[We've been hoping to add screenwriter/playright Todd Alcott and his fascinating story analyses of some of our favorite cinematic tales to The Beat's lineup for sometime, and here's his first contribution, a look at Batman: The Movie from 1966. You'll more of his writings on cinema at his website]

by Todd Alcott

THE BEAT has graciously asked me to contribute pieces to her site. As THE BEAT is the best comics site on the internet, I could hardly say no.

At my blog, What Does the Protagonist Want?, I analyze screenplays — that’s my “beat.” No cinematic character has inspired a greater qualitative spectrum of screenplays than Batman. Starting with 1966’s TV-show spinoff Batman: The Movie and culminating in 2008’s The Dark Knight, Batman has been treated to screenplays ranging from campy to demented, from bizarre to brilliant, from really-quite-bad to quite-staggeringly-good. For THE BEAT, I’m going to analyze each screenplay’s approach to the character of Batman and his world and, hopefully, show the evolution of popular culture’s ever-shifting attitude toward what is, arguably, not only the most popular character not just in comics history but one of the most popular in American culture.

BATMAN (1966)

WHO IS BRUCE WAYNE?
Bruce Wayne is tall, handsome, wealthy and dumb as a post. He lives with his ward, Dick Grayson, who is shorter, not quite as good looking, and also dumb as a post. Wayne refers to himself as a “capitalist” to a woman he believes to be a Russian journalist, but as far as the narrative is concerned, Wayne is born rich. He’s a playboy, he does nothing with his life but bear the name of the Wayne Foundation. He’s a wealthy, carefree philanthropist. The screenplay never mentions the murder of Bruce’s parents when he was eight years old, never mentions any demons or psychological issues that might compel a man to dress up like a bat to go out and fight crime. Like a lot of things in Batman, Bruce Wayne dresses up like a bat to go out and fight crime because the plot demands it.

WHO IS BATMAN?
When giggling, costumed criminals show up, or famous booze magnates go missing, Bruce Wayne and his ward Dick Grayson put on their own costumes and become Batman and Robin. The strange thing about the Batman of Batman is that he’s just as dumb as Bruce Wayne, except somehow he’s also got a bat-cave full of gadgets that he has, somehow, invented. He has personally invented a device for almost every situation — shark repellent, retinal scanner, missile jammer. He’s clearly a technological genius, and yet he still falls prey to ruses that wouldn’t fool a five-year-old.

Batman, a masked vigilante, not only has the full, open support of the Gotham City Police Department, he’s respected — revered, even — by everyone in town. As he must, I suppose, since he runs around town in broad daylight, in his grey tights with their package-enhancing blue silk shorts over them, his yellow bat-sticker on his chest and his little bat-cowl with the graceful little “angry lines” painted on its brow. He needs a full flight crew out at the airport to prepare his Bat-copter, and doesn’t hesitate to leave his various Bat-vehicles parked on streets, docks, or outside foam-rubber conventions.

WHAT SORT OF PLACE IS GOTHAM CITY?
Gotham City, the narrator says, is a bustling metropolis, but you wouldn’t know it from the strange set of indicators presented in Batman. This Gotham City is a sunny place, strangely depopulated, sometimes obviously New York and sometimes obviously Los Angeles, and other times obviously a cheap set on the Fox lot. People in Gotham City are polite, respectful and only occasionally obstreperous or rude — and only then in the run-down area of the docks, where fat twin women gorge themselves even when faced with immediate death from a big round bomb, and alcoholics have to contend with Salvation Army bands.

WHO IS JIM GORDON?
Commissioner Gordon in Batman is, like Bruce Wayne, dumb as a post, as is his police chief O’Hara. Gullible, vacant and easily manipulated, his main duties as police commissioner involve calling Batman for help, worrying about Batman’s safety, acting as Batman’s press liaison (he’s introduced as a “fully deputized member of the Gotham Police Force,” which would come as a great surprise to the Commissioner Gordon of The Dark Knight), and acting as a general, genial authority figure — when the president calls to ask about Batman’s work, he calls Gordon, not the mayor.

WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST WANT?
What does Bruce Wayne/Batman want? His stated intent is to rid Gotham City of costumed criminals, but it seems that he’s willing to put this goal on hold in order to pursue a love life. For an entire act of Batman, Bruce Wayne ignores his Bat-manly duties of crime-fighting in order to go on a date with Miss Kitka, the visiting Russian journalist. He falls deeply in love with Miss Kitka during a whirlwind, internationally-flavored date that involves gypsy violinists, a French chanteuse, a romantic cruise through Gotham Central Park, a cup of cocoa, and implied sex, back at Miss Kitka’s place. Alas, things do not go according to plan, and Bruce will soon have to face the bitter, bitter truth about Miss Kitka — she is not only not going to have sex with him, she is, in fact, the evil and ruthless Catwoman.

