life thug. He goes to the Sphinx Club and throws Marshall's name around. Bernie (Warren Jackson), the bartender, takes him in to see Fletcher. But Fletcher decides to shake him down, so White pulls a gun. But the others manage to overwhelm him.
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| The bat signal saves Chuck White. |
Robin, watching through a window, distracts the thugs by shining a Bat-Signal flashlight into the room.
The goons chase
Robin while Chuck White disappears and changes into his Batsuit. Two of the
thugs chase Robin onto a ship at the pier while Batman fights the others on the
dock.
Robin dives off the ship, while Batman is knocked out by a punch, after which one of the thugs drops a gangplank on him.
Chapter 10 – “Flying Spies” Released
on September 17, 1943 Run Time: 18 minutes
When the chapter opens, we see that Batman rolls out from under the gangplank just in the nick of time.
The thugs report to Daka yet
again that they've killed the Batman. When Daka mentions the numerous times
before that they've made the same claim, they say that this time it's for sure.
Daka begins to wonder if there's more than one Batman. Daka gets a call from an
associate, stating that they've stolen some radium for him and will drop it
from an airplane at a designated location that night.
Meanwhile, Bruce gets another
coded message from the government, telling him to be on the lookout for the
radium, which was stolen from "Michigan Hospital in Chicago." Bruce
decides to try his Chuck White guise again. He goes back to the Sphinx Club and
meets Daka's recruiter (not Fletcher), who is supposed to bring recruits to
another secret location so Daka can look at them.
Chuck is ushered into a room,
where Daka spies on him through the eyes of a painting.
"He looks like a cheap
gangster," Daka says, but tells the boys to give him a tryout anyway. They
take Chuck to the site of the radium drop.
The radium is dropped out of the
bathroom window of a passenger airliner, and Chuck White runs away, returning
moments later as the Batman! Robin is quickly knocked out, but Batman grabs one
of the thugs' cars and takes off toward the radium. The thugs shoot out one of
his tires, and Batman appears to die in a fiery car crash.
Chapter 11 – “A Nipponese Trap” Released on September
24, 1943 Run Time: 16 minutes
When the chapter opens, we see Batman jump out of the car just before it goes over the road.
Meanwhile, the thugs gloat over Batman's death and run off to fetch the radium, completely ignoring the unconscious Robin at their feet. Robin gets up, groggy, and runs back to Bruce Wayne's car with Alfred and together they fetch Bruce and head back to the Bat-Cave.
The thugs deliver the radium to Daka, who gloats that now he can build the
full-size Atom Disintegrator, a weapon "more destructive than anything Man
ever dreamed of."
Back at Wayne Manor, Robin eats a banana while Bruce does his make-up. Even
though the gang now knows that Chuck White is not a dependable recruit,
Marshall has never met Chuck White, so Bruce figures White can coax more
information out of him. He has himself arrested and thrown into a cell next to
Marshall. Chuck tells Marshall about how he broke into a house and found a
weird cave full of bats and stuff. Marshall asks if he can find the house
again, and White says sure. So, Marshall tells him where to go with that
information if he gets out first.
Alfred and Dick go to a bail bondsman to free Chuck White. Shortly afterward,
Daka gets a call that Chuck White is in jail. Daka, suspecting that White works
for Batman, sends his own men to bail White out, and when White emerges, they
crash into his cab with a big delivery truck. They drive off, chuckling that
they've killed him "for sure."
But in the next scene, we see Chuck White getting out of the hospital with a
bandage on his ribs, but apparently suffering no pain at all. He goes to a
phone and calls Dick and Alfred to come meet him at the hospital, while the
thugs report to Daka that White is dead.
In the car, he changes into his batsuit as he directs Alfred to the address
Marshall gave him. It's a cabin on a rural road. Batman and Robin bust into the
place and fight the thugs, and finally win one, mainly because Robin picks up a
dropped pistol and holds it on the crooks.
