Tag: Catwoman

Batman: The Movie (1966)

3/4 stars

I have heard it said that the 1960’s Batman television series existed in a more innocent time. I suspect that people say this to offer an explanation for the campy, childlike flavor of movies and TV in those days. But, I don’t think this is precisely true. The 60’s were no more innocent a time than the 2020s, but what made them different was the counterweight that superhero stories offered against the world, scary as it was at the time and continues to be today.
The first superheroes came on the scene in the late 30s when Hitler was rising in Europe, and their popularity continued through World War II, the counter-culture revolutions, the Cuban missile crisis, Vietnam, the Kennedy assassination, and Watergate. Hardly innocent times.
Instead the difference between Batman (1966) and the modern superheroes is not the times, but how they reacted to them. They are more cynical and reflective now, presenting the world as it really is and demonstrating morality as beleaguered and somewhat of a lonely companion. To stand against evil they must be tough, compromising, and angry.
But, in the Silver Age of comics books and comic book movies, people were more ready to accept goodness as an absolute that was capable of enduring scorn. It was a time when presidents and world leaders were respected figures, the police were more trusted, and antiheroes weren’t admired. It was not the times that changed. It was people who did.

The 1966 Batman movie starring Adam West was a product of the earlier time. This Batman (West) gets his moral values from Sesame Street. He is the sort who disapproves of gambling, believes in the potential for good in everyone, helps old ladies cross the street, goes to church on Sunday, and supports the local police. He is all about law and order, and even denies in one scene to being a vigilante. It’s explained that he and Robin, the Boy Wonder (Burt Ward) are formally deputized agents by the Gotham PD.

After narrowly avoiding a mishap involving a fake yacht and an exploding shark (a detailed explanation wouldn’t make it less ridiculous, I promise) he and Robin uncover a sinister plot to take over the entire world. Such a fiendish scheme, of course, could only involve the work of super-criminals and Commissioner Gordon (Neil Hamilton) discovers that not one, but four super-criminals are currently at large. With Batman’s superior detective skills (AKA improbably correct guesses a propos of nothing whatsoever) he realizes that all four of them must be responsible.
The four dastardly villains now working together are The Penguin (Burgess Meredith), The Joker (Cesar Romero), The Riddler (Frank Gorshin), and Catwoman (Lee Meriwether, replacing TV actress Julie Newmar who was recovering from a back injury at the time).
The movie juggles the four villains remarkably well during the 105-minute length, by simply keeping them together in the same room most of the time. They spend the majority of the movie bickering, laughing together, scheming excitedly, and then laughing some more. Singly on television or all together as in here, these characters are always a ton of fun. Meredith and Gorshin are my favorite actors to play Penguin and Riddler and I think a lot of it is due to the sheer level of enjoyment they have playing their roles. Riddler is constantly excited and laughing in high-pitched giggles. He is the most physical of the four, moving about like he has extreme ADHD. Penguin is laughably mean, squawking about and full of pure malice as he barks orders and complains on a regular basis. Meredith completely throws himself into the role and it is clear watching him on TV and in the movie that he absolutely loves playing it.
Joker contributes the least of all of them, generally going along with the plans and offering a funny comment here and there. Romero plays Joker like he is just happy to be here for the simple mischief of the whole thing, and to me that fits the character just fine; but he sadly gets a bit sidelined by the Riddler’s riddling and the Penguin’s masterminding.
Catwoman, however, plays a more central role this time around. She seduces Bruce Wayne by pretending to be a Russian journalist named Kitka in order to set him up for kidnapping. The wily scheme works and the evildoers wait for Batman to arrive to rescue him in order to trap and kill him. For obvious reasons this doesn’t work out very well and Wayne ends up escaping on his own. Meriwether’s role is fairly straightforward. She struts about in the catsuit all lithesome and seductive while moaning on occasion like a cat in heat. When she is playing Kitka it’s only a matter of silky tones in a fake accent and looking pretty. Catwoman’s eventual rise as a feminist icon is still a generation away.
Still, the combination of all four of them in one film pays off, and it shows that having multiple villains in a superhero movie can be done effectively if done right. A lot of other superhero flicks have struggled with this despite longer runtimes and less characters to juggle.

