Billion Dollar Batman

by Bruce Scivally

  Naish was having a rough time of it until his fortunes were changed by another man’s ill fate. When William Fox, the head of Fox Films, was severely injured in an auto accident in July 1929, the call went out for a blood donor who shared Fox’s rare blood type. Naish responded, and when the film mogul recovered, he put the actor under contract. From the time Naish signed his Fox contract in December 1929, he would never again be an out-of-work actor.

  With his penchant for dialects and chameleon features, Naish quickly became one of Tinseltown’s busiest character actors, appearing in such prestigious films as The Lives of a Bengal Lancer (1935), Captain Blood (1935), Anthony Adverse (1936), The Charge of the Light Brigade (1936), Beau Geste (1939), Blood and Sand (1941) and The Pied Piper (1942). In 1940, while filming Down Argentine Way, Naish spoke to gossip columnist Paul Harrison about how audiences sometimes thought he was Eurasian because he played so many Asian characters. “Naturally, the studio never would want the heavy identified as a Chinese or Japanese,” said Naish, “so when they’d begin worrying about accents I’d give ‘em Chinese with a few extra r’s and they’d say, ‘that’s swell—what is it?‘ I’d tell ‘em it was a rare Malaysian dialect and everybody’d be happy.” He went on to say, “Those pictures maybe didn’t make for good acting, because nobody can be easy and convincing in a phony part, but they were a lot of fun as long as we didn’t take ‘em seriously.”30 He could have been speaking about Batman...

  To appreciate the 1943 Batman, you must understand the world as it was at that time. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese hysteria gripped the nation. With Americans fearing another Japanese attack on American soil, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order on February 19, 1942 that resulted in 120,000 citizens of Japanese descent being removed from their homes and placed in internment camps. It was against this background that Batman went into production, designed to be a nifty piece of propaganda as well as kiddie entertainment. The underlying message of Batman—and numerous other films of the time—was that the inscrutable Orientals could not be trusted, and would destroy our American way of life given half a chance. Coming so soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, the atrocities the Japanese visited on Nanking, and the Bataan Death March, these assumptions did not seem so far-fetched to a populace consistently fed virulent anti-Japanese images. Also, it has to be remembered that the comic books of the time had a similar patriotic fervor; one World’s Finest cover (No. 7, Fall 1942) featured Superman, Batman and Robin sitting astride the big phallic guns of a battleship, erect and pointing out at the viewer in a clear show of American superiority. As many reviewers have noted, the irony of the Batman serial is that the plot involves Dr. Daka trying to create a radium-powered weapon. Just two years later, the U.S. unleashed such weapons on Japan, with the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  It is the portrayal of Daka that makes the serial so hard to watch in modern times. Even when one considers the propagandistic fervor of the time, the voice-over and dialogue in the serial are still shocking. In Chapter One, when Linda’s Uncle, Martin Warren, is taken by Daka’s men to Little Tokyo, a narrator intones, “This was part of a foreign land transplanted bodily to America and known as Little Tokyo. Since a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs it has become virtually a ghost street where only one business survives, eking out a precarious existence on the dimes of curiosity seekers.” That business is a waxworks, the Japanese Cave of Horrors, which serves as a front for Daka’s headquarters. There are only a few exhibits inside the cave, one showing Japanese soldiers forcing an American soldier to dig his grave, another showing Japanese soldiers about to bayonet a white woman whose hands are bound behind her back, and a third showing Japanese soldiers guarding an American soldier in a cage. Presumably, these are meant to show the consequences of not wisely rounding up the shifty-eyed yellow devils. Once inside a secret chamber in the Cave of Horrors, Warren is confronted by Dr. Tito Daka, who introduces himself as the head of the League of the New Order, composed of men who have been “dishonored.” We can tell Daka is evil by the way he holds his cigarette holder, and because he is the only character in the serial who wears a string bow-tie. “I am Dr. Daka,” says the villain, “humble servant of his majesty Hirohito, heavenly ruler and prince of the rising sun. By divine destiny my country shall destroy the Democratic forces of evil in the United States to make way for the New Order, an order that will bring about the liberation of the enslaved people of America.” Pretty much every Caucasian who encounters Daka, including Linda Page, exclaims, “A Jap!‘ upon seeing him. Daka responds, “Please to say Nipponese. That is the courteous way of addressing one of the future rulers of the world.” Batman goes one better; when Daka orders a brainwashed Linda to slap the Caped Crusader, Batman exclaims, “You Jap devil!”

