BATMAN (1966)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological, sociological*

Most fans know that the theatrical BATMAN movie was rushed into production as soon as the show’s first season proved a massive hit with TV audiences. The writers and producers of BATMAN ’66 had successfully mined the structure of old movie serials to produce a program that both celebrated and mildly satirized the tropes of superhero fiction. However, the same trick didn’t work quite so well for a movie of roughly 100 minutes.

The two-part episodes of the first and second seasons were perfect for playing with the apparent absurdities of the established tropes. A supercrook would start committing crimes. Batman and Robin would track him/her down, often thanks to the criminal leaving a lot of clues around. The fiend would capture the heroes and place them in a death-trap. The heroes would escape the trap, track the villain down and vanquish him/her and all henchpersons.

Movie-BATMAN starts out with the notion that not one but four supervillains—Joker, Penguin, Riddler and Catwoman—have teamed up to use a super-weapon to control the world. Batman and Robin gather a few clues to track the villains down. However, because the heroes can’t be allowed to track the villains down too soon, what occurs is that the villains keep setting traps to kill the heroes and failing. Eventually the villains go ahead with their plan anyway—to kidnap the diplomats of several premiere countries and use them to leverage control of the entire planet. (Yeah, that didn’t make sense to me even when I was a kid, either.) Batman and Robin overtake the villains—whom they weren’t able to find earlier—capture the evildoers and set things right.

As I argued in my series of reviews of the ’66 episodes, beginning here, the most mythic stories were those that gave the Dynamic Duo the chance to spoof various aspects of social organization—politics, literature, Hollywood movie-making—and yet making it seem (maybe unintentionally) as though the entirely artificial world of superheroes and supervillains was, by its very absurdity, comparatively rational. Movie-BATMAN doesn’t play that game, and in many ways the film is closer to an overt spoof of superheroes than most if not all episodes of the teleseries.

Most of the movie’s high points revolve around Batman and Robin’s reactions to the villains’ newest sally. Some of these are moderately amusing, like Batman coping with an exploding shark, and some are lame, like the Dynamic Duo’s encounters with a magnetic buoy and with a missile that almost shoots down the Bat-copter. Without question, the scene in which Batman finds that “some days you just can’t rid of a bomb” stands as the movie’s best sequence, but that sequence probably owes a debt to the dynamics of silent film comedy. The failed schemes of the villains become particularly wearisome with Penguin’s plan to ambush the duo with a gang of “dehydrated thugs.” Because of all these repetitious schemes, I found myself missing the more human-sized goof-ups of support characters like Alfred and Commissioner Gordon.

The most potent Bat-trap set by the fearsome foursome is a romantic one, even if it’s not intended to specifically target the Big Bat. In order for viewers to accept the sequence, they must go with the idea that even though Batman has fought and captured Catwoman on some previous occasions, he’s never seen her without her domino mask, and so doesn’t recognize the villainess when she poses as Russian journalist “Kitka.” Later, the villains decide to kidnap Bruce Wayne in order to lure Batman and Robin into a death-trap, and to use Kitka as the bait for Wayne—though the villains scarcely guess that the alter ego of their nemesis will fall hard for the disguised Princess of Plunder. Though I can’t say any of the other Bat-actors have much of a chance to shine, Adam West gets to stretch his thespian muscles a bit, as stuffy Wayne pursues a passionate, albeit essentially chaste, rapprochement with the lovely Russian journalist. Lee Meriwether’s Catwoman lacks both the overripe delivery and the raw sex appeal of Julie Newmar—who, to be sure, had only completed one Catwoman episode prior to the movie’s production. Yet I must admit Meriwether handles the faux romantic scenes better than Newmar would have, since the latter never showed much ability to play romance “straight.”

The first BATMAN feature—not counting any of the multi-part serials of the forties—remains good fun for the most part. But it’s sloppy fun, having more in common with the loopiness of the show’s third season than with the best offerings from Seasons One and Two.