But then Batman gets distracted and the thugs overpower Robin despite the gun,
and both of them are knocked out. The thugs debate whether to kill Batman right
away or take him alive to Daka, but first, they unmask him and believe Batman
is Chuck White.
Meanwhile, Robin runs to the next room and summons police on the thugs'
shortwave radio. The thugs set a bomb to blow up the cabin, but before the last
one leaves, Batman jumps up and fights with him. Robin comes in to help and
they knock the guy out, then turn to run, but the house explodes.
Chapter 12 – “Embers of Evil”
Released on October 1, 1943 Run Time: 15 minutes
As the chapter opens, we see Batman and Robin dive through a trapdoor in the floor before the bomb goes off. They emerge outside the fence, near their car.
Daka receives a report that Batman is dead yet again, and that he was Chuck
White. Daka is glad to hear the news, but worries that Chuck was just one
member of a large force of Batmen, so he decides to use Linda Page to bait a
trap and see if he can lure another one out of hiding.
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| Medusa cigarettes are poisoned. |
Daka also learns that Marshall is still alive and in jail, so he sends Bernie from the Sphinx Club to deliver Marshall a pack of very special cigarettes, Medusa.
The next day, Bruce sees Bernie leave the police station as he is entering.
Captain Arnold has called Bruce in to see if Marshall is one of the men he saw
earlier, when he was reviewing mug shots.
Marshall is dead inside his cell, but Bruce identifies him anyway. Bruce finds a half-smoked cigarette on the floor and makes off with it.
Meanwhile, as Linda is leaving work, she sees a car drive by with her uncle as a passenger. She jumps in her own car and follows it to the Ajax Metal Works, where she is kidnapped. Other members of the gang spread clues to lead Batman to the factory, if he's still alive, that is.
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| Captain Arnold (Charles C. Wilson) is about to light up a Medusa, but stops himself. |
Bruce determines that the cigarette was poisoned and calls Captain Arnold as Batman to tell him about the cigarettes and Bernie's involvement. And just in time, too, because Captain Arnold is about to light up one of those Medusa cigarettes himself.
Next Bruce tries to track down Linda and goes to the Ajax Metal Works. Switching to Batman, he and Robin sneak into the basement. Batman sets off a smoke bomb to lure the crooks into his own trap. When they come down, Batman and Robin attack from the smoke!
In the fight, a cigarette is dropped onto oily rags and a real fire starts. Batman sends Robin to call the fire department while he searches for Linda. The fire spreads, and he is crushed under flaming debris.
Chapter 13 – “Eight Steps Down” Released on October 8, 1943 Run Time: 15 minutes
The chapter opens and the wreckage narrowly misses Batman, and he manages to escape the flaming building as firemen arrive.
He calls Captain Arnold to ask about Bernie, but the captain says that when they raided the place, no one there knew any Bernie. So, Batman visits the abandoned club himself, and quickly finds a secret room where Bernie is holed up.
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| Daka, happily working on his Atom Disintegrator. |
Meanwhile Daka, happily working on his Atom Disintegrator model, gets a report that yet another Batman has been killed.
He's in a good
mood when Linda Page arrives.
Daka: Welcome to my humble
abode, Miss Page.
Linda: A Jap!
Daka: Please to say, 'Nipponese.' That is the courteous way of
addressing one of the future rulers of the world.
Linda is excited to see her uncle Martin, even though he's a zombie.
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| Linda is emotional when she sees her uncle. |
Batman and
Robin, having no clues to work from, go back to the house where Daka looked out
from the painting. After a bit of searching, they find a secret passage, but
that leads to a dead-end that is the back-door to Daka's secret HQ. Batman
sends Robin for a crowbar while he searches for another secret door. He steps
on a switch in the floor and Daka is signaled that someone is in the tunnel.
