The Bat (1959)

It’s long been a mystery why anyone thought it would be a good idea to resurrect Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood’s 1920 play The Bat, itself based on Rinehart’s 1908 Old Dark House novel The Circular Staircase, for a third big screen incarnation at the end of the 1950s. It was released at a time when Hammer were giving the genre a much needed shake up (The Bat toured American cinemas on a double bill with Hammer’s much better The Mummy (1959)), William Castle was just getting going with his “gimmick” horrors (both The House on Haunted Hill and The Tingler came out the same year as The Bat) and Roger Corman was waiting in the wings with his series of Poe adaptations (House of Usher was just a year away) and frankly this stiff adaptation looked longer in the tooth than any vampire.

Crime writer Cornelia Van Gorder (Agnes Moorehead) moves into the old mansion known as The Oaks. In the nearby woods, bank president John Fleming (Harvey Stephens) is on a hunting trip with his doctor Malcolm Wells (Vincent Price) and reveals to him that he’s made off with over a million dollars in negotiable securities, hoping that Wells will help him fake his death and they can split the money. Instead, Wells kills Fleming. Meanwhile, the local town is being stalked by an apparently faceless killer known as The Bat who is ripping out throats with his steel clawed gloves and dispatching rabid bats to claim even more victims. Hands clutch at windows, secret passages are revealed, suspicion falls on Wells and the police are baffled.

Opening with an incongruously jazzy “Bat Theme” from Alvino Rey, The Bat looks at first like it might be out to keep pace with the changing times but audiences are soon disavowed of that idea as the film settles into an Old Dark House groove that had been worn thin decades before. Photographer Joseph F. Biroc commendably brings a touch of film noir lighting to the proceedings but to no avail – it remains a creaky, ploddingly directed affair, slow, talky with and all of the wit and humour of the earlier film versions (Roland West’s silent 1926 adaptation and the same director’s “talkie” remake, The Bat Whispers (1930)) largely lost.

Vincent Price is good value as the murderous Doctor Wells but attempts to paint him as the villain of the piece are laborious and clumsy. He may have taken a shotgun to Fleming in the opening scenes but he turns out not to be The Bat despite thumping great bits of misdirection like him experimenting on a collection of small bats and people dropping ominous pronouncements whenever he’s about. Agnes Moorehead is fun as the writer and look out for former Our Gang member Darla Hood, all grown up now making her last big screen appearance as one of The Bat’s victims.

The Bat was written and directed by Crane Wilbur, a former actor who turned to scriptwriting and later directing and who had written an updated version of The Bat for the stage in the mid-1920s. He’d worked with Price before having written the 3D House of Wax (1953) and his best work was always as a writer – he scripted Alfred Werker’s He Walked by Night (1948), Gordon Douglas’ Academy Award nominated tub-thumper I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951) and Phil Karlson’s violent true crime/noir gem The Phenix City Story (1955). Horror was never really his forte, his only other foray into the genre being 1948’s The Amazing Mr X which he scripted for Bernard Vorhaus. He seems to have little feel for the mechanics of the genre and The Bat is as resolutely unscary as can be, a dreary plod through all the old clichés with absolutely nothing new to add to a story that had been told far too many times already.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the other attractions available at the time The Bat wasn’t a box office hit. The predominantly younger audiences now flocking to genre films would have been unimpressed by the old-fashioned trappings of the story, the lumbering pace and the unengaging story. The faceless killer is a nice look and possibly an influence on the maniac that stalks Mario Bava’s Sei donne per l’assassino/Blood and Black Lace (1964), but it’s not really much compensation for the rest of the tedious proceedings.