Well, since The World Unbuilt is over, I reckon it's time to get into another project. Saddam has been bugging me about this for probably a year now, so welcome to...
Batman (dir. Leslie H. Martinson)
The 1960s. Vietnam, flower power, Beatlemania. The good old days, when 20th Century Fox was shoving Frank Gorshin's prodigious green bulge in your face instead of terrible Spider-Man spin-offs. Yes, that's right, a time before Warner Bros. executives got their greasy mitts on Batman and turned him into a series of gruff growlers, self-serious scientists, and quizzical quippers. A time when everything was labelled and everyone spoke in alliterative exclamations of exasperation. Unfortunately, during my soujourn into those heady cultural pastures of mid-century life I did not have my ballpoint banana ready to take notes, but here's my recollection of a certain episode of Batmania that fell upon me all of a sudden in April of 2018.
To begin with, we get a SNATCHER-esque opening dedication, but rather than cyberpunks who fight against injustice every day of their lives, Batman is for crime fighters, escapists, and people who like weird things. It's more inclusive, and, since it is 2018, I'm sure we can all get behind that. Also there's a couple necking in an alleyway, which forewarns you of just how sexy this film is. Indeed, it is not long before so many male bulges, off-set at least a little by the permanently erect nipples of Lee Meriwether, are on screen at once that sometimes it can be hard, no pun intended, to know where to look! Somehow, even this is not as gay as the way Batman looks at Superman during their Dawn of Justice when the former tries to run over the latter.
What I particularly love about our introduction to Batman and Robin in this film, and indeed the film itself, is that almost everything takes place in broad daylight. Bruce Wayne happily steps out for a night on the town with Miss Kitka (a barely disguised Catwoman) as an unwitting part of a plot to lure Batman to her secret hideout, but Batman himself likes the sun. There's no sneaking around or hiding awkwardly in the corners of rooms in order to surprised the police for no apparent reason. In fact, Batman's awkward relationship with the police is nowhere to be seen here, as he and Robin are officially recognised and deputised. He can fly around in the Bat-Copter and wave at people as he passes over head, the police even take their hats off as a sign of respect when they see him go by. It's quite literally a night and day contrast from all or most non-comic book Bat Media that has come since.
The major plot thread involves a tetrapartite conspiracy between Penguin, Catwoman, Riddler, and Joker. Joker last because, contrary to modern Bat Cinema, he isn't the main character. And no, Suicide Squad with its abysmal bit-part does not count! The wacky foursome have contrived to kidnap one Commodore Schmidlapp, an English sailor who says “pip pip”, because of course he does, and have ingeniously stored him in a replica boat (where he can catch up on his Dickens) so that they can steal his dehydration device. While this device is used to try and sneak a dehydrated army (five people) into the Batcave, the real plan is to dehydrate the leaders of nations in the United World Security Council and hold them to ransom. I guess the UN would not lend the film its official support, and it's easy to see why given that the film depicts the Security Council as a bunch of self-important fools shouting over each other ad infinitum to little purpose, and the final joke of the film doubles down on that in the most glorious way. Batman has a surprising amount of topical humour about politics and international relations, and while none of it could be called incisive or biting, it obviously wasn't supposed to be. High camp is high camp, this is a comedy in which everyone is a target, but no one is hurt.
Maybe even “comedy” is not an all-encompassing descriptor here. The dialogue might at times be more towards the nonsense of Edward Lear, which is not outwardly “funny” but rather “silly” in an endearing way. The performances, however, show a clear comic/straightman dynamic. Batman and Robin are broadly speaking straightmen, no pun intended, foils to the villains who are constantly goofing around and hamming it up. Adam West's totally serious, news-anchor-esque delivery in the face of exploding sharks, bad Russian accents, Frank Gorshin's bulge, Burgess Meredith's waark-waark-waarking, not to mention Burt Ward's exclamatory puns and other assorted insanities, provides much balance, and is made all the stronger in its balancing by the ridiculousness of the Batman costume itself. For people who know the original TV series, this will hardly come as a surprise, and on that front it's pretty much business as usual, but unlike most TV shows making the transition to feature film, here's one that didn't sacrifice all the things that made it good in order to be “cinematic”.
When thinking of classic Batman villains, I at least would be hard pressed to come up with a more iconic group than Penguin, Catwoman, Riddler, and Joker. They aren't necessarily those characters as you know them from more recent films, but they are delightful to watch as they prance, dance, slither, and waddle around with exaggerated bravura. Burgess Meredith growls and squawks, equal parts bird and sinister businessman, a cigarette holder dangling permanently from snarling lips as he pumps green knockout gas from an umbrella. Catwoman plays both seductive and silly, and is perhaps the funniest of the four, because she is at once the most outwardly normal and the most insane. Lee Meriwether only played the role this one time, but she did it brilliantly. Frank Gorshin's Riddler, bulge aside, seems at times like some kind of proto-Kramer; the way he delivers his monologue as he plots how to defeat Batman once and for all (this involves catapulting Batman into an exploding octopus) reminded me so much of Kramer in episode 78 of Seinfeld, “The Marine Biologist”, when he talks about his plans to go out to the beach and hit golf balls into the ocean.
Last, and perhaps even least, Cesar Romero's Joker has surprisingly little to do. I think this is mainly a temporal thing. My history might be wrong, but since Alan Moore's one-shot The Killing Joke was blown out of all proportion it seems that we've come to think of the Joker as Costello to Batman's Abbott, an inseparable duo, diametrically opposed, who, underneath it all, might be more similar than they think. It's a classic set-up, and it's easy to see why it's so popular—well, maybe it won't be any longer thanks to Jared Leto's er... questionable interpretation—but I wonder if back in the golden or silver age this wasn't a bit less the case. Knowing his performances for the TV series, maybe he doesn't need to be so prominent anyway, simply because let loose he could well overshadow the others. He's also a lot more fun than some of the more recent interpretations, even just seeing his well-trimmed moustache peeking through his make-up is funny.
Adding to performance and plot, Nelson Riddle's score carries the action on a sonic bed of surf rock, lounge jazz, surf rock, orchestral swoons, and more surf rock. From the very beginning the music helps bring you into the film's heightened camp version of the mid-'60s and underlines with knowing winks the silliness of the script and the performances it calls for. Taken all together, it's a really fun film. It knows it's silly, and it revels in it. I'm not sure I would call great comedy, but it's a very entertaining piece—certainly more so than Batman's two most recent outings, by turns ludicrous, dire, insulting, and bland—and a great place to commence my adventure through the Bat Annals of Bat History. That does it for this edition of the Batshit Odyssey. Tune in next week, same Bat Time, same Bat Channel, when we'll check in with 1989's Batman.