THE BAT (1959) ** Don't miss the early scene where the bank manager invites Agnes Moorehead and her maid into his "office," which is just like the one made famous by Les Nessman in "WKRP in Cincinnati"!...but who will turn out to be...the Bat!!?? The bat, you mean like...the bat-man? No, no, Batman is good, unless he's hypnotized or something-the Bat is a bad criminal! Oh, in that case it must be Vincent Price (whom we first see as a flannel-clad doctor), no? Suspects abound, in fact Crane Wilbur gets quite a few mysteries with scintillating clues going early, all perfectly accentuated by his enthusiastically gloomy use of black & white (window frames, shadows in the yard, the interior of a depressed mansion). Agnes effortlessly carries most of the action, and is entirely credible as a popular novelist. There are a lot of things going on, some of them stranger, and most more entertaining, than inquisitory interior dialogues when you already know the answer. Unfortunately, they just aren't sure where to go from there. They don't give the big secret away, but it becomes considerably less interesting as the plot disappears almost entirely, the characters become a bit too familiar, and the successive murders more mundane. In fact, Moorehead's fine performance notwithstanding, things wouldn't have suffered if Angela Lansbury had suddenly stepped in as the lead to save her nephew, who had inexplicably been put in prison for the crimes (as usual). The lasting impression is of Wilbur's shots, which are impressive but maybe just a level down from Jacques Tourneur or Mikhail Kalatozov. Damn, that sounded just like a reviewer. Yeah, well it's a book of reviews. Yeah, I know, but...
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