Greenstreet/Lorre: Three Strangers (1946)

After a few weeks of Casablanca knockoffs, it’s refreshing to arrive at Three Strangers and find that it is instead an off-brand version of The Maltese Falcon, with three unsavory characters who find their lives changed by their obsession with a bronze statue. Aside from the headlining duo of Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre, Three Strangers has a number of other tangential connections to The Maltese Falcon, but it’s ultimately a pale imitation of a greater film with good performances nonetheless from the usual suspects.

Crystal Shackleford (Geraldine Fitzgerald) invites two strangers to her apartment with an unlikely offer: her bronze statue of the goddess Kwan Yin will grant them all one wish at the stroke of midnight. The three strangers pool their resources on a sweepstakes ticket; charismatic drunk Johnny West (Peter Lorre) is charmed by the idea, but solicitor Jerome Arbutny (Sydney Greenstreet) is doubtful that he’ll see any money out of the affair. When the three part, their personal lives begin to crumble, but the looming promise of their joint ticket is never far from their minds.

 

Three Strangers is never quite a Maltese Falcon remake, though the connections are surprisingly myriad. You have the cast, yes, and the fixation with a mysterious statue, but you also have a screenplay co-written by John Huston. Director Jean Negulesco (who also helmed last week’s Mask of Dimitrios) had done some preproduction work on The Maltese Falcon before Huston claimed the project, while Geraldine Fitzgerald was an early contender for the Falcon role that eventually went to Mary Astor. Meanwhile, Three Strangers very nearly starred Humphrey Bogart in the Peter Lorre role, but Bogart was committed to The Big Sleep. Perhaps it’s just a big game of “six degrees on the Warner lot,” but it seems there is an unnatural tether between Three Strangers and its more perfect antecedent.

 

The greatest challenge in Three Strangers is that the three strangers spend most of the film estranged from one another. That is, aside from the opening and closing sequences, Greenstreet and Fitzgerald and Lorre never interact, which is both surprising and disappointing. One might expect, for example, that the strangers might find themselves in actuality tied to one another – particularly since one is a solicitor and another becomes involved in a murder trial. Instead, the plots branch off and never meet until the very ending scene at Crystal’s apartment, and consequently there are large sections of the movie that just aren’t very interesting. As has been the case all month, the few moments between Greenstreet and Lorre are so engaging that you’ll wish the whole movie had been made up of them. Apologies to Bogart, but they are the stuff dreams are made of.

 

Three Strangers is almost like watching three separate films that only tie together at the very end. Geraldine Fitzgerald’s subplot starts off with a bombshell but smolders away until nothing quite happens. Sydney Greenstreet gets the unusual opportunity to play a man driven mad by ambition and shortsighted greed; for a performer usually known as the coolest cat in the room, Greenstreet is clearly reveling in the opportunity to mug for the camera. But it’s Lorre who is the most dynamic actor in the film; he too gets to play against type, here headlining as the ostensible romantic lead of Three Strangers. Lorre is eminently charming as Johnny West, just about the only truly sympathetic character the film has, and Lorre plays him like an empathetic and decidedly less psychotic Raskolnikov, a likeable sort who may or may not have simply fallen in with the wrong crowd.

 

I wonder if Three Strangers would fare better on rewatch, since my principal objection to the film seems to be that it wasn’t the film I was expecting. Negulesco is highly competent, and there are some sequences that are undeniably arresting in their tension. Huston, meanwhile, is a gifted storyteller, and he makes his point quite eloquently that human life is a combination of chance and choice. Huston’s message seems to border on nihilism, but one senses also a strong moral compass in the film; the thieves and the philanderers get what’s coming to them, while the innocent get put through the wringer but emerge with a clearer sense of what truly matters in life.

 

It's only a shame that Three Strangers gets really good right at the end, but then I suspect that most audiences will remember that moment, the moment when the film goes from a slice-of-life to a Twilight Zone episode. It’s the kind of poetic justice that Rod Serling adored, and it’s the first film this month that hasn’t seemed to demand a sequel. Perhaps that’s a remarkable achievement in itself – these characters have run their narrative course. We left even The Maltese Falcon wishing for a sequel (and, in the case of Across the Pacific, very nearly got our wish), but Three Strangers wraps up nicely. Moreover, it cautions us to be careful what you wish for; longing for a sequel may not, the film suggests, be in our best interests.

 

Three Strangers is not rated. Directed by Jean Negulesco. Written by John Huston and Howard Koch. Starring Sydney Greenstreet, Geraldine Fitzgerald, Peter Lorre, Joan Lorring, and Alan Napier.

Greenstreet/Lorre: The Mask of Dimitrios (1944)

The Mask of Dimitrios is proof of one indisputable fact about the Golden Age of Hollywood – there’s never too much of a good thing when it comes to Peter Lorre and Sydney Greenstreet. After a few movies this month where the two didn’t have nearly enough screen time together, The Mask of Dimitrios brings us much more of the Greenstreet and Lorre goodness. When they’re on the screen, the film crackles, but its unusual frame narrative structure ends up being more of a tease than a treat.

Mystery writer Cornelius Leyden (Peter Lorre) becomes fascinated with the strange case of master criminal Dimitrios Makropoulos (Zachary Scott), who appears to have washed up dead in Turkey. Looking for inspiration for his next book, Leyden follows the clues into the past, egged on by the shadowy Mr. Peters (Sydney Greenstreet). Leyden begins to learn more about the crimes that shaped Dimitrios even as he begins his own investigation into Mr. Peters, who is following his every move across Europe. 

 

The structure of The Mask of Dimitrios is best described as “John Le Carré’s Citizen Kane,” with a central protagonist digging ever deeper into the world of espionage through the focal lens of one man’s biography. As this protagonist, Lorre is riveting, wrestling between his curiosity and his own innate timidity. In an early scene, a Turkish police colonel tells Leyden that he is not quite what one imagines when picturing a writer, and that’s because of the graceful ease Lorre brings to humanizing this (and every) character. He stoops and mumbles, but he lights up when the pieces start fitting together in his mind. Leyden’s arc throughout the film becomes a kind of bildungsroman in which the artist becomes a hero, and it’s a triumph to see Lorre enact that character, instead of being relegated to playing heavies, goons, and creeps.

 

Throughout the film, Lorre is matched, finally, with Greenstreet. After each extended flashback into the life of Dimitrios, there is inevitably a sequence in which Leyden returns to his hotel for an impromptu reunion with Mr. Peters. Where Lorre is unnerved and guarded, Greenstreet is his usual boisterous self, glad of confidence and disarmingly open-armed. Greenstreet proves himself among Lorre’s best co-stars (if not the outright best), and one senses that the two are enabling each other to reach greater heights than they would individually. Their chemistry is so unique, best summed up in the moment when Leyden says of Mr. Peters, “He’s my friend! Well, no, he’s not my friend, but he’s a nice man!” 

