A few words about…™ – The Bat Whispers — in Blu-ray

Whoa. Yes, thank you.

Pardon me if this has already been answered, but has the 35mm version undergone a restoration as well? The 65mm is an interesting novelty but I think the 35mm version is, IMO, the better film of the two.

Is this the disc coming from VCI ?

I couldn’t find anything online about a MPI release. I assume Robert meant VCI. There’s a link on Amazon for that one:

Interestingly, all three versions of the story are being addressed in one form or another. The VCI release associated with the Mary Pickford company.https://www.vcientertainment.com/product-category/film-categories/mary-pickford-films/
At the present is like a dollar more than what Amazon has, but there's also the chance to pick up some of the stellar Pickford releases at a reasonable price.

At the same time I'm kicking myself, because I believe I was too late, Ben Model, of Undercrank Productions, had a Kickstarter to restore the 1926 silent version. Not certain if it's still open or not. But it was in conjunction with UCLA and Ben was going to provide music. We live in amazing times

Definitely pre-ordered under recommendation!

Will Krupp said:

Pardon me if this has already been answered, but has the 35mm version undergone a restoration as well? The 65mm is an interesting novelty but I think the 35mm version is, IMO, the better film of the two.

Click to expand...

Yes. But not sure you’ll feel that way once you see the large format.

jbirdp said:

I couldn’t find anything online about a MPI release. I assume Robert meant VCI. There’s a link on Amazon for that one:

Amazon.com

Click to expand...

Yes. Thank you. Juggling far too many unicorns.

The included booklet, courtesy of Mr. Blair for HTF:

An ArtCinema Production released by United Artists on November 29, 1930



Producers Joseph M. Schenck, Roland West

Director Roland West

Screenplay Roland West [uncredited]; Based upon the

play The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart and

Avery Hopwood

Photography Ray June (35mm)

Robert M. Planck (65mm Magnifilm)

Settings Paul Roe Crawley

Editor James Smith

Sound J.T. Reed (35mm)

O.E. Lagerstrom (65mm)

Production Assistants Roger H. Heman, Ned Herbert Mann,

Charles H. Smith, Helen Hallett



The Cast, In Order of Appearance:

Police Lieutenant Chance Ward

Mr. Bell Richard Tucker

The Butler Wilson Benge

Police Captain DeWitt Jennings

Police Sergeant Sidney D’Albrook

Man in black mask S.E. Jennings

Miss Cornelia Van Gorder Grayce Hampton

Lizzie Allen Maude Eburne

The Caretaker Spencer Charters

Dale Van Gorder Una Merkel

Brook William Bakewell

Dr. Venrees Gustav von Seyffertitz

Detective Anderson Chester Morris

Richard Fleming Hugh Huntley

Detective Jones Charles Dow Clark

The Unknown Ben Bard




Restoration Work

Although originally shot in both standard 35mm and 65mm “Magnifilm,” the widescreen version of THE BAT WHISPERS was believed lost until the 65mm original negative was found in the vaults of the Mary Pickford Company, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive undertook photochemical restorations of both versions of the film with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For the widescreen version, Richard Dayton and Pete Comandini of YCM Laboratories modified a 65mm printer, made available by Linwood Dunn, to handle the shrunken nitrate camera negative, and create a new 65mm master positive. The optical soundtrack was on a separate strip of 35mm nitrate film, recorded at a speed of 112.5ft/min instead of the normal 90ft/min. This difference is due to the fact that 65mm film has an image that is 5 perforations high instead of the typical 4 perforation image on 35mm film. An optical recorder was specially modified by Ralph Sargent of Film Technology Company to run at this higher speed and transfer the sound to magnetic stock. Since the expense of 70mm black and white release prints was prohibitive, a 35mm reduction dupe negative was made using an anamorphic lens to squeeze the 2 to 1 aspect ratio image onto the smaller film. Printed with a new 35mm track negative, new 35mm prints were created of the widescreen version to be projected with a “Cinemascope” anamorphic lens to unsqueeze the image on the screen.

