by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark
When my husband Charles arrived home from work early enough last night to watch a movie, I ran The Bat Whispers, a 1930 talkie remake of the Mary Roberts Rinehart-Avery Hopwood play The Bat that had previously been filmed as a silent in 1926 by the same director, Roland West. The film doesn’t have a screenplay credit but apparently Roland West did the adaptation himself. West was independently wealthy and, like Howard Hughes, took up film production simply because he thought it would be fun to make movies. He was known not only for making movies whose stories took place at night but actually shooting them at night, and he was a director of real visual imagination. Charles and I had recently watched his first sound film, Alibi (1929), though apparently my journal comments on it didn’t make it to the moviemagg blog, and it was a nicely plotted gangster thriller even though it had some of the typical problems of early talkies.
The Bat Whispers begins with a marvelous first reel featuring long tracking shots of New York cityscapes (albeit mostly done with models) before we discover a plot via the intriguing device of a police radio we overhear as cops are driving to the scene of a crime that hasn’t happened yet. It seems that the mysterious masked and hooded criminal “The Bat” has threatened to steal a priceless necklace from a New York multimillionaire at midnight, and the cops have staked out his apartment building in hopes of catching The Bat. Come midnight the rich guy opens his safe, takes out the necklace and fingers it – and then The Bat bursts in through his window, having climbed up the side of the building with a rope, and steals the necklace, explaining in a note he leaves for the police that the millionaire’s clock was fast and the police were slow. Charles noted that quite a few of the movies we’ve been watching lately from the cusp of the silent-sound transition had scenes in which people seemed dwarfed by the stunning oversized buildings.
Alas, after this splendid opening scene – including some shots so expressionistic I joked that Roland West must have seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and had an orgasm right there in the theatre – The Bat Whispers turns flat and ordinary once it gets to the home of banker Courtleigh Fleming (whom we never see) in the New York countryside. A wealthy eccentric named Cornelia Van Gorder and her long-suffering maid Lizzie Allen, who says she’s stuck with her through socialism, Fletcherism (a diet regimen of the time) and theosophy “but I draw the line at spooksism!”, have leased the Fleming estate for the summer while the banker is presumably on a European vacation, but in fact his whereabouts are unknown and they made the deal with Fleming’s scapegrace nephew Richard (Hugh Huntley), who did an unauthorized lease deal for the house to subsidize his gambling addiction. It’s unclear who plays Cornelia and the maid; the cast list on imdb.com says Grayce Hampton was Cornelia and Maude Eburne as the maid, but I’ve seen Eburne in enough movies (incliuding the 1933 Warners women’s prison drama Ladies They Talk About, in which Eburne plays a dowager actress who ended up in prison for poisoning her faithless husband), that I think she was Cornelia and Hampton was the maid).
The dialogue references $500,000 that was supposedly robbed from the Fleming bank, though it seems more like an embezzlement given that Richard Fleming and bank clerk Mr. Bell (Richard Tucker) are the prime suspects. Supposedly one or both of them have hidden the money on the Fleming estate, where they show up to retrieve it (Bell poses as a gardener but has uncalloused hands and doesn’t know the first thing about plants) and “The Bat” shows up to steal it. The film alternates marvelous Old Dark House-style sequences with really dull dialogue scenes probably taken verbatim, or nearly so, from the Rinehart-Hopwood play, and it doesn’t help that the movie was shot in an early wide-screen process called “Magnifilm” that just renders the piece even more static than the norm for an early talkie. I’ve read that West shot two versions of this film simultaneously, one in Magnifilm and one in the normal 4:3 aspect ratio of the time, and that the 4:3 version is actually a better movie because it contained more shot-reverse shot editing and more closeups. (When a few films were shot in experimental wide-screen processes around 1930 the directors were told that because of the sheer size of the screen, closeups were no longer necessary – and when wide-screen processes like CinemaScope were reintroduced in the early 1950’s and quickly became standard, directors were once again given that piece of stupid advice.) A police officer named Detective Anderson (Chester Morris) shows up, ostensibly to investigate the crimes and catch “The Bat,” but in the end [spoiler alert!] he turns out to be The Bat, having kidnapped and tied up the real detective.
The Bat Whispers is a really disappointing movie, all too typical of mediocre early talkies in the slowness of its pacing, the stentorian delivery of dialogue by the actors, and only an occasional scene here and there that shows any visual or auditory imagination. There are a few bits that anticipate Val Lewton’s use of sound in his films in the mid-1940’s, notably the ghostly tapping the characters hear that turns out to be Richard Fleming tapping the walls to see where a secret room might be hidden in which the money is stashed, and a bump-bump-bump that turns out to be a bowling ball rolling down a staircase. (Why?) There are also some spectacular scenes in which characters make quick escapes by hurling themselves down a laundry chute – with a strategically placed pile of laundry to break their fall at the end (just as Lizzie at one point gets pitched out of a second-story window and lands in a bit of shrubbery that cushions her landing and saves her life), and there’s a clever bit at the end in which a curtain is drawn over the final action and Chester Morris comes out as himself and pleads with the audience not to tell their friends how the movie ends. Mostly, though, The Bat Whispers is pretty slow going, and while The Bat in this movie (albeit a villain) was cited by comics artist Bob Kane as his inspiration for the character of Batman, it’s obvious he got the bat iconography more from the silent version (in which the Bat’s costume is a good deal more convincing than it is here!) than this one (just as he took the look of the Joker from Jack P. Pierce’s marvelous makeup on Conrad Veidt in the 1928 film The Man Who Laughs). There’s also a scene that I’m surprised Charles didn’t call out because it’s a pet peeve of his: the little satchel that supposedly contains the stolen $500,000 is the size of a doctor’s bag and couldn’t possibly contain that much cash.