This Batman is the WASPiest crime-fighter in history. The opposite of the angry, suspicious fascist usually presented these days, this Batman goes through the entire movie on eggshells, terrified that he will disrupt or offend — he does not wish to impose upon the citizens of Gotham City. Although he’s happy to participate in a news conference, he is anxious in the face of adoration and, in spite of his garish design choices and outlandish costume, would rather nobody take notice of him.

Taking its cue from its title character, the movie Batman, similarly, does not wish to impose. It all but apologizes for itself with an opening title card, over-explaining itself as a comedy so as to prepare its audience for its narrative shagginess.

WHAT DO THE BAD GUYS WANT?
The bad guys of Batman, The Penguin, Catwoman, The Riddler and The Joker, want money. To get money, they have developed a plan to hold hostage the UN ambassadors to nine countries. Their plan is, of course, brilliant and foolproof. It goes like this:

Step 1: Kidnap one Commodore Schmidlapp, a British distiller and inventor. This is trickier than it sounds — Batman is always around, and you must be careful to get him out of the way first.

Luckily, getting Batman out of the way can be easily done: simply travel to a spot in the Atlantic, set up a buoy with a secret hologram projector inside, rig the hologram projector to project an image of Commodore Schmidlapp’s yacht, then call the Gotham City Police Department with a fake announcement regarding Commodore Schmidlapp’s abduction, and give them the coordinates of the holographic yacht. This will lure Batman out to this spot in the Atlantic, where he will attempt to board the holographic yacht, and then you can easily kill him with the trained attack-shark you have patrolling the waters, which you have rigged with explosives beforehand. While Batman is off getting killed by your trained exploding shark, you can easily dash off and kidnap the real Commodore Schmidlapp.

Step 2: Assuming Step 1 has gone off without a hitch (and there’s no reason to suspect that it won’t), the next part is a piece of cake. First, set up Commodore Schmidlapp in a room inside your secret headquarters on the docks in Gotham Harbor. It’s very important to make sure that Commodore Schmidlapp not realize he’s been kidnapped, so you must take great care to set up an elaborate pretense — it must appear to him that he is still on his yacht, waiting to come into harbor. This illusion must be maintained throughout his abduction. Then, it’s simply a matter of obtaining from Commodore Schmidlapp’s yacht his Total Dehydrator, which is his newest invention.

Step 3: Commodore Schmidlapp’s Total Dehydrator was created for use in the distilling process, but you’re going to use it for a much darker purpose — you are going to break into the United World Headquarters while the United World Security Council is having a meeting, and you and your team are going to tiptoe into that meeting and de-hydrate the ambassadors from nine prominent nations. Once they are dehydrated, you’re going to carefully sweep up their dehydrated particles into nine separate test-tubes and then demand a billion dollars from each one of the nations the ambassadors hail from.

Piece of cake!

NOW THEN: If, for some reason, Batman does not get killed by your exploding shark, you will have to postpone your dehydrating plan and institute a backup plan. Here’s a good one: have the female member of your team pretend to be a sexy Russian journalist, and have her pretend to fall in love with millionaire philanthropist Bruce Wayne. Once Wayne is in your clutches, kidnap him and take him back to your secret headquarters. This will lure Batman out of hiding to rescue Wayne, and you can then easily kill Batman with a carefully-rigged spring platform that will propel him out the window of your secret headquarters onto a trained exploding octopus you have waiting for him in the harbor. It’s very unlikely that this plan will fail, but if it does, you’ll just have to try to continue with your dehydrating/ransom plan and hope for the best.

THE WORLD’S GREATEST DETECTIVE:
Aside from his cave full of gadgets that can do anything, Batman executes one piece of brilliant detective work in Batman. When he is attacked by a decommissioned submarine, he calls up the Navy and asks them if they’ve recently sold any decommissioned submarines to anyone. The officer who answers the phone, who sees nothing unusual about taking a call from Batman, has the information at his fingertips and is happy to help out. He then goes back to his game of tiddly-winks.

Like The Dark Knight, the 1966 Batman is divided into four acts. I’m afraid the similarities end there. A goofy, colorful comedy, the polar opposite of The Dark Knight’s gritty, grounded realism, Batman is nevertheless worth analysis as a kind of pantomime of a superhero movie. You could complain that it doesn’t take its subject matter seriously, but then by the mid-60s Batman comics didn’t take themselves very seriously. They may have stopped short of camp, but they were miles from the character’s dark origins.

Act I involves the villains’ kidnapping of Commodore Schmidlapp and their inability to kill Batman, Act II sets into motion the Bruce Wayne kidnapping plot, Act III pretends that Act II didn’t happen and gets on with developing the dehydrating plot (including The Penguin disguising himself as Commodore Schmidlapp in order to gain access to the Batcave), and Act IV is the dehydrating plot enacted. Anyone who notices that each act is about the length of a half-hour TV episode is a greater detective than Batman.