At UCLA, the standard 1.33 to 1 ratio 35mm version was preserved from the original camera negative made for foreign release. The camera negative for the domestic version had been lost years earlier and only a master positive “lavender” existed. The foreign release version was chosen as the basis of the restoration due to its superior image quality, though it did consist of alternate takes, varying slightly in performance from the original filming.

VCI Entertainment took UCLA's photochemical restorations one step further and performed digital restoration to remove as much of the remaining dirt and scratches with minimal digitally introduced artifacts as possible. Tiffany L Clayton, digital restoration specialist for VCI Entertainment, has developed a restoration process involving software rendering and manual removal of dirt and scratches while maintaining the original grain structure. It is our hope at VCI Entertainment that these films, and many other classics like these, will be enjoyed for years to come.

A viewer doesn’t need to be far into The Bat Whispers--just a couple of minutes will do--to realize that this is no run-of-the-whodunits early talkie. Start with its status as one of only two surviving 1930 features shot in an innovative wide-screen process. Beyond that, its breathtaking photographic effects, dandy cast, and keep-’em-guessing plot ensure that The Bat Whispers is hardly your standard filmed play. Even so, like many films of its era it did begin on the Broadway stage, where The Bat opened on August 23, 1920 for a nearly unprecedented two-year run. Star mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, working with playwright Avery Hopwood, had transformed her 1908 novel, The Circular Staircase, into a gripping piece of theater. Along with ample comedy, it had a newly-added title character unmasked at the final curtain. Nearly overnight, The Bat became a template for such thrillers, on stage and film, as The Cat and the Canary,The Monster, and The Gorilla, as well as One Exciting Night, directed by D.W. Griffith after he was unable to buy The Bat’s film rights. The show’s influence and popularity were enough to cause a not-unfamiliar phenomenon: it would ultimately be considered too familiar and dated for revivals. By 1959, when a third film version of The Bat appeared, it was judged an antique.

Something of an American Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart was both prolific and adventurous. Along with an output that included more than four dozen books, she served as a foreign correspondent during World War I, narrowly escaped murder by a vengeful employee, and following a mastectomy in the 1940s became an early public advocate of breast examinations. Although co-author Hopwood had many successful plays to his credit, Rinehart’s most striking collaborator on The Bat Whispers was its audacious director, Roland West.

Moving from vaudeville to theater and films, West quickly demonstrated a gift for writing and directing twisty, inventive works dealing mostly with crime and retribution. His list of director credits, as idiosyncratic as it is frustratingly short, comprises only fourteen films between 1916 and 1931. (Stretch it to fifteen by counting both versions of The Bat Whispers.) While most of his early work is lost, his 1925 film The Monster, starring Lon Chaney, survives as, significantly, a mystery-comedy adapted from a Broadway hit. It led directly to West serving as producer, director, and co-writer of the successful 1926 silent adaptation of The Bat. While his next film, The Dove (1927), fared less well, his 1929 production of Alibi was immediately hailed as one of the best-made of the new talking pictures. As with The Bat, it embellished a somewhat familiar story with imaginative direction and dynamic photography. As was his custom, West took his time moving on to the next project, which turned out to be a remake (perhaps “reimagining” is the better term) of his silent success The Bat. The slight title change assured audiences that this time it’s a talkie.

