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I have a great fondness for false history.
Wait, no, don't run! Not in a scary Stalinist 'erased from the photographs and the official history' way, or a Maoist 'Year Zero' way, or an even more terrifying (since it's happened relatively recently) 'extremist right wingers trying to infiltrate the National Trust to stop people talking about the actual facts about Empire, like slavery' (for Stateside readers, think Lindsay Halligan's 'museums shouldn't make slavery seem bad') kind of way. They're all pretty chilling. No, I mean in a falsified fictitious film history kind of way.
Ever since I saw 2009's House of the Wolf Man and admired the recreation of a 1940s Universal horror movie down the film grain and aspect ratio, I've loved the escapism of sitting down to watch that kind of modern (re)construction of the filmic world of a bygone age and slipping into an alternate reality where it really was made back then; the adaptations of The Call of Cthulhu and The Whisperer in Darkness by the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society - made in 2005 and 2011 respectively, but made as though they emerged from the aether in the 1920s and 1930s - stand as wonderful examples of the art. The loving craft, if you will. Heh. I will, even if you won't.
Fun, then, to go back through the list of actors who have essayed the role of the Caped Crusader - the Dark Knight Detective - back, back to the beginning.... Before Adam West.... Before Gordon Lowery... Before Lewis Wilson... To find...
Ryan Bijan? Huh. Okay. Let's go with this.
So here we are in an alternate 1939 - a reality where the Batman made his celluloid debut a full four years earlier than in our harsh realm, in the same year as his comic book premiere. In this quantum state Mystery of the Bat-Man predates the 1943 Batman (a.k.a. The Batman) and all of its extraordinarily dodgy yellowface villainy and wartime anti-Japanese attitudes, giving us a far less problematic Bat-inception... now there's a Christopher Nolan crossover just waiting to happen. I mean, the Nolanverse is getting weird, isn't it, with the Scarecrow inventing the atomic bomb or whatever? I think that's what happened. I dunno, I watched Barbie instead.
Anyway...we are presented with a constructed reality wherein this 'lost' motion picture serial from 1939 has been rediscovered in a barn outside Beesville, Texas - rather than in a relay station in Jos, Nigeria by archivist and mentalist Philip Morris (another one for the Who fans out there. Yes, I still refuse to say 'Whovians': it sounds silly and I'm set in my ways). The fiction we are buying into here is that this was a mooted twelve part serial of which only the first six were made (and so it remains eternally, maddeningly, incomplete like the Cliffhangers serials of the eponymous 1979 portmanteau series [comprising Perils of Pauline pastiche Stop Susan Williams, pulpy Phantom Empire tribute The Secret Empire, and the marvelous Gothic vampire tale The Curse of Dracula - the only one of the trio of tales to actually get a televised ending]), before the poverty row studio producing it - BJC Studios - folded.
It begins...
Chapter One: The Case of the Chemical Syndicate
And so we make a good start by adapting - or at least using the title and a few guest characters from - Detective Comics issue #27, the actual debut story of the Bat-Man himself. Created by writer Bill Finger and artist Bob Kane, as I'm sure everyone already knows, the character was the embodiment of a veritable smorgasbord of ingredients including Johnston McCulley's Don Diego de la Vega a.k.a. El Zorro from The Curse of Capistrano and it's sundry sequels as well as the criminal protagonist of the 1926 silent The Bat (or, more likely, the 1930 talkie remake The Bat Whispers - though silent cinema would certainly plant the seeds of the Bat-Man's chief nemesis the Joker through Conrad Veidt's grinning Gwynplaine from 1928's The Man Who Laughs).
