THE BAT by Avery Hopwood opened in August of 1920 and was a smash that ran for more than two years and 867 performances. After wrapping on ORPHANS OF THE STORM, Griffith worked on his next project, which was -- ahem -- inspired by the Broadway hit. It would be a modern dress affair, with contemporary characters and thrills, and humor and all that good stuff. There would be a missing heir, a treasure of half a million dollars to be found, a fiendish, masked murderer running around, reaching from hidden panels in the wall to strangle random house guests, a romance of young people and comic lower-class servants.
There are some issues.
First, there's the technical issue of its length. The IMDb lists it as running 128 minutes. The copy I saw on YouTube, derived from the Killiam Collection, timed at 146 minutes, and crawled. I adjusted the speed so it ran a touch over a hundred minutes. Now it was brisk. Unfortunately, for the first three-quarters of its length, it's a snooze.
The opening certainly took its time, with a long prologue that ran backwards sixteen years from the main events, setting up the ending with little surprise. The prologue was about 45 minutes on the Killiam print, 30 in real life. I would have cut it entirely, and dropped a little of the background into the rest of the picture, for a nice 70-minute feature.
Griffith might have wished to make a small picture, but he could not. He was the Great Director, and his public demanded major pieces from him. He could no more direct a five-reel movie than Fannie Hurst could turn out limericks. Like Cecil Demille in his last decade, every movie had to be an epic with a finale that would top his last epic.
Next there's the matter of casting. I won't even go into the actors in blackface playing comic servants. It might have still played in 1922, barely, but looking at them now, it's just insulting. Worse, Griffith had lost the Gish sisters and Richard Barthelmess, and he was stuck with Carol Dempster. Miss Dempster is fine in the closing sequence of the movie, when she nerves herself up to go out after the villain. She was fine at playing the modern -- for 1922 -- woman. Unfortunately, earlier in the movie, she plays the stereotypical Griffith heroine: sixteen years old, virginal, browbeaten by her mother and hiding in her blankets. She's worse than poor. She's ridiculous in the role.
So we have a slow, sodden beginning played by the wrong actors, leading up to the epic Griffith finish, and that ending is fine. People run around. A hurricane starts up. It rips trees and houses apart, it knocks down the players, it threatens them with death, and it's truly exciting.
Unfortunately, by then, I didn't care. The long prologue told me how it would come out. The dictates of drama told me that boy would get girl. I had the leisure to figure out who the villain was, and why that threatening man who invades the girls' bedroom was no threat. There was no dramatic tension, just the socko finish, like the Little Colonel leading the charge, or Lilian Gish leaping from ice floe to ice floe. Too bad. Too little, too late.
There are some issues.
First, there's the technical issue of its length. The IMDb lists it as running 128 minutes. The copy I saw on YouTube, derived from the Killiam Collection, timed at 146 minutes, and crawled. I adjusted the speed so it ran a touch over a hundred minutes. Now it was brisk. Unfortunately, for the first three-quarters of its length, it's a snooze.
The opening certainly took its time, with a long prologue that ran backwards sixteen years from the main events, setting up the ending with little surprise. The prologue was about 45 minutes on the Killiam print, 30 in real life. I would have cut it entirely, and dropped a little of the background into the rest of the picture, for a nice 70-minute feature.
Griffith might have wished to make a small picture, but he could not. He was the Great Director, and his public demanded major pieces from him. He could no more direct a five-reel movie than Fannie Hurst could turn out limericks. Like Cecil Demille in his last decade, every movie had to be an epic with a finale that would top his last epic.
Next there's the matter of casting. I won't even go into the actors in blackface playing comic servants. It might have still played in 1922, barely, but looking at them now, it's just insulting. Worse, Griffith had lost the Gish sisters and Richard Barthelmess, and he was stuck with Carol Dempster. Miss Dempster is fine in the closing sequence of the movie, when she nerves herself up to go out after the villain. She was fine at playing the modern -- for 1922 -- woman. Unfortunately, earlier in the movie, she plays the stereotypical Griffith heroine: sixteen years old, virginal, browbeaten by her mother and hiding in her blankets. She's worse than poor. She's ridiculous in the role.
So we have a slow, sodden beginning played by the wrong actors, leading up to the epic Griffith finish, and that ending is fine. People run around. A hurricane starts up. It rips trees and houses apart, it knocks down the players, it threatens them with death, and it's truly exciting.
Unfortunately, by then, I didn't care. The long prologue told me how it would come out. The dictates of drama told me that boy would get girl. I had the leisure to figure out who the villain was, and why that threatening man who invades the girls' bedroom was no threat. There was no dramatic tension, just the socko finish, like the Little Colonel leading the charge, or Lilian Gish leaping from ice floe to ice floe. Too bad. Too little, too late.