  Like other Columbia serials, the Batman serial was filmed at the Larry Darmour Studios on Santa Monica Boulevard. In a 1966 interview, Lewis Wilson recalled, “We were so scorned by everyone at Columbia Studio that the executives rented other facilities for us so we wouldn’t be seen on the main lot.”31 As filming got underway, Wilson found himself working long hours—he was in practically every scene. No wonder that when he appears as Bruce Wayne, whom the screenwriters have written to be lazy and prone to nearly lying down in chairs that normal people would simply sit in, he really does seem exhausted. Nonetheless, he has a natural insouciance that shines through despite the wooden dialogue. “He was charming and funny, especially when he was playing Bruce Wayne,” recalled his son, Michael Wilson. “I think he in a way created that idea that Bruce Wayne was a sort of Scarlet Pimpernel type. And then he would become Batman.”32

  As Batman, Wilson was more vigorous, but still had a carefree air about him, as though he really enjoyed getting into fights with crooks wearing fedoras. This is no brooding Dark Knight vigilante, but rather the living personification of the wise-cracking Batman of the comic books of the time. He’s also the only Batman with a blue-blood accent, pronouncing yard “yahd,” can’t as “cahn’t” and “stand guard” as “stand gahd.” Yet although he is obviously rich, he’s more like the richest man in the city, not one of the richest men in the nation (with each new film incarnation, Bruce Wayne becomes richer; by the time of Batman Begins, he’s in the Bill Gates league). In another nod to the times, Bruce Wayne explains that the reason he’s not in the Army is because he’s 4-F, but we later learn that he’s actually on special assignment to the federal government. In Chapter 5, he receives his first special assignment when a coded message arrives, addressed not to Gotham City but to 1918 Hill Road, Los Angeles, Calif. The envelope contains what appears to be a blank page, but it’s actually a coded message from Uncle Sam, so one wonders if the government knows that Batman and Bruce Wayne are one and the same, or if they’ve only enlisted wealthy playboy Bruce Wayne as an operative.

  The biggest challenge Wilson faced as Batman wasn’t battling the bad guys, but battling the Bat-suit. Capturing the sharp lines of the hyper-muscular comic book Batman proved difficult for costumers who, for the first time, were tasked with the challenge of creating a real-life Batman outfit. Unlike the Batman suit in the comics, the real-life version was baggy and sagging and prone to everyday nuisances, like visible seams, zippers and wrinkles. Furthermore, in making the transition from page to screen, Batman’s cape was shortened, and his cowl, though reproduced as accurately as possible, fit loosely around the lower part of his head, with protuberances that looked more like devil horns than bat ears. Also, in some chapters, the cape and cowl are made from lighter colored material than the trunks and boots. The real-life outfit also featured a very thick utility belt that rode high on Batman’s hips, obscuring Lewis Wilson’s slender waist and making him look pudgy, a problem exacerbated by the use of barrel-chested stuntman Eddie Parker, who doubled Wilson for the fight scenes and dangerous stunts like leaping out of vehicles before they went over cliffs. Parker, who doubled Buster Crabbe in the Flash Gordon serials
and both Lon Chaney and Bela Lugosi in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, seemed to have trouble dealing with the cape. In Chapter 2, when Batman climbs a rope, his tunic rides up over his belt, exposing his white undershirt. In the fight scene that follows, after Batman and Robin crash through a window and begin fighting Daka’s minions, the cape first wraps itself around his arm, then comes off completely. Parker keeps fighting sans cape. After a quick cutaway to Alfred waiting down below, the cape is magically back on, though in many subsequent fight scenes the two sides are drawn to the middle and pinned together to keep them from getting entangled in the stuntman’s mitts. After the fight, when Lewis Wilson is back in the costume, it looks like the side seam of Batman’s trunks have split.

  Robin’s outfit is a very close facsimile of the one in the comic books, except that his mask is obviously a cheap dime-store Halloween half-mask. When the Dynamic Duo go into action, skinny, pencil-legged Douglas Croft is replaced by a much more stout and muscular stuntman. The serial showed why certain concepts just don’t translate well from one medium to another. While, in the stylized universe of the comic books, Robin is drawn and presented as a credible adversary to the various thugs he faces, seeing a live-action teenager getting punched in the face by a grown man is a little hard to stomach—which is probably why in subsequent screen adaptations, Robin always looked closer to 20 than 13.

