PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
The third outing for
King Tut, scripted by Stanley Ralph Ross and the team of Leon and
Pauline Townsend, starts off with the Egyptian evildoer back in his
identity as a Yale professor. However, some crumbling masonry hits
him on the skull—as well as clobbering a couple of nearby students.
Thus King Tut lives again, and two of his servants are even in on the
delusion.
The script doesn’t
trouble to give the royal robber a scheme for dominating Gotham City.
This time, the obese overlord just wants someone to love. Tut decides
that Lisa Carson, daughter of a rich Gothamite, is the reincarnation
of Cleopatra, simply because she dresses as Cleo for a masquerade
party. No one bothers to point out that the historical versions of
Cleopatra and Tutankhamen lived in different eras, naturally. For
once Tut “counts coup” on Batman, in that millionaire Bruce Wayne
has been dating Lisa occasionally—which is very nearly the only
time Wayne comes close to justifying his image as a “playboy.”
There’s also an
odd touch in that Tut already has a moll, one Nelia (Grace Lee
Whitney), and there’s a brief suggestion that Nelia and Tut have
done a little more than verbal dalliance. This suggestion plays a
minor role in the script when Nelia actually tries to free Robin from
captivity so that he’ll remove Lisa from Tut’s overbearing
attentions, purely with the idea of saving the king for herself.
There’s a decent enough deathtrap and trap-escape, but I suspect
that the priority of the writing-team was to come up with as many
acidulous lines as they could for Victor Buono—and he chews the
scenery in grand form, particularly in describing the terrible things
he’d like to do to Batman.
That said, the hero,
in both of his identities, gets two of the best lines. After the
climactic fight, Tut reverts to his normal persona, and bemoans his
fate in the legal system—whereon Batman borrows from an old Teddy
Roosevelt speech, solemnly declaring that, “no man is above the
law, and no man is below it.” On a much lighter note, the coda
shows Bruce concluding a date with Lisa, accepting her invitation
into her apartment for “milk and cookies,” because (as he tells
the audience) “Man cannot live by crimefighting alone.”
No comments:
Post a Comment