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| Batman is trapped in a room with knives in the wall. |
He turns on a monitor and sees Batman. But he has the place riddled with traps, so he moves to a bank of wall switches. Linda shouts a warning at the TV, but Batman can’t hear it. Daka berates her for being stupid, then takes a moment to savor his victory before giggling and throwing a switch. Batman falls into a pit! And the walls, with big knives embedded, start to close in on him.
Meanwhile, Daka is turning Linda into one of his zombies.
Chapter 14 – “The Executioner Strikes” Released on October 15, 1943 Run Time: 16 minutes
Robin gets back with a crowbar, which he throws down to Batman in the well. Using the crowbar, he manages to stop the walls from closing in and allowing Batman to escape.
Batman and Robin decide to grab some equipment to test the walls and find the secret entrance.
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| Linda is turned into one of Daka's zombies. |
In Daka's lab, Linda is now a Daka zombie like her uncle.
Daka goes to the pit to gloat over Batman's dead body, but finds him gone. "The Batman must be a magician or a devil," he exclaims, then blows up the mines he has planted in the tunnel, collapsing it completely.
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| Batman and Robin look through the wreckage in the tunnels. |
A few minutes after Daka blows the mines, Robin and Batman investigate the wreckage. They decide to check city blueprints of the entire neighborhood to see if they can find another way into the secret headquarters.
When they get back to their car, thugs see Robin getting into the car. They follow the car and stop it, but by that time, Bruce has changed into civvies. He has Dick hide, and talks to the thugs, who admit they must have been mistaken.
As they drive away, Bruce changes back into Batman and chases them down. A big fist fight ensues, with even Alfred getting involved.
They take the defeated thugs back to the Batcave, where he has Bernie tied up.
But before he can question them, Alfred calls down with news of a mysterious
note from Linda, asking Bruce to meet her at a certain address. Even though
they know it’s a trap, Batman decides to go anyway.
He goes into the building alone, telling Robin he'll call on his "Batman
radio" if he needs help. He finds Linda sitting in a chair, unresponsive.
Thugs club Batman from behind and they toss him into a crate.
They haul the crate back to Daka's headquarters, where Daka has the zombies throw it into the alligator pit.
Chapter 15 – “The Doom of the Rising Sun” Released on
October 22, 1943 Run Time: 20 minutes
Daka tells his thugs that this is their last chance and sends them out to take
Batman alive. Batman and Robin fight Daka’s men and win.
Batman leaves Robin to tie them
up while he goes in to find Linda. He is grabbed by zombies Pat and George and
brought to the secret lab, where Daka plans to turn him into a zombie.
Daka has Batman strapped in the zombie chair and takes a few minutes to gloat over his victory. Meanwhile, Robin notices that the zombie guards ignore him, so he walks by them into the lab.
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| With Daka's help, Batman brings Linda back from being a zombie. |
Robin captures Daka by lassoing him from behind. He then frees Batman, who forces Daka to help him de-zombify Linda.
But Daka escapes his bonds and threatens Linda with a knife! He backs toward the door, planning to escape. Batman tells Robin to push the button that closes the outside door, but Robin pushes the wrong button and drops Daka into the alligator pit.
Alfred shows up with the police. Captain Arnold wants to arrest Batman, but Alfred sneaks over to the button panel and figures it out instantly, opening another secret door to distract the cops, then opening the alligator pit to keep them from pursuing our heroes as they make their escape.
Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson show up moments later and no one is
the wiser of their secret identities.
In retrospect, this should really be no one’s introduction to
Batman. Because it was made at the height of World War II, the serial hasn’t
aged well. This is a common problem for films like this, made during the War, that were also shot with propaganda in mind. Such terms like “Jap!” and "slant-eyes" were
acceptable given the circumstance, but are not today.
Further, this Batman and Robin are not above using guns, or killing, which
seems different from the character in the comic books it claims to be based
on. No one is shot and it may have been a cheaper alternative for the stories, but it still seems to stick out.
