The Bat (1959)
Mystery novelist Cornelia Van Gorder rents an isolated country house for the summer, unaware that a masked prowler called the Bat is hunting a fortune in stolen bank notes hidden somewhere inside. Bodies pile up as she and her maid try to outlast the killer and identify him among the people around them.
Crane Wilbur’s film was the fourth screen version of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s much-adapted stage hit The Bat, itself drawn from her novel The Circular Staircase. Shot cheaply and fast, it pairs Vincent Price with Agnes Moorehead and lapsed into the public domain, making it a television and budget-video perennial.
Background
The Bat was the fourth screen adaptation of Mary Roberts Rinehart’s frequently adapted stage hit of the same name, itself drawn from her earlier novel The Circular Staircase. Director Crane Wilbur shot this version cheaply and quickly, pairing Vincent Price with Agnes Moorehead in a story about a mystery novelist who rents an isolated country house for the summer, unaware that a masked prowler known as the Bat is hunting a fortune in stolen bank notes hidden somewhere inside.
What to watch for
Watch for how the story’s locked-house mystery structure, bodies piling up as the heroine and her maid try to identify the killer among the people around them, follows a formula that had already proven durable across several earlier versions of the same source material. The film lapsed into the public domain, which turned it into a frequent presence on television and in budget video collections, giving it a much longer afterlife than its modest production values might otherwise have earned.