The super-criminals’ super-scheme to take over the world ultimately leads them to the United World Headquarters (an obvious stand-in for the UN) where representatives of several countries argue about world peace. The Penguin uses a diabolical machine to turn them into dust and it is up to the Dynamic Duo to reclaim the dust and restore the representatives to their original state.
The members of the United World Headquarters are only vaguely characterized. The hows and whys of world peace are not articulated, but is only spoken of in worshipful idealistic tones. There is a sense of moral naivete that is deliberate. Batman lives in a world where the buck stops at right and wrong and any thought of costs and necessary compromises are wholly alien to his philosophy. To him a spade is a spade. But, the Joker is wild and so are his companions. The nefarious villains are similarly single-minded in their badness. Without a touch of ambiguity they seem to be fully aware that they are bad people. The motivations of greed are only secondary to their childish desire to be a foil to Batman who is every bit as outlandish as they are. Without Batman these people would likely just go get desk jobs and give up on crime altogether because it wasn’t fun anymore. The 60s Batman show and the movie play more like an elaborate game of cops and robbers with each playing their respective roles with gusto.

Batman: The Movie is a highly innocent kind of film built up on the values of Dick and Jane and Mr. Rogers. As a straight-up adaptation of the TV series rather than an interpretation of the comics, it may very well be the most true to form Batman movie of all time. The comical tongue-in-cheek style adds to its charm and it is flawless in its intentions. It’s message of unambiguous morality is free and clear while it persistently goofs off. The gadgets are absurdly specific and convenient, the clue-finding is brainlessly non-sequitur, the characters are larger than life and costumed to match, and the action scenes are straight out of cartoons. The movie does more than capture the innocent moralizing of the Silver Age comic books. It also captures the fun.

Director: Leslie H. Martinson
Writers: Lorenzo Semple, Jr; Bob Kane, William Dozier
Cast: Adam West (Batman/Bruce Wayne), Burt Ward (Robin/Dick Grayson), Lee Meriwether (The Catwoman/Kitka), Cesar Romero (The Joker), Burgess Meredith (The Penguin), Frank Gorshin (The Riddler), Alan Napier (Alfred), Neil Hamilton (Commissioner Gordon), Stafford Repp (Chief O’Hara), Madge Blake (Aunt Harriet Cooper), Reginald Denny (Commodore Schmidlapp)
Producers: William Dozier, Charles B. Fitzsimons
Composer: Nelson Riddle
Cinematography: Howard Schwartz
Editor: Harry Gerstad

Batman Returns (1992)

1.5/4 stars

Batman Returns is an ugly, unpleasant, and meanspirited film. There is something sick beneath its surface of gross-out grotesquerie, bondage-inspired sensuality, and gratuitous violence. Watching it, I felt there must have been a lot of anger behind its making. It’s the sort of movie that after viewing it I wanted to ask the filmmakers, “Who hurt you?”

