Mysterious master criminal the Bat has just left the big city for the
countryside where he (she ?) wittnesses a bank robbery & follows the
culprit to Old Man Fleming's house - & Old Man Fleming is actually the man
whose bank was robbed (!). But Old Man Fleming is away for the summer & has
rented his enormous mansion to Hillary Van Gorder (Grayce Hampton) & her
maid Lizzie (Maude Eburne). So it's in the best of interests of both the
(unknown) bankrobber & the mysterious Bat who wants to get his hands on the
loot to scare off resolute Hillary - but she shows no interest in doing so
despite the Bat's scaretactics, & any number of suspicious characters
showing up at her doorstep: doctor VanRiess (Gustav von Seyfferitz), who urges
her to leave the mansion & clearly has an agenda besides healing patients,
the gardener Brooke (William Bakewell) her niece Dale (Una Merkel) brings to
the mansion - who of course soon turns out to be both the cashier blamed for
the bank robbery, and Dale's fiancé -, the clumsy caretaker (Spencer Charters)
who might - or might not - be as stupid as he looks, Old Man Fleming's son
Richard (Hugh Huntley), or even police detective Anderson (Chester Morris).
Soon, Dale finds out that the loot might be hidden in some hidden room
somewhere in the mansion (don't ask how she found that out), but Richard
Fleming, the only one who has blueprints of the building, refuses to hand them
over to Dale ... & for that he is soon shot by the Bat. Investigating this
murder, Anderson soon enocunters doc VanRiess having an unhealthy interest into
the blueprints - or what part of them the Bat failed to take - & accuses
him to have robbed the bank together with Old Man Fleming ... however as a
reward for his detective work, Anderson gets hit over the head by
VanRiess.
Much confusion ensues when Dale actually finds the hidden room, but sees the
Bat kill another man & attacking her, too (she manages to escape), &
it's not made any better when incompetent private investigator Jones (Charles
Dow Clark) shows up to mess up everything even more.
Only a stranger, who shows up injured at the mansion's doorstep & whom
Anderson claims to be the Bat, can shed light on the proceedings. When he traps
the bat in his own trap & reveals him to be ... detective Anderson -
actually a fraud who has taken on Anderson's identity, with the stranger being
the real Anderson. But the Bat can make good an escape, until he steps into a
beartrap that timid maid Lizzie has naively laid out to catch the criminal ...
This movie is already the second version of the popular stageplay The Bat
by Avery Hopwood & Mary
Roberts Rinehart, the first one was madein 1926, also directed by
Roland West. The play is said to have been - along with Zorro
& The Shadow
- one of the key influences for Bob Kane's/DC-Comics' Batman.
The movie in itself, an early talkie example of the popular old dark
house-genre does have its nice touches, including some inspired modelwork
to create the illusion of the camera sweeping over a city & up & down
buildings, to create a sense of dynamics & depth - which is all limited to
the beginning of the movie though, before the main action in the old dark house
even begins (in a prologue that has only very little to do with the actual
story).
Once the film moves to the mansion however, despite some atmospheric shots,
the audience would be hard-pressed to find anything really inspiring though,
with a way too convoluted & over-populated mystery plot that seems to
change directions on a whim & throws any kind of criminalistic logic out of
the window ever so often, making the movie, along with it's solution, rather a
disappointment.
|