 

As for Dimitrios, though, I have to say I found this character uninspiring. It’s Zachary Scott’s film debut, but Dimitrios is a classic example of “show, don’t tell.” The other characters consistently tell Leyden what an amazing, devious, magnetic personality Dimitrios was, and they overhype the character to the point where no living actor could match that introduction. Moreover, unlike in Citizen Kane, the flashbacks here are often a bit dry, the performances stiff and unengaging. It’s a shame because the interstitial scenes that introduce the flashbacks, with Lorre and Greenstreet or particularly Lorre and Victor Francen, are effervescent, bubbling over with enough personality to fill a one-act play.

 

I will give The Mask of Dimitrios credit for its third-act turn, which I genuinely did not see coming. I should have, certainly, especially having read a few Le Carré novels in my day. Best of all, the developments of the film’s third act force Leyden and Peters even closer, to the point where they’ve almost become co-conspirators in a plot that seems inevitable only in hindsight. One wonders very much what hijinks Leyden and Peters might have found in a sequel, whether the two men might have been bound by friendship rather than circumstance. But, as Mr. Peters says throughout the film, “How little kindness there is in the world today!” The Mask of Dimitrios leaves you wanting more, but if one were to rewatch the film, it would only be to rewatch Peter Lorre in all his squirrelly greatness, emboldened by the magnificent Sydney Greenstreet.

 

The Mask of Dimitrios is not rated. Directed by Jean Negulesco. Written by Frank Gruber. Based on the novel by Eric Ambler. Starring Sydney Greenstreet, Zachary Scott, Faye Emerson, Peter Lorre, and Victor Francen.

Greenstreet/Lorre: Passage to Marseille (1944)

If last week’s Background to Danger was an attempt to recapture the magic of Casablanca, Passage to Marseille is an even more transparent effort to reunite the stars, the director, and the atmosphere of its iconic predecessor. Passage gets nearer to the mark, thanks especially to returning star Humphrey Bogart, though its labyrinthine structure plays a weird and distancing game with its audience.

Passage to Marseille begins with the journalist Manning (John Loder) interviewing Captain Freycinet (Claude Rains) about a Free French outpost in England. Freycinet tells Manning the incredible story of the naval voyage aboard the Ville de Nancy, where he was introduced to the garrison’s infamous gunner, Jean Matrac (Humphrey Bogart). There Matrac relays the strange way and his band (including Peter Lorre, Helmut Dantine, George Tobias, and Philip Dorn) made their way from the Devil’s Island into the service of the French air force. 

 

Passage to Marseille has become notable for its Inception-like plotting, which features a flashback within a flashback within a flashback. It’s evident that the film is an adaptation of a novel, where such narrative devices are commonplace, but in a film it’s a bit disorienting to be continually reminded that what we are seeing is actually just a story being told to one of the characters. Freycinet tells Manning about his first meeting with Matrac, at which time Matrac told him a story about being imprisoned on Devil’s Island, at which time the prisoners told each other the story of Matrac’s arrest. The film spirals ever backwards into history, with four separate timelines; none of it is too confusing, and as narrators go one could do a lot worse than Claude Rains, but it is peculiar to have to wait for nearly half the film to understand why we should care about most of the characters.

 

Fortunately, Bogart’s star power does much of the heavy lifting. The minute we see him, we too are eager to learn more about Matrac, this haunted and driven gunner. Bogart’s performance is clearly meant to emulate Rick Blaine of Casablanca, with his specific brand of morality driving him away from, then into, the Second World War. But there is something too of Fred C. Dobbs from The Treasure of the Sierra Madre in Jean Matrac, particularly in the Devil’s Island sequence where we see Matrac wrestle with his captors, false imprisonment and his own budding madness. As ever, Bogart is electrifying, though the film neuters itself by reminding us that we have already seen that Matrac will escape.

 

While sporting an eyepatch, Claude Rains does his usual Claude Rains thing, all elegance and precision. I was a little surprised to see the film not flash back to the loss of Freycinet’s eye, though Rains weaves it into the understated backstory of the character, treating it not as a handicap but as a welcome challenge to how he can continue to serve France. Among the rest of the cast, Lorre is a stand-out, though perhaps I’m biased. His Marius seems to be Matrac’s deputy, helping first to recruit Matrac in the escape attempt and then aiding him as he leads the other men to freedom. In the Ville de Nancy timeline, Marius is eager to speak for himself and his brothers, while simultaneously deferring to Matrac when he deigns to lift his voice. 

 

Relative to our purposes this month, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre are once again kept apart for nearly all of the film, though the rampant chemistry between Bogart and Lorre is on full delightful display. Where he stumbled as a Nazi in Background to Danger, Greenstreet is better cast as the martinet Major Duval, who relies solely on his own intuition and who wields respect like a bullwhip. Greenstreet and Lorre only have the one significant scene together, in which Duval’s interrogation precedes Freycinet’s more sympathetic dialogue, and it’s a fine centerpiece for Greenstreet to tell us plenty about Duval. As usual, in this sequence Lorre tells us more about Marius in the moments when he’s not speaking, but one cannot help – especially this month – wanting more, more, more.

 

Director Michael Curtiz, himself of Casablanca, went to great pains to reassemble as much of the magic from that film in Passage to Marseille. So much of the cast returns for this one, right down to a cameo from singer Corinna Mura. (Even Michèle Morgan, in her thankless role as Matrac’s wife, has a Casablanca connection – she screen-tested for the role that inevitably went to Ingrid Bergman after Warner Bros lowballed RKO for a release from her contract.) Between Curtiz’s directorial eye and the musical ear of Max Steiner, who bombards the film with refrains from the French national anthem La Marseillaise, the film’s every impulse seems to invite comparisons with Casablanca – short of thinly remaking the film, as was the wont of the Golden Age of cinema, it seems there was little more that anyone could have done to make this film more like Casablanca. 

 

You don’t need me to tell you, however, that Casablanca needs no remake. It’s cute to watch them try, and a film starring Bogart in his prime is never a misuse of one’s time, but Passage to Marseille is neither quite what it aims to be nor precisely what its audience expects of it. As the old saying goes, though, here’s looking at you – even a vanilla Golden Age war film is still worth a look.

 

Passage to Marseille is not rated. Directed by Michael Curtiz. Written by Casey Robinson and Jack Moffitt. Based on the novel Sans Patrie by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall. Starring Humphrey Bogart, Michèle Morgan, Claude Rains, Philip Dorn, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, George Tobias, and Helmut Dantine.

Greenstreet/Lorre: Background to Danger (1943)

For the month of June, we’ll be celebrating the 117th birthday of Peter Lorre – one of my all-time favorite actors – by looking at five of his lesser-known collaborations with fellow character actor Sydney Greenstreet. The two met during Greenstreet’s film debut in The Maltese Falcon (1941) and starred in eight films together (nine, if you count their fun cameo in Hollywood Canteen). Despite being two very different performers, their chemistry was electric, their mannerisms impeccable. When you see their names on a bill together, you know you’re in for a treat.