Taking place a few years after the much superior Batman (1989), the film sees the Caped Crusader springing back into action after a group of rogue circus performers kidnap industrialist Max Shreck (Christopher Walken) during a public ceremony. He is blackmailed by the sewer-dwelling Penguin (Danny DeVito) who knows of Shreck’s illegal toxic waste dumping. Unlike the more balanced previous movie, the villains in Batman Returns take center stage leaving Bruce Wayne (Michael Keaton) more time to brood in front of his TV, I guess. The Penguin, far removed from the boyish aristocratic charm of Burgess Meredith, is a repulsive figure. He waddles in disgusting soiled long underwear, chows on raw fish with ill-manners that Gollum would have objected to, and lecherously leers at any woman he meets. His pasty, balding, hook-nosed visage only further elicits disgust in the viewer. In one of the films most disgusting scenes he chews on a raw fish, flesh dribbling from his mouth, right before biting a man on the nose causing it to gush blood. He then turns his attention to a female assistant and confides in Shreck his sexual fantasies featuring her. He flaps his deformed hands saying he wants to show her his “French flipper trick.” The scene’s comic tone only accentuates the rotten spirit that could have gone into writing it.
Added to the new rogues’ gallery is Catwoman (Michelle Pfeiffer) who starts out as a mistreated assistant to Max Shreck who pushes her out of a window when she discovers too much about his illegal activities. As Selina Kyle, Catwoman’s alter ego, she is a depressing figure. Selina is a misogynistic caricature of a sexually frustrated working woman living in a man’s world. The attempted murder causes her to snap and she returns to her apartment smashes it to bits and then makes herself a shiny black catsuit. As one does.
The character transformation is sudden and without much explanation. She adopts a sultry voice saying to herself, “Now I feel a lot yummier.” Her performance is sexually charged and out of place in a film made to cater to kids. When she allies herself with the Penguin he continually bombards her with unwanted sexual attention, his language vulgar and graphic. The game she plays with him is one of flirtation, innuendo, and rebuff (in that order). Her action scenes play out like a dance where suggestive comments contextualize a connection between sex and fighting. This sort of thing has been done before, but its application here in a movie for young people is disturbing. Catwoman as an archetype has always represented something prepubescent. She represents the growing confused feelings in young boys still overcoming their “girls are icky” phase. But that element is not here. In Batman Returns Catwoman fully embraces a dominatrix persona rife with explicit sexual dialogue. Every time she defeats a male opponent in a fight I kept waiting for them to take a quiet break for a cigarette.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. Pfeiffer’s Catwoman is my favorite Catwoman. She encapsulates the seductiveness of the character and my reasons for favoring her are undeniably male ones. But the writing’s on the wall when put in the movie’s context. This movie is neither The Batman (2022) or The Dark Knight Rises. There is an offset of cartoonish comic book action and storytelling that makes her raw sensuality inappropriate. I have objections to her representation here in a kids movie as both a man and a father, if not so much as a male. To put it more succinctly, a movie that has been marketed with Happy Meal toys really ought not to have elements of BDSM and sexualized violence in its plot.
If I had any sympathy for the movie it was completely lost when we get to the part where Penguin murders a beauty queen. To frame Batman she is kidnapped and pushed off of a tall building with a flock of bats. The woman’s skimpy costume remains well-photographed throughout the ordeal and when she lands she is in surprisingly good shape, if still dead. There is something I find inherently sick about scantily clad women being killed on film that is especially egregious in a movie like this one.
Further adding to my distaste for the film is Penguin’s plot in the final act to kidnap Gotham’s firstborn and drown them in the toxic waste in his sewer. I had hoped that this would remain discussed and that the movie wouldn’t bother with scenes of scared screaming babies being loaded into cages, but alas, no dice; and the film goes there. Of course, Batman comes to the rescue and nothing horrible happens, but still…

This is among some of the most unpleasant superhero movies ever made. I wish I knew what Tim Burton (a very talented director) was going through when he made it. It is definitely the most Burton-esque of his Batman films. Danny Elfman’s score is highly reminiscent of the style heard in Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands and the same Dr. Seussian sense of model design under a winter blue color palette that characterizes Burton’s films is present here. His movies look a lot like the inside of a snow globe.
But, there is a lot of anger and resentment in the film’s writing. Any and every opportunity to be gross, exploitative, and crass is taken throughout. The Joel Schumacher Batman movies that followed are notoriously stupid in their idiotic writing and cartoonish visuals, but Schumacher never juxtaposed the lightweight content with half-naked women being murdered, bondage-geared dominatrices saying “Don’t be too rough with me it’s my first time” before a fight, or vile depictions of gross-out violence. The movie is rated PG-13, but much of the sexual dialogue is more fitting for an R-rated picture. The ugly tone and foul attitudes that fill every scene contains no meaningful commentary, but simply exist for their own sake.
It’s a film where sex is firmly connected to violence, Batman kills people, and the downtrodden and discarded poor folk are, we are told, monstrosities of nature. Batman Returns is the most hate-filled superhero flick ever made, and if I was not clear, I didn’t like it much.

Director: Tim Burton
Writers: Bob Kane, Daniel Waters, Sam Hamm
Cast: Michael Keaton (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Danny DeVito (Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin), Michelle Pfeiffer (Selina Kyle/Catwoman), Christopher Walken (Max Shreck), Michael Gough (Alfred), Michael Murphy (Mayor), Cristi Conaway (Ice Princess), Andrew Bryniarski (Chip), Pat Hingle (Commissioner Gordon)
Producers: Ian Bryce, Tim Burton, Denise Di Novi, Larry Franco, Peter Guber, Benjamin Melniker, Jon Peters, Michael E. Uslan
Composer: Danny Elfman
Cinematographer: Stefan Czapsky
Editors: Bob Badami, Chris Lebenzon