  While Shirley Patterson didn’t have a strange outfit to contend with, she did have trouble with one scene. When her character is captured by Dr. Daka, the sinister villain brainwashes her with a glass dome-like device that fits over her head and has special effects smoke pumped into it. “It made me sick to my stomach,” she later told film historian Boyd Magers. “I don’t know what they shot into that helmet...it might have looked effective on screen, but it made me quite ill.”33

  Though the budget restraints limited the film’s fidelity to the comic books, the serial nonetheless had an impact on its source. The screenwriters apparently decided that the natural lair for a bat was a cave. Consequently, the first shot in the serial is a moody, shadowy depiction of Batman’s headquarters, called the Bat’s Cave. In the original comics, there was only a secret underground tunnel that connected Wayne Manor to an old barn where the Batmobile and Batplane were stored. By Batman #12 (August-September, 1942), comic book writer Bill Finger had changed it to secret underground hangars. After visiting the film set, Bob Kane mentioned the cave idea to Finger, who was scripting the first Batman daily newspaper strip. When the strip debuted in October 1943, so did the Batcave. It was introduced in the comic books in Detective Comics #83 the following January. The comics also adopted the way Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson entered and exited the Batcave in the serial—through a secret door in a grandfather clock in the mansion.

  In April 1943, a new character was introduced in the comic books, Alfred Pennyworth, Bruce Wayne’s butler. In his first comic book appearances, as in the serials, Alfred was played for comic relief. He fancied himself an amateur detective, but to the extent that he actually solved crimes, he did so by accident. He was clean-shaven and portly in the comic books, but when slender, mustachioed William Austin won the role in the serial, the editors at National decided their Alfred should look like the one on-screen. Consequently, in Detective Comics #83 (January 1944), the comic book Alfred was sent to a health resort, where he slimmed down and grew a mustache. Though Austin may not have looked physically like the original Alfred of the comics, when he’s first introduced, he’s seen in the study of Wayne Manor reading a lurid detective novel, and in the course of the serial he twice disguises himself and goes undercover to help Batman and Robin. This is an Alfred who is played strictly for comic relief, a far cry from the more dignified butler of the later serial and the 1960s TV series. In Chapter 3, when Batman and Robin burst in on several of Daka’s men who are confronting Alfred, a fight ensues. Alfred, hiding behind an overturned desk, picks up the phone and says, “Get me Scotland Yard! Give me the police! Oh, give me anything! Please, hurry! Yes, I’m being murdered here!”

  Douglas Croft as Robin and Lewis Wilson as Batman in Columbia Pictures' 1943 serial, Batman (Columbia Pictures/Photofest, © Columbia Pictures).

  Lee Zahler provided the music for the serial, choosing Richard Wagner’s “Rienzi Overture” to set the proper mood of mystery. The theme song plays at the head of each chapter, under a logo of a bat with Batman’s face. Zahler was an old hand at providing music for serials; he scored The King of the Kongo for Mascot in 1929, the first serial to feature a synchronized musical score with sound effects.34 In the 1930s, Zahler served as a musical director at the Larry Darmour Studios. By 1933, he was credited with having over 250 of his original compositions adapted for the movies. But the 1940s were rough years for the composer; as the decade began, his son Gordon, while performing a gymnastic feat at a junior high school, broke his neck. Gordon was left a paraplegic, and Zahler was left with medical bills that eventually ruined him financially and caused the break-up of his marriage. He died in 1947, at age 53.35

  It is difficult to say how well Batman performed at the box-office in its original 1943 release. Unfortunately, when Columbia Pictures moved from its Gower Street location in Hollywood to Burbank in 1972, joining Warner Bros. to become The Burbank Studios, nearly all of Columbia’s production records and office files were destroyed.36 Thus, in writing about Columbia, film historians are left with what little they can glean from newspapers and trade papers of the time, and movie serials were never deemed worthy of much serious press attention.

  When Batman was finished, the only featured actor in the cast whose career continued on an upward trend was J. Carrol Naish. In the same year that he appeared in Batman, he played Giuseppe opposite Humphrey Bogart in the WWII drama Sahara, a role that won Naish an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. He received a second Oscar nomination and won a Golden Globe three years later for his supporting role in A Medal for Benny. He continued playing ethnic characters, starring as an Italian immigrant in Chicago in the TV series Life With Luigi in 1952, and as Earl Derr Biggers’s Chinese detective in TV’s The New Adventures of Charlie Chan (1957-58; Chan was produced by Rudolph Flothow, producer of the Batman serial, who scored an earlier hit as producer of the popular TV series Ramar of the Jungle). For horror fans, however, Naish’s most memorable role was as Daniel the hunchback in the Universal monster-fest House of Frankenstein (1944). He remained busy in TV and film until 1971, and passed away in 1973.