After The Maltese Falcon, Lorre and Greenstreet were not quite reunited in Casablanca (1942); both give unforgettable performances as the squirrely Ugarte and the voluminous Ferrari, respectively, but the only misstep in an otherwise perfect film is that they never share the screen. (Their presences are so indelible, however, that you’d be forgiven for not noticing until now.) It would not be until Background to Danger in 1943 that the pair inhabited the cinematic frame together, albeit only for one tense sequence. The film is one of a host of Casablanca imitators, unmemorable but not unwatchable.

 

George Raft stars as traveling salesman Joe Barton, secretly a spy for the United States. After meeting the beautiful but doomed Ana Remzi (Osa Massen) on a train to Turkey, Barton comes into possession of secret documents that indicate the Nazis are about to implicate the Soviet Union in a fictitious invasion of Turkey, the better for Germany to take control. Barton is pursued by the plan’s architect, the Nazi Colonel Robinson (Greenstreet), but he’s also caught the attention of two Soviet spies, Nikolai Zaleshoff (Lorre) and his sister Tamara (Brenda Marshall).

 

Background to Danger is surprisingly complex in its plotting, taking its cue perhaps from the similarly suspicious Maltese Falcon, in which no one can be trusted and everyone is lying about something. Here, the MacGuffin is likewise an artifact of deception; there is to be no invasion, but the Germans want Turkey to think there will be. With Greenstreet as provocateur, authoring fiction after fiction to cover his own failings, there is something prescient about the film’s emphasis on “fake news” and its value as a weapon of war. As his Gutman was in The Maltese Falcon, Greenstreet’s Robinson is the only character with all the answers, and his mere presence alone gives you a satisfactory antagonist.

 

One cannot help but feel, however, that Greenstreet is only slightly miscast as the German spymaster. There is nothing German about his performance, neither his accent nor his wardrobe; nor is his very name – Robinson – anything less than stiff upper-lip British. Greenstreet is delightfully villainous, but something in his performance feels held back, as though he’s careful not to have too much fun as a Nazi. Likewise, George Raft seems out of his element as Barton, a role that hinges on the reveal that he’s an American spy. When Barton plays the part of a salesman, there’s never a sense that he’s not in total control of the situation; it’s worth noting that the original novel saw Barton as a forerunner to Cary Grant in North by Northwest, bewildered after an accidental plunge into the world of espionage. (The change was made at Raft’s insistence.) Here, though, it’s hard to see why anyone buys Barton’s “babe in the woods” routine, and when he shifts into spy mode, it’s hard to see Raft as anything but the hardboiled gangsters he played.

 

Perhaps the only casting that really works – at least, of the cast with anything of note to do in the script – is Peter Lorre as the Russian spy Nikolai. There is something stagey about Lorre’s performance here, and I mean that in a good way; Lorre imbues the character with a broad physicality, all stooping hunches and balled fists, such that you can imagine his parts of the film being stage plays. Even when he’s not the focus of attention, Lorre is constantly doing something, clutching his fists to his head or bemoaning his lack of vodka. Of all the times that the film asks you to doubt what you suspect about a character, Lorre is the best at walking that line of uncertainty, and I can’t help but wish Nikolai had been a recurring character in other WWII films.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the best scene of the film is the moment when all the spies are in the same room together – Raft, Greenstreet, Lorre, and Marshall. At the top of the film’s third act, all the cards get put on the table, and all the actors get to play off each other like some of the more claustrophobic scenes from The Maltese Falcon. To add to the tension, everyone’s got a gun pointed at each other, but more importantly, it’s one of the most successful moments of shifting alliances and casual deception. Everything clicks in this scene, and the audience ought to be genuinely surprised at where the moment goes. It’s not quite the climax of the film, but everything that follows feels like denouement compared to the energy level of this dynamite sequence.

 

Between the restrictions of the Hays Code and the rah-rah patriotism of the era, there are not many surprises in how the film turns out, and it leads to an ending that is perhaps too overtly cheery to fit with the rest of the film, which tries to be a shadowy tale out of John le Carré’s playbook. Background to Danger is fairly emblematic of the Warner Brothers brand of 1940s war films, with most of its familiar faces flitting in and out. It’s not as good as Casablanca – but, then again, few films are.

 

Background to Danger is not rated. Directed by Raoul Walsh. Written by W.R. Burnett. Based on the novel Uncommon Danger by Eric Ambler. Starring George Raft, Brenda Marshall, Sydney Greenstreet, Peter Lorre, Osa Massen, and Turhan Bey.

Bat-May: Batman & Robin (1997)

Last week, I assumed I was going to pan Batman Forever, but between my childhood nostalgia and a nugget of narrative complexity, I ended up finding things to admire about the film. (I might even go so far as to say it’s underrated when it stays out of its own way.) Now that we come to the end of Bat-May, we find ourselves in the dubious company of Batman & Robin, the film which killed the franchise stone dead for nigh on a decade. I’d argue that director Joel Schumacher’s career never really recovered, though he continued to work steadily.

And it’s also worth saying that, Catwoman (2004) aside, Batman & Robin changed the way that Hollywood treats superhero movies. Kevin Feige has said as much, and it’s certainly true that you don’t get an earnest Marvel Cinematic Universe without X-Men (2000) and Spider-Man (2002) looking at Batman & Robin as the wrong way to do things. It is, they say, always darkest before the dawn, and in this case Batman & Robin is a very dark night indeed, a film that, at best, has nothing to say beyond reveling in the most arch camp imaginable – and, at worst, exists only to sell merchandise. 

 

Gotham City has a new menace – Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), whose diamond heists have plagued the city while he tries to cure his wife’s terminal illness. Batman (George Clooney) and Robin (Chris O’Donnell) suit up to save Gotham from a deep freeze when the villainous Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman) and Alfred’s young niece Barbara (Alicia Silverstone) come to town, each ready to give the Dynamic Duo their own unique brand of headaches.

 

It may go without saying at this point – and perhaps it should – but I like movies. I like to enjoy movies. I don’t take a lot of pleasure in deliberately watching bad movies, nor am I often content to dislike a movie. As we saw last week, I’m almost always looking for some redemptive reading of a film, some kernel of potential or some recognition that the film accomplishes its own goals. I try not to judge a film based on how I would or would not have made it. If something in a film doesn’t work, I usually try to figure out why, instead of dismissing the film out of hand. So believe me when I say that I want to like Batman & Robin. It stars my favorite fictional character of all time, and it’s got actors who are really good in other films. The best I can say about Batman & Robin, though, is that it’s really hard to look away. With all the reasons I should enjoy this movie, I kept asking myself what wasn’t working. What did this film do wrong?