NOTES:
What does everyone remember from Batman? The exploding shark, which happens in the first ten minutes. People tend to get sketchy about the rest of the movie after the first act break, since the plot puts itself on hold in order to piddle about with the Miss Kitka subplot, and a lot of people never even watch the rest of the movie. I sympathize, and yet the idea of a Batman story revolving around the kidnapping of Bruce Wayne is actually pretty brilliant and it’s too bad that it doesn’t fit into this narrative better. The last act, involving the actual plot to dehydrate the UW Security Council is actually pretty funny, and involves some incredible visuals, including Batman making a solemn speech about the importance of international relations while holding a limp garden hose.

The real-life UN, inspiration for the UW, looms large over the plot of Batman. The UN’s dream of an effective security council and a world made peaceful through open communication is parodied by its device of uniting four bickering villains to undo said communication. The Penguin, Catwoman, The Riddler and The Joker are shown to be at each others’ throats throughout the movie, and even acting against each others’ interest in the pursuit of their plot. To make the UN parallel more obvious, the script actually gives the villains’ organization a name, the United Underworld, with a very cold-war octopus as their logo. The Miss Kitka ruse, and her internationally-flavored date with Bruce Wayne, underline the why-can’t-we-all-get-along aspect of the message.

The plot of Batman is strange to say the least, and one of the strangest aspects of it is its stance on alcoholism. Batman openly disdains alcohol (he reluctantly admits that alcoholics are people, in spite of their degenerate habits) and Bruce Wayne drinks cocoa when trying to get Russian journalists into bed. The plot is set into motion by the kidnapping of a distiller, and Commodore Schmidlapp takes up gigantic chunks of the narrative, which the writer obviously feels is a hilarious joke in and of itself. Commodore Schmidlapp is presented as a bumbling idiot who happily wanders around the movie without the slightest idea what’s going on. The fact that all of this is presented in a sunny, goofball comedy says something about somebody involved in this production, although I’m not sure what.

The villains of Batman, like Batman himself, are the least threatening, least evil villains on record. They want to make off with nine billion dollars, but god forbid they should inconvenience anyone in the meantime. They go to great trouble to obtain Commodore Schmidlapp’s Total Dehydrator, then go to even greater trouble to make sure that Commodore Schmidlapp himself never cottons to the fact that he’s been kidnapped. If one’s goal is to obtain a man’s Total Dehydrator, which is being stored on said man’s yacht, the obvious course would be to board the yacht, kill everyone on board and take the Dehydrator. The Joker’s biggest scene in the movie is the one where he serves tea to Commodore Schmidlapp — think of that! The Joker, Batman’s greatest villain, the darkest, most storied, most comprehensively twisted character in all comics lore, here is reduced to serving tea to a kidnap victim. Worse still, he must take orders from The Penguin, rail ineffectively against giggling idiot The Riddler, and stand around fighting for screentime during the Catwoman sub-plot. (Cesar Romero refused to shave his mustache for the project, and one can hardly blame him: it remains clearly visible under his clown-white makeup.) If one is looking for a poor deployment of a multiple-villain plot, Batman sets the all-time record early.

What’s worse is that the movie doesn’t even stay true to the basic ingredients of the villains’ characters: Catwoman, who is normally a cat-burglar (hence her name), here becomes a master of disguise and pretends to be a Russian journalist. The Penguin, normally concerned with bird-related crimes, here pilots a penguin-painted submarine and also briefly becomes a master of disguise, none of which I remember from the comics or the TV show.

Now, I’m perfectly okay with The Penguin, Catwoman, The Riddler and The Joker getting together to dehydrate the UN, but I get confused when it’s revealed that their henchmen are a trio of pirates. Pirates? Why pirates? The Penguin buying a decommissioned submarine and re-fitting it so that it looks like a giant penguin, fine, all well and good — but why staff the submarine with pirates? And where does one find pirates — 16th-century pirates, at that — in 1966? What’s wrong with hiring a staff of, I don’t know, ex-Navy submarine crew members? Because there’s no indication that the Penguin’s submarine crew is made up of normal guys dressed as pirates — no, they are pirates. One would think that the Pirate Submarine Crew would justify a movie of their own, but Batman glides right over this tantalizing possibility.

Now then, Batman is, after all, a comedy. More than that, it’s not even really a movie. It was not meant to compete with, say, Torn Curtain. It’s merely product, a brand extension, designed to increase the value of a television show.

The tone veers from genial camp to bizarre, psychedelic comedy. Adam West, looking like the young Harrison Ford (or maybe Dennis Quaid) plays Batman with a keen edge of ironic seriousness. The Batman of Batman: The Movie is not one to brood in a cave between illegal bursts of vigilante activities; this Batman takes place entirely in broad daylight. Batman holds press conferences at police headquarters, trots down the street in crowded lunch-hour traffic and punches a shark while dangling from a ladder. Far from being the world’s greatest detective, this Batman is an easily-fooled dolt who blunders from clue to clue, solving crimes almost by accident.

Text ©2010 Todd Alcott. All Rights reserved