Feature Productions/United Artists, 1926. Director: Roland West. Scenario: Julien Josephson, adapted from the play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood. Camera: Arthur Edeson. Film editor: Hal C. Kern. Cast: Jewel Carmen, Jack Pickford, Louise Fazenda, Emily Fitzroy, Arthur Houseman, Robert McKim, André de Beranger, Charles W. Herzinger.
October is the month of the Pordenone festival, and also the month of Halloween—in other words, a month devoted to both silent films and horror films. Accordingly, I’m focusing this month on a silent horror film! And a remarkable one at that, a film that enthusiasts have sought for decades: The Bat, directed in 1926 by Roland West. Like so many silents, The Bat was very nearly lost, was rescued from oblivion in the nick of time, and has been restored to view in near-pristine condition courtesy of stellar preservation work. Now, thanks to our friends at Undercrank Productions, it will be released this month on a new Blu-Ray.
The Bat is based on a play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, an “old dark house” comedy-thriller of the type that enjoyed a vogue during the 1920s. It concerns a bank robbery, the stolen money secreted somewhere in a dark, forbidding mansion. On the trail of the stolen loot, and the thief, are the police—and a mysterious master criminal known only as “The Bat,” who has his own designs on the money. The film “opens up” the play only to the extent of adding a prologue, picturing a wickedly ingenious crime committed by the Bat under the noses of the bumbling police, followed by the bank robbery itself. After that the film, like the play, confines its action to the grounds and the dark, spooky interiors of the mansion.
But this is no static, stagebound exercise in filmed theatre. Thanks to the directorial skill of director Roland West, it’s a visually gripping thriller. Like Rex Ingram, Josef von Sternberg, and the other great pictorialist directors of the 1920s, West subjugates story, acting, and all else to the visual power of his film. His Bat is all ominous shadows, sliding panels, and half-glimpsed, furtively skulking figures. It gains in no small measure from the contributions of art director William Cameron Menzies, cameraman Arthur Edeson, and Edeson’s uncredited assistant: none other than a young Gregg Toland! In 1926, despite Universal’s definitive production of The Phantom of the Opera the previous year, there was as yet no established horror-film tradition in Hollywood. The Bat, with its spooky atmospherics, was a key film in helping establish that tradition.
Having said that, the cast of this film is one of its most interesting ingredients. Jewel Carmen, who was married to Roland West at the time, had enjoyed a busy but relatively brief career on the screen. The Bat would be her last film, and preserves her performance as a prototypical horror-film heroine—that is, a damsel in distress but hardly helpless, and more heroic than some of the male characters in the house. Jack Pickford, Mary’s younger brother, is no help at all in solving the case, and reinforces his position as one of the unlikeliest leading men in movies. Arthur Houseman is remembered today for his frequent appearances as a comic drunk, but appears here in a very different role that demonstrates his acting range. Louise Fazenda as the constantly hysterical maid, like much of the comic relief in these mystery/comedies, has not worn well with time—but Fazenda was well established as one of the leading comediennes of the silents, and it seems clear that the fault lies not with her performance, but with the frightened-maid convention. 
Far more effective is the underplayed comedic presence of Emily Fitzroy as the matriarch of the house. Utterly unfazed by the procession of odd noises and shocking apparitions, she displays a cool panache as she takes each new terror in stride, then calmly goes on with her knitting!
The present-day survival of The Bat is one more testament to the miraculous work of the film preservation community. Long considered a lost film, it resurfaced in 1987, but only in the form of a shrunken, brittle, and deteriorating nitrate print. Painstaking, meticulous work by the wizards of UCLA Film Archives resulted in a print that was at least projectable. Now, with the additional benefit of 21st-century digital restoration (special credit to Thad Komorowski), The Bat glistens in near-mint condition. A minuscule flash of nitrate decomposition, and the brief occasional frozen frame (telltale sign of a shot that is otherwise lost), are the only evidence of the film’s travails on its journey back to the screen. With its original tinting in place, and with the benefit of an appropriately eerie organ score by Ben Model, we can enjoy it substantially as audiences did in 1926.
With the coming of the talking-picture revolution, Roland West remade this film with sound as The Bat Whispers in 1930—and, taking advantage of the current fashion for widescreen movies, made it simultaneously in flat and widescreen versions. His visual craftsmanship remained undiminished in both editions of The Bat Whispers, and now, with this new reconstruction of the original silent, we have the luxury of comparing all three of his iterations of the same story. These films have an added notoriety in today’s popular culture, thanks to the impression they made on a young viewer named Bob Kane, inspiring him in later life to create a superhero character called Batman. But whatever our frame of reference, we can be thankful that this long-missing silent has been restored to our view, and in such an elegant presentation.