 

The answer, I think, is very simple. Batman & Robin has nothing to say. It combines the camp “crime doesn’t pay” attitude of Batman ’66 with the “look at this, look at that” mentality of a toy commercial. For all its faults, Batman Forever at least had some narrative integrity; it made some degree of sense to include Two-Face in a movie about psychological duality, with The Riddler as a kind of emergent repressed persona. Framing Robin as the redemption of Batman’s self-imposed curse, too, fits into the unified whole of the screenplay. (It’s the delivery that doesn’t work, but we talked about that last week.) Batman & Robin, on the other hand, is a collection of bits that don’t relate to each other at all; there may be a loose thread of family between the addition of Batgirl, Mr. Freeze’s love for his wife, and Poison Ivy’s demi-adoption of Bane – but that so-called theme never rises above the level of “Some people have families.”

 

Where Batman Forever – and indeed the preceding three Batman films – picked its villains because of their relationship to the central theme of the film, Batman & Robin seems to have chosen its antagonists based on who was unused but popular all the same. For context: Mr. Freeze had recently been reborn, thanks to Batman: The Animated Series; Poison Ivy was too sensuous to be included on Batman ’66; and Bane was a recent addition to the rogues gallery after a top-selling comics storyline in the early 1990s. They have nothing to do with each other, and the film doesn’t even play with the incongruity of a frozen villain teaming up with the embodiment of lush, verdant life. Worse, it neuters the character of Bane, strips him of his intellect and fighting prowess, and reduces himself to a grunting accessory. (Thank heavens for Tom Hardy.) 

I will say this about the lead villains, though: clearly Schwarzenegger and Thurman are having a blast in their respective roles. The campy atmosphere of the film gives both performers a license to overact, and they are devouring the scenery without discretion. Schwarzenegger cackles his way through the corniest of one-liners, but the only thing that makes his Mr. Freeze remotely compelling is airlifted from the animated episode “Heart of Ice.” Thurman, meanwhile, turns vamping into a whole new artform; her cartoonish Poison Ivy is equal parts Mae West and Eartha Kitt, a child’s idea of what dangerous sexuality looks like. These two fit right into what is essentially a high-budget episode of Batman ’66, but it is undoubtedly all spectacle, all surface.

 

Clooney, meanwhile, inherits the mantle of the Bat and has been of two minds about the role. On the one hand, it catapulted him from television’s ER into the role of Hollywood’s top leading man; on the other hand, the film is abysmal, and he’s admittedly not very good in the role. He plays an adequate enough Bruce Wayne, but he’s missing the nuance that Michael Keaton and Val Kilmer brought to the role. Clooney’s Bruce is all genuine, a civic-minded billionaire who’s less playboy and more socialite. (There’s also a very compelling argument to be made for a reading of this Bruce Wayne as gay, which the film probes not at all but which seems inescapable, particularly in the moment when Bruce hems and haws at the notion of marrying a lady.) I’ve long remembered Clooney as a commendable Bruce Wayne, but this time around, I think “passable” is the kindest word for the performance. As Batman, though, he’s nearly no good at all, stiff and unconvincing, with his only standout moments coming in his interactions with Robin.

 

On the subject of Robin, Chris O’Donnell remains strangely cast, playing the role as emotionally stunted, prone to outbursts of jealousy and impotent fury. One does wonder why this fully grown adult, bristling at his partner’s mentorship, still hangs around the Batcave at all. He has so little to do in the film that he’s barely referred to by name throughout much of the dialogue; by the time his name is spoken aloud for the first time, one almost forgets his name is “Dick,” assuming instead that Bruce has chosen that moment to resort to bratty name-calling. And then we come to Alicia Silverstone, who is so wildly out of her depth with a thankless role in a script that gives her nothing much to do at all. Indeed, one wonders why Batgirl is in this film at all; she arrives on the doorstep of Wayne Manor unbidden, with no real purpose for coming to town, and with no incentive to become a superhero other than the fact that her uncle Alfred has, inexplicably, taken the liberty of designing a molded rubber suit for her to wear.

 

As Alfred, Michael Gough is commendable, the only one of the cast who’s doing any acting at all. While the rest of the cast is competing to overact past each other, Gough is giving a delightfully restrained performance, deeply affecting and emotionally tender. The film’s decision to afflict poor Alfred with a nebulous medical condition notwithstanding, the genius Gough takes that opportunity to present Alfred as concealing his symptoms from his charges, halfway between the British stiff upper lip and a father’s fear that he will leave his children unable to care for themselves. Throughout the “Batman Quadrilogy,” as it’s come to be called, Gough has been one of the only steady unifying presences, and in this film you truly see why.

 

But the question of Alfred’s illness raises a larger point about the way the screenplay is put together. Batman & Robin is a series of MacGuffins and Chekhov’s Guns where plot elements only exist in the first half to come up in the second half, yet when these things resurface it’s without any logic or purpose. Bruce Wayne’s colossal telescope is only in the film to be used by Mr. Freeze in the climax (where it behaves like a telescope doesn’t); likewise, Alfred’s diagnosis with “MacGregor’s Syndrome” is only included so that he can get better. In the same vein, Barbara is introduced only so that she can become Batgirl – but why? There’s no narrative or thematic purpose for Batgirl in this story, and the only conclusion I can draw is that she’s been included to sell toys. And I can say that because I bought the action figure. I bought a lot of the action figures from this film.

 

Maybe there’s beauty in that, creating a superhero narrative to give children more fodder for their imaginative (and actual) toyboxes. But Batman & Robin is not a children’s movie in the way that, say, The Phantom Menace – a similarly “toyetic” film – was. There’s no place for children in this innuendo-laden film (I don’t even think there is a child in the film!). It’s more than just a cartoon come to life; Batman & Robin may as well be a children’s playground reenactment of a cartoon. You may see some redemptive beauty in that idea, but to me it seems sad to think that this film and these characters were cobbled together carelessly, with concern only for how these likenesses could be merchandised. It’s a sad fact of the comic book industry writ large, that unique site where art meets commerce, but after having seen some of the best films starring Batman, this one feels soulless. 

 

In that sense, that cold and emotionless cynicism of chasing valuables, perhaps Mr. Freeze is the perfect villain after all.

Batman & Robin is rated PG-13 for “strong stylized action and some innuendos.” Directed by Joel Schumacher. Written by Akiva Goldsman. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, George Clooney, Chris O’Donnell, Uma Thurman, Alicia Silverstone, and Michael Gough.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Bat-May: Batman Forever (1995)

In an interesting way, Batman Forever was foundational for me. It was the first Batman film I had seen in theaters and, in 1995, must have been among the first films I saw in theaters. (I was bitten in 1994 with The Lion King.) I had the poster on my wall, the action figures in my toybox, and the comic book adaptation in my collection. I lived and breathed it. It was the greatest thing I’d ever seen in my life.