  Douglas Croft suffered the common fate of child stars—he grew up, losing the feature that made him most bankable, his youthfulness. After Batman, he played a small role as “Davey” in the Judy Garland-Van Heflin musical Presenting Lily Mars (1943), and an even smaller part in the mystery River Gang (1945). He entered the Army near the conclusion of World War II, and upon his return had a role sparring with Mickey Rooney, whom he knew from his days of hanging around the Andy Hardy set, in Killer McCoy (1947). By 1950, he was no longer acting, and was instead working as a short order cook at a restaurant owned by his friend Jerry St. John.37 He died on October 24, 1963, at the young age of 38.

  In the same year that she made Batman, Shirley Patterson appeared in four more films with Lewis Wilson, Redhead From Manhattan, Good Luck, Mr. Yates, Klondike Kate and My Kingdom for a Cook, though both she and Wilson only had small roles in each film. She costarred in Westerns with Charles Starrett and Eddie Dean and took bit parts in Lana Turner vehicles and the Judy Garland musical The Harvey Girls (1946) before taking a break from films in 1948 to raise her son. When she returned in 1953, she was acting under a new name, Shawn Smith. She found a little TV and film work, most notably in two science fiction films, The Land Unknown (1957), where she and Jock Mahoney encountered dinosaurs, and It! The Terror From Beyond Space (1958), where she was menaced by Ray “Crash” Corrigan in a rubber monster suit. She then retired from films for good. In later life, she became ill with cancer, and passed away at age 72 in April 1995 in Fort Lauderdal
e, Florida.

  Lewis Wilson’s career also had a downward trajectory after Batman. On June 17, 1943, while still filming the serial, he renewed his Columbia contract.38 He played small roles in a number of films through the rest of 1943 and 1944, but his career was interrupted by the war. “He got drafted and had to go into the Army,” said his son, Michael G. Wilson. Lewis Wilson reported as a private at Fort MacArthur on June 27, 1944. Before the war’s end, he would serve in Europe and in the front lines at the Battle of the Bulge. “He didn’t get back until 1946,” recalled his son.39 When Wilson returned from the war, so did all the big-name studio actors whose absence left open a small door of opportunity for lesser-known performers. “Everybody came back, and he came back, and mother and I were living in New York,” said Michael Wilson. “They started doing theater work, summer stock in New England and then they came out to the Pasadena Playhouse.”40 In August of 1948, Lewis Wilson had a small role as Marine Sgt. O‘Hara in a production of Rain at the Laguna Beach Playhouse, with Gladys George as Sadie Thompson and Victor Killian as the missionary, Alfred Davidson.41 Films roles were harder to come by. When Columbia made a sequel to Batman in 1949, they hired other actors to play the Caped Crusaders.

  In 1950, the Weiss Brothers, producers of the very first Columbia serials, made a pilot for a TV Western called Trigger Tales. Wilson had a small role, but the pilot didn’t sell. His next film job didn’t come until 1951, when he played the male lead in writer/director Norman Dawn’s Wild Women, which costarred his wife, Dana. The jungle adventure, about a trio of hunters who are held captive by the “white sirens of Africa,” was filmed on a budget so low it makes the Batman serial look like Gone With the Wind. As Queen Bonga Bonga, Dana Wilson is reduced to purring lines like “Ulama throw weak man to fire god, Ulama make strong man husband.” Their marriage ended soon afterward. Wilson fared much better in the 1952 TV series Craig Kennedy, Criminologist, based on a character created by Arthur B. Reeve that first appeared in the December 1910 issue of Cosmopolitan. Kennedy was a scientific detective at Columbia University who used his knowledge of physics and chemistry to solve crimes. The show, produced by the Weiss Brothers, starred Donald Woods as Kennedy and Wilson as a wisecracking, womanizing newspaperman, Walt Jameson. Wilson seemed to have fun with the role, which allowed him to display his natural easy-going charm. It should have opened doors for him, but the series lasted for only 26 episodes. Several of the programs were directed by Harry L. Fraser, one of the writers of the Batman serial.