Batman All In One Go

Press, Issue 30997, 1 March 1966, Page 11

Batman All In One Go

As Constant Lambert once pithily remarked, the dunghill of today is often the potpourri of tomorrow, writes the film critic of “The Times.”

Certainly in the cinema particularly the last thing which can be relied on to produce art is the deliberate intention to produce it: nearly always what seems to us most effective. and indeed the most artistic, in the film-making of the past is not the pretentious grands films d'art. but the

relatively uncalculating entertainment of past ages. So, does “Batman” qualify now as great art, shamefully unrecognised by snobberyblinded critics at the time? Well, no, not exactly.

The idea of Columbia, who produced the original 15-epi-sode serial in 1943, in showing the whole thing, all four hours-odd (not to say four odd hours) of it in London last month, in a continuous “cinethon,” would seem to be more to amuse us than to open our eyes. And tins it does very effectively. The audience goes for a laugh, and it gets it, cheering the heroes, booing the villains, and providing a ribald commentary on the relationship between Batman and his teen-age henchman Robin which just shows how

much we have lost in innocence even since 1939, when Bob Kane’s first Batman stripcartoons hit the news-stands. Is there any more to it? Yes and no. Of course these vintage strip-cartoons and the film serials derived from them have played their part in pop art and even in art art, helping to form the taste and modify the vision of a whole generation of artists, Resnais as much as Godard, Francis Bacon as much as Andy Warhol. It would be absurd to build any great thesis on the shaky foundations of “Batman” as realised by Lambert Hillyer, but at least the film can be enjoyed as sheer uninhibited story-telling and relished for its shamelessly two-dimen-sional characterisation, particularly that of J. Carral Naish as the fiendish Dr. Dakar, solitary underground survivor of a period when “a wise government has rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs.” It is not art—to see the difference one need only compare it for a moment with the greatest of all serials, Feuillade’s “Les Vampires”— but occasionally it shows signs of being the raw materials from which art may be made.

SIXTEENTH-CENTURY ART This winter the sixteenth century is being celebrated <n Paris as “the first century of Europe,” the beginning of a Common Market in Art, and the Louvre has brought out three parallel exhibitions of its finest drawings and engravings.

FILM RIGHTS SOLD The film rights of Graham Greene’s just published novel, “The Comedians,” have been acquired by M.G.M. Greene will write the screenplay himself.