Time’s gone on, and it hasn’t been kind to Joel Schumacher, who picked up the directorial reins from Tim Burton and put his own avant-garde camp stamp on the franchise. For many years, fans used Schumacher as a punching bag to defend their own aggressively macho, insistently grown-up takes on Batman. Whatever Batman is, the argument went (and I admit I was in that crowd for many years), Batman Forever wasn’t it. Now that I’m older and wiser, I know that Batman can be everything at once – the genius of the character is that he is at once immutable and simultaneously infinitely adaptable. He fits into any genre, and still he persists. And I’m pleased to see that the fans are coming around to this perspective with Batman Forever, which has undergone a kind of cult reclamation such that cries of “Release the Snyder Cut” have, now fulfilled, been followed by “Release the Schumacher Cut,” which promises a longer and darker version of Forever.

 

Only I don’t know that it’s necessary. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll happily watch a three-hour Batman Forever, but I’m not convinced that it’s what Schumacher wanted. My sense of Batman Forever is that Schumacher intended to update the Batman ’66 format with an inflection of the Tim Burton aesthetic, and on that count – even if I don’t love it – I have to admit he made exactly the movie he set out to make. It’s silly, it’s daft, and it’s over-the-top, but it’s also got an undercurrent of psychological complexity that gets lost in the static of Schumacher bashing.

 

Val Kilmer dons the cape and cowl as a Bruce Wayne haunted by the death of his parents and what he sees as a disturbing reprise when acrobat Dick Grayson (Chris O’Donnell) is orphaned by Two-Face (Tommy Lee Jones). While Bruce attempts to dissuade his newfound ward from vengeance, Batman is facing a new adversary in the form of The Riddler (Jim Carrey), secretly a disgruntled employee of WayneTech who has developed a mind-control device.

 

Batman Forever begins, rather unfortunately, with a joke that falls very flat. Alfred (the stalwart Michael Gough) offers Batman dinner before his nightly vigil; after a strangely long pause, Batman says, in a reedy squawk, “I’ll get drive-thru.” It’s perhaps an effective table setting – we’re in for a Batman that’s cornier and more prone to one-liners, even if they don’t always work – but I suppose it’s also an indicator of how much worse the film could have been if every scene had this tone, if nothing was taken seriously. It’s also an unfortunate opener because it sells Val Kilmer short; neither the voice nor the mannerisms are quite right in this first scene, but Kilmer gets it right almost immediately thereafter. His Bruce Wayne is psychologically broken, emotionally dead, but he embodies a key interpretative theory of the character – that Bruce Wayne cannot be both happy and Batman. Instead, Kilmer finds a cold middle ground, which might read as disaffected – but isn’t that what the Bruce Wayne persona should be? Isn’t Bruce an airheaded satire on the notion of a billionaire playboy?

 

The only times we start to see the real Bruce Wayne – the damaged orphan boy, stunted by his parents’ murder – is in his scenes with psychologist and lover Dr. Chase Meridian, which is honestly one of the all-time great fictional names ever. Now raise your hand if you’d forgotten that Nicole Kidman was in a Batman film. (I myself forget every so often.) Her performance vamps a little bit – nowhere near what Uma Thurman would do in Batman & Robin two years later – but Kidman is pretty effective as a Jungian femme fatale. Though the film is a bit condescending with her inability to decide whether she loves Batman or Bruce Wayne, this motif of duality plays into the film’s larger investment in Bruce Wayne’s fractured psyche. Michael Keaton’s Batman recognized the disconnect between his own romantic fulfillment and his vow to avenge his parents; Chase Meridian helps Bruce to draw out the fact that he is utterly incapable of functioning as a human being while fighting crime as Batman.

 

Indeed, Bruce Wayne is fundamentally unable to connect with his new ward, Dick Grayson, until he unites his own twin personas, ultimately accepting the young lad as his crimefighting partner, Robin. I have no idea how old this incarnation of Dick Grayson is supposed to be; he must be under 18, for Bruce to take him in as a foster father, but Chris O’Donnell plays him like a brash mid-20s, and there’s something in that performance that doesn’t quite work. He’s hot-headed like the second comics Robin, Jason Todd, and his Dick Grayson has a dated youthful edge that perhaps hasn’t aged well. (The contemporaneous animated series took a similar tack with Robin, but it seemed to work better there.) It might be the weakest performance in the film, because it’s not quite dialed into what this film needs of a Robin; his mood swings and impetuous plans to murder Two-Face never really connect with the audience.

 

Then we come to the villains. I have long maintained that the fundamental problem with Batman Forever is that both Tommy Lee Jones and Jim Carrey are playing their characters as though they were Jack Nicholson’s Joker. I stand by this claim, because it certainly explains what keeps these performances from being truly faithful to the comics, but there are some nuances to draw out. It’s been widely reported that Jones and Carrey didn’t get along during filming, especially because Jones reportedly hated Carrey, telling him at one point, “I cannot sanction your buffoonery.” (True or not, has there been a more Tommy Lee Jones sentence than that?) Though to that point, I would have to ask Jones what he made of his own performance, because it is prancing buffoonery at its finest – again, precisely what the film needs of him, but it is a far cry from the more grounded Harvey Dent given us by Aaron Eckhart in The Dark Knight. But the cleverness of joining Bruce Wayne’s bifurcated psyche to a plot involving Two-Face is genius, and one wishes the screenplay had borne that out a little more directly. One also wishes that Jones had played his Two-Face a little more seriously; unlike Kilmer, whose first scene is a dud, Jones’s first scene is note-perfect as he monologues to a hostage bank guard about the universal fairness of luck.

As for Jim Carrey’s Riddler, it is a Jim Carrey performance from the mid-90s, largely indistinguishable from the rest (costuming aside). It’s that same manic oscillation, bounding and mugging. There’s a hearty helping of Nicholson in there somewhere, but the performance is perhaps more properly an amalgam of Frank Gorshin and Max Headroom – which may indeed be the Rosetta Stone for Carrey’s whole career. Carrey’s Riddler is overdone, his riddles aren’t great, but at least his chemistry with Two-Face is commendable, particularly if the off-set animosity was as feverish as it seems. His Riddler is gleefully vain, too, applied more to his appearance than to his genius, and there’s something in his envy of Bruce Wayne that gets echoed in Sam Rockwell’s begrudging RDJ-worship in Iron Man 2. These days, though, I’m particularly intrigued to see what Paul Dano brings to the role in The Batman, with his Zodiac-killer take wildly distinct from the gleeful tricksters we’ve seen thus far.

