The Bat (1959), a Sentimental Favorite, Starring Vincent Price

Cornelia Van Gorder is mystery-solving mystery novelist, much like Jessica Fletcher, but she is tougher and tarter. She started out as Rachel Innes, the heroine of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s novel, The Circular Staircase, but morphed into the less sentimental character of the Broadway adaptations, titled The Bat. The original West End run featured Claude Rains, so it must have been spooky. Rinehart subsequently released a novelization ghost-written by Stephen Vincent Benet to differentiate the divergent properties. However, we are more interested in Vincent Price, who co-starred third official feature film adaptation. The dastardly villain is on the prowl, much to Miss Van Gorder’s annoyance in Crane Wilbur’s The Bat, which airs this Wednesday on TCM—and is easily findable online, having fallen into public domain.

Miss Van Gorder and her comic relief maid Lizzie Allen have rented the country home of local bank president, John Fleming, but they have trouble hiring domestic help. Evidently, the property has a bad reputation. It does not help when Fleming dies in a supposed hunting accident. Actually, it was Dr. Malcolm Wells who killed, in hopes of stealing the million bucks Fleming embezzled. Of course, he has an advantage, since he also serves as the medical examiner.

So, is Dr. Wells the notorious Bat—the faceless mad man, who has terrorized the town? He is obviously a leading suspect, along with Warner, Van Gorder’s arrogant chauffeur-turned-butler and Lt. Andy Anderson, who always seems to arrive on the scene just in the nick of too late. Whoever he is, the Bat keeps skulking around the Fleming house, in search of the missing money.

Admittedly, The Bat is not a great movie, nor is it very scary, but it is fun, in a nostalgic, Scooby-Do kind of way. It also moves along quite briskly, thanks Louis Forbes’ jaunty and brassy score, featuring jazz-exotica guitarist Alvino Rey. Wilbur certainly understood the material, since he wrote a knock-off play titled The Monster.