Initially released on the 28th of August 2016 and opening with a 'new', 'present day' introduction from purported film scholar Michael Monro - who for all I know may well be a real person - which details the falsified history behind the Mystery, the serial starts with a very authentic-seeming opening credits sequence that just gives the kayfabe away with knowing wink credits for a 'Frank Adams' as assistant director and a 'Neal Miller' as art director (referencing much later than '39 Batman alumni Neal Adams and Frank Miller respectively) and leaves both protagonist the Bat-Man and antagonist the Red Hood uncredited - the former given an enigmatic '?' despite Bruce Wayne being separately billed; creator, director, star and all-round auteur Bijan taking the name of Desmond Harmon for his performance as the millionaire playboy. Were this from 1939 of course, most of the movie-going but non-comic reading public would be unaware of the lead character's dual identity so the artifice makes total sense.
The opening titles replete with split-screen character intros are spot-on and period-accurate and lead us into an opening scene a post-heist robber being waylaid on a rooftop by the masked vigilante that's a great Batman intro, but does give the game away / drop the kayfabe somewhat with its very modern seeming handheld camera shots. But that's a relatively minor quibble. Commissioner Jim Gordon (Michael H. Price, supposedly a veteran of classic Westerns, according to Monro in the introduction; I find myself wondering whether this is the same Mr Price who co-authors the wonderful Forgotten Horrors series of tomes on genre obscurities and lost Poverty Row genre flicks?) is discussing the case at his home with millionaire playboy Bruce Wayne (Bijan) who expresses feigned incredulity at the exploits of this "costumed fruit" as Gordon rather politically incorrectly phrases it and directly references pulp and radio vigilante the Shadow with his maxim of "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?" (and for more on Walter B. Gibson's noirish forerunner to the Bat, see here) before Gordon's lovely daughter Barbara (Marisa Duran, a rather prolific voice actor in various anime series and video games the only one of which I know is One Piece; Duran's imdb page says she's non-binary but says she uses she as well as they so I think I'm okay in continuing to refer to her as 'she', especially as I'll generally be referring to Barbara Gordon in character) enters and her father makes rather clumsy introductions and attempts at match making - including mentioning that Wayne has recently returned from "a sojourn in the Orient". The rather awkward scene is interrupted by a call alerting Gordon that old Lambert, the "chemical king" (I used to know somebody at university with a similar moniker, but I must stress for very different reasons), has been found stabbed to death. This rather gory news comes as something of a relief and Gordon asks Wayne if he wants to tag along to the murder scene, as you do.
After a rather nice model house establishing shot, we dissolve to the scene of the crime where there's a dead man in the study - no word on whether or not the chicken's still dancing though - and a guest appearance by Clark Kent (Paul Bisnette, replaced by Beau Coleman in later chapters) himself who's here to cover the story; asked by an exasperated Gordon whether or not there's crime in Metropolis that he should be concerned with his feigns an "aw shucks" demeanour and says there's not so much since "you know who" appeared on the scene. Questioning the late Lambert's widow Leatrice (Nicole Johnson) Gordon divines that she was out with noted crime boss Tony Zucco at the time of her husband's murder before returning to find her "Daddy" (meaning her husband not her father - don't kink shame) now a deady with a knife in him. Gordon receives a panicked call from one of Lambert's former business partners Steven Crane (Tommy Cuerri) saying that Lambert was threatened by some mysterious figure named 'the Red Hood' and that he has also had the same threatening call.
Detective Harvey Bullock, a familiar character from the acclaimed noirish Saturday morning Batman: the Animated Series where he was voiced by Robert Costanzo and played in live action by Donal Logue in Gotham, here essayed by Matthew Ham - another prolific voiced actor with roles in such stuff as Fairy Tale and Attack on Titan - is rapidly dispatched to the scene but arrives too late; Crane has already been shot dead by a gang of red hooded goons (red hoods?) and Bullock finds the Bat-Man pummeling one of them on the roof of Crane's domicile only for the masked man to vanish in a puff of smoke. Resolving that the other two former partners, Paul Rogers (Parker Fitzgerald) and Roland Jennings (Robert Perrin), are next on the hit list both the vigilante and the police head for the laboratory at Apex Chemicals; where the weaselly Rogers has already been struck down by his treacherous compadre - Jennings is a member of the Red Hood's gang and the Bat-Man is walking into a trap...