 

Batman Forever is filled with performances and setpieces that are watchable for their spectacle, and I practically inhaled a bowl of popcorn during the film’s bombastic first act. It’s an energy that never really lets up, but the script is full of things that happen only because the movie needs them to happen. Two-Face has no master plan, striving only to kill Batman in a disconnected string of death traps (more shades of Batman ’66), while the Riddler’s mind-control plot is both too outlandish and much too easy to foil. One can easily see why a seven-year-old Cinema King would have been enamored of this cartoon come to life, but there is a kernel of something greater in here that keeps the adult coming back – occasionally against my better judgment, but compelled all the same. There is something very savvy about Batman Forever, and one wishes the film had leaned harder into that aspect of the story rather than the neon pop-art comic book come to life (which was, after all, what Schumacher intended). Perhaps there ought to be a Schumacher Cut, after all.

 

Batman Forever is rated PG-13 for “strong stylized action.” Directed by Joel Schumacher. Written by Lee Batchler, Janet Scott Batchler, and Akiva Goldsman. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Val Kilmer, Tommy Lee Jones, Jim Carrey, Nicole Kidman, and Chris O’Donnell.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Bat-May: Batman Returns (1992)

I was four years old at the time, but I remember Batman Returns feeling like the most important movie ever made. I had an oversized “making of” book that I read practically to shreds. I studied the biography of Tim Burton, pored over the photographs and teasers for the plot. I could even name for you the producer of the film (Denise Di Novi, a wonderfully Gotham-esque name). I had the toys, the fast food cups. And yet, I have no memory of when I first saw the movie itself. In a way, that’s the best metaphor for a review of Batman Returns – chock-full of unforgettable bits and bobs and yet so unwaveringly strange that the whole gets lost amid the mad sum of its ludic parts.

Batman Returns is the story of three freaks – The Bat (Michael Keaton), The Cat (Michelle Pfeiffer), and The Penguin (Danny DeVito). After the events of the first film, Batman spends his nights waiting for action, silently anticipating the call to fight crime. Amid an invasion of circus clowns, The Penguin arrives from the sewers, pleading with Gotham for an opportunity to learn the truth about why his parents abandoned him. Meanwhile, exhausted secretary Selina Kyle is defenestrated and murdered by her boss (Christopher Walken), only to be reincarnated with nine lives, a feline fixation, and a Shakespearean desire for revenge.

 

Just like I can’t say when I first saw Batman Returns, I can’t remember how many times I’ve seen it, but on this latest viewing I was largely unprepared for just how weird this movie gets. I have always maintained that the difference between Burton’s two Batman movies is that Batman is a Batman movie directed by Tim Burton, while Batman Returns is a Tim Burton movie (co‑)starring Batman. The difference is so apparent in this one; the Gotham sets are freakishly Burton, all odd angles and grim shadows, and Returns doubles-down on its predecessor’s premise that freaks beget freaks, with a brooding meditation on how these freaks find their place in a hostile society (they retreat, or they rebel).

 

In short, Batman Returns is so idiosyncratically Burton that it is impossible to imagine a major franchise film – a sequel, no less – surrendering so entirely to its auteur’s vision that the titular hero ends up being subsumed by the villains. (Today, the claim is usually the reverse, that the villains are largely indistinguishable when the movies are governed by the large personalities of franchise heroes. Can you name, for example, the three villains of the Iron Man franchise?) Indeed, Burton is much more fascinated by the monstrous Penguin and the sideways-feminist Catwoman (“I am Catwoman – hear me roar”), with Batman relegated to a largely supporting role in a film that is nominally his. Keaton’s Bruce Wayne is heroic mainly in that he has sublimated his freakish impulses and wears a mask of normalcy, which Penguin is unable to do while Catwoman is entirely unwilling. In a standout sequence, Bruce and Selina attend a masked ball sans disguise, underscoring that their civilian identities are the costumes. (It’s an image that has been appropriated forever since, with a notable reprise in The Dark Knight Rises.) Penguin, meanwhile, crashes the party, as DeVito crashes the film itself, all shouts and gurgles, bile and bodysuits. 

 

It's clear, however, that Burton’s sympathies lie with the villains. The film begins with the birth of Oswald Cobblepot, ultimately cast into a river for his monstrous appearance; despite the fact that the infant Oswald is clearly dangerous, murdering and devouring the family cat, Burton manages to find pathos in this act of attempted filicide. Likewise, at film’s end, Burton stages Penguin’s final scene as high tragedy, with oversized penguins waddling in what appears to be an impromptu funeral procession. In much the same vein that Batman (1989) belonged to Jack Nicholson’s Joker, Batman Returns is paced as if it’s Selina Kyle’s film. Selina gets a full origin story and ends up in a sort of inverted will-they-won’t-they, akin to Bruce’s arc with Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) from Batman. Again, Burton feels more sympathy for Selina than he does for the curiously submissive Batman, evidenced by an elegiac sequence where Selina relives the trauma of her murder and proceeds to dismantle her entire apartment in a fugue of rage.

 

Putting it into plain English makes the film sound entirely normal, but I can’t undersell how bonkers this movie gets by adding a number of elements together. And these are all things that happen in the same movie: There’s an extended subplot about Penguin’s borderline-Trumpean bid for mayor, buoyed by Christopher Walken’s industrialist Max Shreck, who wants mayoral regime change to greenlight his construction of a power plant that will instead drain power from Gotham. (Shreck’s son, meanwhile, is played by Andrew Bryniarski, doing a transparently meatheaded Walken impression.) Circus clowns invade the edges of the frame, with Danny Elfman’s score veering carnivalesque at each turn. The whole thing is set at Christmas, casting a Burtonesque pall of sarcastic cheer over the affair. There are actual marching penguins, wearing rocket launchers, plotting to murder the children of Gotham. As delightfully strange as the movie is, one has the acutely nagging question during the whole film, “Warner Brothers was okay with this?!” (Spoilers for next week – they weren’t.)

 

I mentioned Danny Elfman, and he’s one of the main reasons this film succeeds. A good score can buoy any film, and while his Batman Returns score isn’t as bombastic or iconic as his work on Batman, it works really well by being dialed into exactly the movie Tim Burton wants to make. It’s traditionally superheroic when it needs to be (in those rare moments that Batman is doing hero work), but more often than not it’s playing in a strange realm of uncomfortable tragedy. His descending Penguin theme grows more and more militaristic, balanced as it is by the aforementioned carnival music. His Catwoman theme, on the other hand, plays like a tragic music box, swirling like his Edward Scissorhands work while highlighting the tragedy of Selina’s fall from innocence and her attempts to claw her way back toward peace.