As noted in various sources, the serial is also notable for many production mistakes and plot holes. These range from Batman losing his cape during a fight in one shot, only for it to reappear in the next, and continuity errors, such as Chapter 1 mentioning that Batman operates in "Gotham City" but receiving a letter addressed to "Los Angeles" in Chapter 5. One of the most notable of plotholes is the transitionary cliffhanger between Chapter 5 and Chapter 6, where Batman survives a plane crash that kill two of Daka's henchmen. The explanation behind his survival is never given, both on screen or the shooting scripts.
That said, the serial would
introduce several elements of the Batman mythos that would
become permanent in future depictions. The most notable of these include:
Batman and Robin's use of the Batcave (called "The Bat's Cave" in the
serial), hidden beneath Wayne Manor and accessible via a hidden entrance. The
depiction of Alfred is slim and sporting a thin moustache, rather than the
portly cleanshaven gentleman he'd previously been drawn as in Batman #16.
The acting is about as good as
the story.
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| Lewis Wilson was the first Batman on the screen. |
Lewis Wilson’s claim to fame is sadly this serial. He was only 23 at the time. 1943 was the busiest year of his career, though most of his roles were uncredited. He made fewer appearances in 1944 and then no films until 1951 and his final film was Naked Alibi (1954). He joined the Pasadena Playhouse before leaving show business to work for General Foods. His appearance as Batman is more a footnote than anything else. While not bad looking, he doesn’t really seem to have much charisma.
Robin was played by Douglas Croft, a teen actor who had a very short career. He was also the first actor to portray Robin on the big screen, which is his career highlight. He made his first film appearance in Remember the Day. My favorite role of his was playing George M. Cohan as a boy in Yankee Doodle Dandy. His film career ended after he was critically injured in a motorcycle accident in 1947, though he did make one more film, Killer McCoy, later that year. He’s passing as the Boy Wonder but doesn’t really rise above the story, and several scenes, like the many fist fight scenes, were obviously done with a stunt man.
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| Shirley Patterson as Linda Page. |
Linda Page was played by Shirley
Patterson, a former Miss California. She was discovered by a talent scout while
performing in a little theater production. A contract player at Columbia, she
would appear in 40 films, but her appearance in the Batman serial would
be her most memorable role. Linda is sort of eye-candy and while she is a part
of the plot, she isn’t really given many chances to show her acting chops.
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| J. Carrol Naish plays Daka. |
While using a Japanese actor would have been verboten during World War II, the studio turned to J. Carrol Naish, a white American actor who wore yellow-face to play Tito Daka. He had a career that spanned over 200 films, as well as a long-running radio show, Life with Luigi. A dialogue specialist, Naish was nominated twice as Best Supporting Actor in two films, Sahara (1943), playing an Italian soldier, and for playing a Hispanic father in A Medal for Benny (1945). However, his depiction of a Japanese saboteur is not one that has aged well. I’m sure he was trying his best to be menacing, but he comes off as less.
The serial's rights are in dispute,
as the rights to Batman and the copyright are owned by Warner Bros, but
Columbia and its parent, Sony, own the distribution rights. Though released in
the United States, the serial cannot be released on home media outside of Region
1 by either company. It was while I was working at Sony Pictures that I picked
up this, and the follow up serial Batman and Robin, on DVD for the
novelty.
The two serials were often
reshown at certain cinemas during the 1950s and 1960s, often as An Evening with
Batman & Robin. According to several sources, the popularity of these
reshows helped convince ABC to produce the 1960s Batman series.
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| The serial is partially responsible for the Batman TV series starring Adam West and Burt Ward. |
The serial is only really worth watching if you’re a die-hard Batman lover and wanted to see how the first treatment of the character was handled on film. Otherwise, this is not a rewarding watch. However, it is an example of how Hollywood handled propaganda during World War II. And like Disney’s Der Fuehrer's Face, also released in 1943, not something the studio would point to with pride.
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