Chapter Two: The Man Behind the Red Hood!
Continuing the story, the second segment (which emerged not the following week, but on the 18th of April 2017; whether it was the same Bat-time depends on when you watched it I suppose) sees our cliffhanger - in which the Bat-Man, along with Paul Rogers (but not Free or Queen, that would be Paul Rodgers you're thinking of), has been trapped in a chemical gas testing facility - resolved by donning gas masks and waiting for the hulking Jennings to stop nonchalantly listening to music on his Victrola and reading Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Return of Tarzan (they like getting in their references to other pulp heroes in this - I approve wholeheartedly) and open up the sealed gas chamber to remove the bodies. We get quite a good fight scene between the Caped Crusader and the would-be assassin that moves across the floor of the Apex Chemicals lab; the panning camera move tracking the action one again being the only anachronistic break of kayfabe but it's a nice shot so shhh. The struggle ends with Jennings being stabbed in the neck and Rogers left alone standing over his corpse where he is found by the unctuous Alfred Stryker (Jonathan Hardin), the fourth member of the cabal comprising the late Crane and Jennings, the only one still standing along with Rogers.
We now get the artifice of a caption announcing that there is footage missing due to a damaged reel, and we jump to Rogers being pursued through the plant by Stryker - or so it seems - in full Red Hood garb. Chasing him onto a gantry above the boiling vats of chemicals (I think we all know where this is heading, and you don't have to have read the source comics to have an idea - just a memory of Jack Nicholson in the 1989 Prince soundtracked flick is sufficient), the Hood is surprised by Bat-Man who sends him flying over the rails with a Wilhelm scream to plunge into the bubbling sludge in a scene appropriately tinted green and feeling somewhat like a homage to Michael Curtiz' 1933 The Mystery of the Wax Museum.
Shifting location - both temporally and geographically - to police H.Q. the following day, we meet once again with Commissioner Gordon as he lays out the facts of the case to an affecting nonchalance and disinterest Bruce Wayne, who tells Gordon that his stories are so good he should write for the Saturday Evening Post, to which he responds that he's "more of a Robert E. Howard guy" (I wonder if there's a pulp fiction heroes drinking game in this to be had? I'm okay, the hospital's just down the road within wheelbarrowing distance). Wayne's insouciant demeanour falters however when Gordon says that he has Alfred Stryker downstairs who has confessed to being the Red Hood: it seems that he dressed a member of the janitorial staff in his Red Hood outfit (ah, the 'missing footage' subterfuge becomes clear) and this unwitting innocent is who the Bat-Man knocked into the chemical tank. Still reeling from the thought of having dispatched an unwitting maintenance man, Detective Bullock enters with the news of a kidnapping on the Madison estate. Bruce says that he knows the family well and that he'll drop by but turns down the Commish's offer to ride along, saying he'll drop by later and "take [his] own car".
Meanwhile, a young couple - Jackie (Mackenna Milbourn) and her floppy-haired preppy beau Jimmy (Quinn Moran) - are canoodling by a river when a red-hooded man crawls from the water. As Jimmy goes to find help, the attentive Jackie removes the stricken man's hood only to be repaid by being brained with rock clutched in the man's gloved hand before the figure with the visage still unseen departs laughing a maniacal laugh... What kind of Joker are we dealing with here?
Chapter Three: Bye-Bye, Baby!
Released on the nineteenth of January 2018, the third instalment of our chiropteran saga opens with a caption advising we the viewer that "The following is a love letter to the films of the 1930's and 40's. It is an artistic interpretation, and is not meant to be a wholly accurate re-creation of the era, or its filmmaking techniques" [sic]; rather throwing my couple of minor criticisms of shots that wouldn't have been manageable at the time for the petty quibbles that they are. I wonder if similar critiques were being made at the time for them to append such a disclaimer to the third episode? In any case, suitably chastened I shall refrain from harping in the same vein and instead resort to criticism of bad use of apostrophes. Because I am that petty. So there.