 

Batman Returns is a film of beauty and of pain, in distinctly Burton ratios, but it is also a film almost as broadly painted as Batman ’66. Walken plays Max Shreck like a boogeyman, right down to the electrified hairdo, while DeVito’s Penguin is a thing of perverse revolting fascination, gruesome and grotesque in equal measure. Burbling black-green bile and groping every woman he finds, it is nearly impossible to find the tragic sympathy Burton feels for this grunting, snarling antagonist, who is handily the most revolting Batman foe ever committed to film. And yet, there is something expertly calibrated about Burton’s Gotham; as exquisitely eccentric as Burton’s vision may be, his Gotham seems very much of a piece with the comic book depiction. Gotham is a city of unending crime and corruption, of perpetual peril. Despite the mayor’s objections, a marauding gang of killer clowns seems to go hand-in-hand with Gotham City as a whole, particularly given the intimation that the clowns constitute a kind of haunting courtesy of Nicholson’s Joker. It’s almost a chicken-and-egg situation, where it’s unclear whether the comics birthed Burton or if Burton’s shadow warped the comics in his wake. (I’ll go out on a limb and venture the latter, though it’s equally Frank Miller’s fault.)

 

When I drew up the Personal Canon in 2016, there was no question that Batman belonged on it. That movie was nigh elemental in my love of superhero narratives. But Batman Returns was always the weird younger brother, the one who went away to art school and came back a changed man. I was never all the way comfortable with it, but neither could I relinquish it entirely. It’s always had a weird pull, especially as distinct from the twin day-glo Schumacher films; it was, before Christopher Nolan, what Batman movies ought to be.

 

Batman Returns is rated PG-13 for “brooding, dark violence.” Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Daniel Waters and Sam Hamm. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Michael Keaton, Danny DeVito, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Christopher Walken.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Bat-May: Batman (1989)

I have so many fond memories of this movie that I scarcely know where to begin an objective review of Tim Burton’s Batman (affectionately dubbed Batman ’89 by a generation hoping – nay, longing – to distance it from an earlier era’s Batman ’66). I can’t recall with precision the first time I saw the film, but I can say with confidence that it was the very first DVD I owned, a gift from my father when the home video format was in its nascence. But when I first built my Personal Canon in 2016, it was a natural inclusion; I’ve loved this film for years, and it occurs to me that its peculiar bizarre nuttiness has really permeated my identity as a moviegoer.

Batman redefines the Dark Knight more than two decades after the go-go groovy incarnation embodied by Adam West and his Swinging Sixties interpretation. Here, Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) is a brooding specter of unrelenting justice, a mystery to his city and to Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger), who’s come to town to photograph Bruce’s vigilante alter ego, The Batman. While busting up criminal activity at Axis Chemicals, Batman inadvertently creates his greatest nemesis when Jack Napier emerges from a vat of acid as The Joker (Jack Nicholson), a self-described homicidal artist with murderous plans for Gotham City.

 

Batman is a film that is so iconic because of how quickly it dominated the cultural landscape. Much has been said and written about the cultural saturation of the film, how it changed the superhero genre and action films more broadly, how it reimagined how a blockbuster could perform at the box office. Nicholson’s Joker is both inextricable from the actor’s persona and yet wholly of a piece with the villain’s own flexible characterization; meanwhile, Keaton is to this day still proudly declaring, “I’m Batman.” While the comics had been taking Batman grim ’n’ gritty since the early 1970s (peaking in 1986 with Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns), Batman has the titanic reputation of being the movie that set the superhero genre down the straight and dour path.

 

This is not to say, however, that Batman isn’t a whole lot of fun. In my reviews of Batman: The Animated Series (and even The Killing Joke), I’ve consistently noticed how Mark Hamill’s Joker sets me giggling on a dime, but I’d forgotten that Nicholson’s Joker has the exact same effect. Nicholson’s strength comes from imbuing casual lines like “You’ll never believe what happened to me today” with deadpan sarcasm and repressed theatrical fire, to say nothing of how well that unique Joker look has aged, even on Blu-Ray. His wheezing laugh, too, so quintessential to any successful Joker, is a hoot, especially when it transforms into a fearless manic cackle, often looped over the following scenes, giving the sense that this movie is well and truly The Joker’s. Keaton’s great, too, a perhaps unexpected choice; in fact, he’s so good that we’ve all forgotten that there’s an extended sequence of Bruce Wayne in blue jeans, which feels more out-of-character than having Joker (spoilers) revealed to be the murderer of Thomas and Martha Wayne. But Nicholson doesn’t lean on his reputation; he earns top billing on the poster with a riveting performance that’s so markedly different from Heath Ledger’s Oscar-winning turn two decades later.

 

The older I get, and even as the world begins to retreat from the notion that superhero comics are (or at least ought to be) strictly for kids, I give a lot of thought to why these characters have become a kind of religion for me. Why do I cling to these four-color figures? In the case of this film, I think part of the appeal was that Batman was, for me, one of the first grown-up movies I’d ever seen – or at least it was one of the first that felt grown-up. It was a movie that didn’t talk down to me, didn’t try to pretty up the world. It painted a picture of life as a horrific carnival, Gotham City as a funhouse reflection of what civilization ought to be. It felt larger than life, but simultaneously it seemed entirely within reach, more gothic than the bright colors of a comic book page and yet divorced enough from reality that I could access it without fear. And it was a movie that didn’t really look like anything else I’d seen; it was almost certainly my first Tim Burton film, and the way it manages to make the dated feel timeless gave the film a very specific stylized identity I couldn’t find elsewhere on the video shelf. (His next film, Edward Scissorhands, feels very much a period piece, an homage to 1950s Anytown, USA.)

 

Of course, any discussion of Batman has to acknowledge the exquisitely baroque score by Danny Elfman, which has become the gold-standard anthem for multiple generations of Bat-fans. (No matter what you thought of the theatrical cut of Justice League, you had to love hearing that theme once more. It just felt right, scoring Ben Affleck astride the Bat-Signal.) The Animated Series owes so much to Elfman, as does this film overall. I’ll even venture to say that Elfman’s score is a character in itself, serving the same inextricable role here that John Williams’s work does for Star Wars; put another way, this film doesn’t work without Elfman’s ostentatious gusto over the scenes. That Bat-theme, the playful Joker melodies – heck, even the zany zeitgeist of including Prince in a few key scenes – there’s a reason these tracks are seared into our brains (and it’s not just the Lego Batman games, which aired them on an obsessive loop). Elfman is doing career – and genre – defining work with Batman.

 

If you haven’t seen Batman in a while, it’s high time for another look. On this latest rewatch, I was quite surprised by Alfred’s subplot. If at all, Alfred’s role lives on in cultural memory for the moment when he escorts Vicki Vale into the Batcave, blowing Bruce Wayne’s secret identity. But it’s a moment that the film earns by continually seeding Alfred’s desire for Bruce to move on and find safety in an end to his nightly crusade – all of which, if it seems faintly familiar, seems to anticipate Michael Caine’s “I won’t bury you” plot from The Dark Knight Rises. Michael Gough is quiet and unflappably avuncular as Alfred, a pitch-perfect counterpart to the high mania of the film’s dueling leads, but his deep compassion is so key to the character often brushed off as Batman’s butler. 

 

I was also struck by the mystery atmosphere that pervades the film, which feels quite fresh nearly thirty years later. We’re so used to superhero films that walk us through the origin story as a matter of course. But here, Batman’s backstory is presented as something of a mystery; it’s The Joker who gets the straightforward origin, lending further credence to the notion that the film is as much (if not more) his as Batman’s. Of course, it’s hard to imagine any filmgoer who doesn’t know who Batman is and how he came to be (I’ve only met one such person in my life), but the film introduces the familiar story beats in an innovative story structure that doles it out slowly, with gravity. When we finally get to the shooting of the Waynes, it’s nightmarish and ethereal, a hazy encounter with trauma, and it’s presented as the final cue to understanding Bruce Wayne’s psyche.

 

On that count, I’m not sure that the film succeeds – nor, I think, does it want or need to do so. Burton is content to leave Bruce Wayne as a somewhat enigmatic freak, locked in a chicken-and-egg struggle with Jack Napier. Who created whom? Were it not for the film’s ironclad concrete conclusion, one might almost imagine Burton’s universe operating under the conditions suggested by Heath Ledger’s Joker in his final sequence: “I think you and I are destined to do this forever.” With the news that Michael Keaton will be reprising his role in the Ezra Miller Flash film, at least half of that statement ended up applying. As for me, it’s one of my favorite movies of all time, so I’ll be returning to it forever.

 

Batman is rated PG-13. Directed by Tim Burton. Written by Sam Hamm and Warren Skaaren. Based on the DC Comics. Starring Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Pat Hingle, Billy Dee Williams, Michael Gough, and Jack Palance.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!

Bat-May: Batman: The Movie (1966)

Once upon a time, the most divisive fault line in fandom was whether or not you loved Adam West’s Batman. (It was a simpler time.) Chances are that you held him in higher regard if you grew up with him, but if Tim Burton or Frank Miller got to you at a young age, you might not have had the patience for a groovier, campier Batman. By the time Adam West passed in 2017 – and indeed long before that – the tides seemed to have turned in Bat-fandom: even if Batman ’66 (as it came to be dubbed) wasn’t your Batman, it was at least a Batman with its own redeeming qualities. 

Within that neon outpost in the Dark Knight’s long and storied history, amid the pow-biff-bam of the television series, Batman: The Movie finds the Caped Crusader (Adam West) and his sidekick Robin (Burt Ward) facing the unfathomable – all their greatest villains have teamed up, with global domination in their sights. The Joker (Cesar Romero), The Penguin (Burgess Meredith), and The Riddler (Frank Gorshin) have joined forces with Catwoman (Lee Meriwether), who is posing as the Russian journalist Miss Kitka, in a fiendish plot to rule the world.

 

Batman: The Movie is not quite a movie because it feels like three or four episodes of the television series strung together. You can even mark the narrative intervals with each time it seems Batman and Robin have been blown to smithereens; just supply the Bill Dozier “same bat‑time, same bat-channel” narration yourself. While this pacing can be fun on television, even if you string a two-parter together, it becomes a bit interminable as a feature film with an episodic quality. Perhaps Batman: The Movie is better understood as an artifact, a kind of analogue to comic book crossovers. Where the episodes of the television show usually only featured one high-profile villain (often played by a major celebrity guest star), the selling point here is that the show’s four biggest villains are sharing the screen. (Scrapped plans for a second film, with Batgirl in tow, suggest this pattern would have continued on the big screen.)

 

Like the television show, the film is more enamored of its villains than of the Dynamic Duo. Adam West and Burt Ward play their parts in staid and stalwart fashion, their straight faces serving an essential role in the high camp atmosphere, but there’s no question the film only truly comes alive when it has its antagonists on screen. Of the foursome, Burgess Meredith’s Penguin takes the lead; it’s his submarine and his henchmen that run the plot, with the other villains deferring to his leadership. (Maybe it’s the monocle.) As the Penguin, Meredith is almost a Jack Burnley drawing come to life, all squawks and waddles, but what really stands out about his performance is just how hard he’s selling it.

 

Indeed, all the players are acting their parts with the gusto of a toddler at playtime, hammy in all the right places but never compromising the internal integrity of the thing with so much as a wink to the camera. Each villainous performer finds his or her lane and sticks with it. Frank Gorshin’s Riddler is giddy and over-the-top, but it’s dialed into what this incarnation of the Riddler should be (and a clear template for Jim Carrey’s Riddler in Batman Forever). Cesar Romero’s Joker, once you get past the painted-over mustache, puts the “clown” in “Clown Prince of Crime,” whooping and clapping at his own mischief. Meanwhile, Lee Meriwether (herself subbing in for television’s Julie Newmar) plays Catwoman/Kitka with all the purring puns a single screenplay can handle.

 

Kitka’s romance with Bruce Wayne is compelling enough, with Adam West suitably smitten with the passingly dismissive Soviet. In these moments, it’s a little disappointing that Bruce never sees through the disguise until the very end of the film – particularly since his Batman is marked with over-preparation for literally any other scenario he encounters. He’s got shark repellent in his helicopter, a torpedo deflector in his belt, and even a computer that can sort dust particles by color; it’s just too bad he doesn’t have a working set of eyes and ears to know when he’s being duped. Perhaps, however, that’s the point – this Bruce Wayne is a lover, not a fighter. (Though his seduction skills could use some work – quoting Edgar Allan Poe isn’t the first recourse for most casanovas.) 

 

For a Batman film, both Batman and Robin are woefully underdeveloped, static figures of justice and good manners – which is, again, the point. The camp of Batman ’66 requires heroes who are unchanging and unflinching; nothing flummoxes them, and nothing finds them ill-prepared to save the day. These do-gooders need only do good, despite the less-than-stimulating viewing pleasure such heroics provide. There’s never any doubt that good will prevail, with the only surprises being which unlikely gadget our heroes will pull from their bottomless utility belts. Like their villains, though, West and Ward commit wholeheartedly to their act, with West’s deliberately dramatic delivery matching Ward’s gee-whiz enthusiasm.

 

Batman: The Movie was originally intended to be the series debut, launching the television program in big-screen style. Released after the first season, however, it becomes instead a celebration of everything that Batman ’66 was – flashy, vibrant, and campy. It’s a feature-length distillation of the show’s successes and failings, its mod mentality dialed up to 11. If you loved the show, you’ll love the movie, but if West has never been your Batman, this film won’t change your mind. As for me, I like the show just fine, in small doses, and Batman: The Movie proves to be a bit too big a dose for one sitting. For a generation, this was Batman, so kudos to the crew for keeping the flame alive.

 

Batman: The Movie is rated PG. Directed by Leslie H. Martinson. Written by Lorenzo Semple Jr. Based on the DC Comics, and on the ABC television series. Starring Adam West, Burt Ward, Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith, and Frank Gorshin.

For more Bat-May action, the good folks at Collected Editions posted my review of Batman: The Movies, the comic book adaptation of the Batman Quadrilogy. Give them a click - no one reviews comics like Collected Editions!