Chapter Four: Scandalous
Scandal streaked the screen scarlet in February 2019 as the 28th of the month saw the resolution (there's going to be a resolution, yeah, you know) of the previous instalment's rather literal cliffhanger - roofhanger? - ending, but not before an opening scene with the caption slide 'Gotham City' establishing our location - the first on-screen acknowledgement, I think, that this is in fact Gotham set in a church where Fingers and Ricky are marched before their masked boss the Monk (Toney Dempsey) by the Fox and the Shark. After enquiring after the whereabouts of the Vulture (Adrian Toomes or Blackie Drago? Oops, wrong comic company) and being told of the Bat-Man's fall, Fingers is dispatched for his bungling, for such is the disposability of henchmen, and Ricky is dragged off to be imprisoned in the cellars while the Fox declares that "the Bat is dead".
Chapter Five: Face to Face
Not finally but fifthly, Face to Face features as our penultimate adventure just mere months after the last; the 27th of June 2019. Continuing the action of the precious instalment, with the masked and anonymous Barbara Gordon breaking into the room where the sex worker 'Kitty' is about the by murderer by her non-paying client. After a nicely violent close-quarters fight scene where the pugilistic punter is getting the better of Babs, he finds himself in for a free spot of unexpected and non-erotic asphyxiation as the abused call girl garrotes him with her whip. "Well, he definitely finished" she quips, Bond-style over his corpse in her lingerie. Some of us would pay good money for that.
Chapter Six: The End is the Beginning is the End
How nice to close on a Smashing Pumpkins reference - and a Batman-related one at that (albeit a Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin one. Personally, I think REM's 'Revolution' was the better song from that soundtrack but it's pretty slim pickings [wasn't he in Dr Strangelove?] on a tracklist awash with the likes of the Goo Goo Dolls and Bone Thugs-'n'-Harmony).
Debuting on the 1st of May 2020, the concluding chapter of the serial sees the dream team of Kitty and Barbara, having disposed of the body of the murderous john (who won't be writing up a Punternet review anytime soon - if Punternet's still a thing these days, I dunno), on a mission knocking door to door in Kitty's apartment block. The call girl and the commissioner's daughter hit the jackpot when they wind up at the threshold of the domicile currently containing both the baby and the brutalised Bat-Man. Made an offer of a threesome he's can't refuse (who'd turn down the prospect of being the Lucky Pierre filling in a Bargirl / Catwoman sandwich?) the disgraced doctor (James Jackson) is tempted back to Kitty's room along with the ladies, leaving his brother and compatriot Billy (Johnny Loyd) sipping on 'World's Finest' whisky - ha! - and guarding the hostages. Bruce seizes on the opportunity to take advantage of his credulous custodian, asking to be passed his utility belt for the 'medicine' contained within one of the pouches thereon. Meanwhile, while Kitty distracts the doctor Barbara has made her way through the ventilation shaft to rescue baby Jackie and call the police for back-up.
But the maladroit medic isn't distracted by the charms of 'Kitty' Kyle for long and notices Babs' absence. catching them in the act of escaping, he knocks Barbara out only to be assailed by a batarang and flashbomb from the Bat-Man's belt.Kitty enters the chaotic melee and this kitten with a whip manages to rescue both Barbara and the baby just before the fuzz arrives led by Harvey Bullock who kills Dr. Death just before he can put a bullet in Bruce.
The full serial in six parts is available to view on the Big John Creations Youtube channel - which also features a great many videos wherein film historians such as Jonathan Rigby, David Del Valle, the late Lee Gambin and others spotlight various movie classics in conversation with Bijan and is highly recommended to all who have an interest in and affection for the annals of cinema.
That's annals with two 'n's, you dirty lot. Yeesh.