With typical bravado, West decided that this new Bat would be filmed twice: in the conventional square-ish movie ratio and in a nearly-twice-as-wide process, a 65mm format christened Magnifilm. (Only eleven early wide-screen features were shot, including Happy Days, Kismet, and the only other survivor, The Big Trail.) While using Magnifilm would obviously raise the budget, West was so intrigued by the idea of a wide Bat that he reportedly financed the cost increase himself. He also oversaw the creation of some incredibly detailed miniatures and a huge scaffold that would allow the camera to prowl and swoop in batlike fashion. In both incarnations, The Bat Whispers,remains a tour-de-force, embellishing its standard (sometimes static) mystery elements with sudden bursts of energy and imaginative composition, lighting, and use of sound. The two versions are reasonably congruent, each artfully composed to suit the shape of its frame, with minor differences in gesture and line delivery. When The Bat Whispers opened late in 1930, the spell and influence of the play were so great that critics focused on the mystery, not the dazzling technique. (Photoplay, however, observed that “only in certain much-discussed foreign pictures have there been camera feats of equal effectiveness.”) Unfortunately, very few audiences had the opportunity to see the Magnifilm Bat Whispers. Having recently paid for installing sound equipment, theater owners were unwilling to put in a twice-as-wide new screen and make the other necessary adjustments. Wide-screen film would resurface only in the 1950s with CinemaScope, Todd-AO, and the others.

Moody and restless, Roland West made only one more film, the 1931 Corsair. Then, in late 1935, his life changed forever when his companion, actress Thelma Todd, was found dead in her car in a closed garage. While her death was ruled accidental, Todd’s tempestuous relationship with West ensured that whispers and rumors would never again be completely absent from his reputation. Few of his films were available to reinforce his standing as a major director, and both the silent Bat and the Magnifilm Bat Whispers were eventually thought to be lost. The “standard” Bat Whispers was long available only in a truncated 16mm version, a situation which fortunately changed in the 1980s when it was discovered that all three films survived complete. Given a beautiful restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, The Bat Whispers, especially in its “wide” incarnation and this sparkling new transfer, is every bit the thrilling experience that West intended. Not without some 1920s theatricality, to be sure, yet a virtuosic bag of tricks with a fine cast and, more than a century after he was first created, a memorable villain. Small wonder that cartoonist Bob Kane used The Bat--and The Bat Whispers--as his inspiration for Batman. But just remember, as its epilog cautions us: don’t reveal that ending!

dana martin said:

Interestingly, all three versions of the story are being addressed in one form or another. The VCI release associated with the Mary Pickford company.https://www.vcientertainment.com/product-category/film-categories/mary-pickford-films/
At the present is like a dollar more than what Amazon has, but there's also the chance to pick up some of the stellar Pickford releases at a reasonable price.

At the same time I'm kicking myself, because I believe I was too late, Ben Model, of Undercrank Productions, had a Kickstarter to restore the 1926 silent version. Not certain if it's still open or not. But it was in conjunction with UCLA and Ben was going to provide music. We live in amazing times

Definitely pre-ordered under recommendation!

Click to expand...

Updates on The Bat (1926) restoration:

Yes, the BAT WHISPERS was produced by Mary Pickford's company with Roland West directing, who also helmed the silent version. This had been sitting in my Amazon cart for months. I was uncertain about the quality, but with Mr. Harris' Good Housekeeping seal of approval, I pulled the trigger.

Old memories can be faulty, but I recall seeing both the silent as well the 35mm & 65mm sound versions one rainy day at MOMA in the very early 70's, back when the AFI used to have a yearly presentation of saved films. In fact, I believe Ms. Pickford was there, and spoke before the films. I was totally blown away by the large format version, much preferred it to the 35mm. Visually, it had such a glow to it, the level of detail amid such rich blacks, especially when the Bat is prowling about rooftops, made the images resemble an Alfred Kubin print. It may be a "novelty" as most theaters weren't equipped for 70mm, but I found it superior, both in direction and image.

I’ve had mine on preorder for months.

Robert Harris said:

Yes. But not sure you’ll feel that way once you see the large format.

Click to expand...

Challenge accepted!! (I can't wait!)

The description on amazon doesn't mention that two versions are being included. The good news is that it's discounted to $20 at the moment.

Richard Kaufman said:

The description on amazon doesn't mention that two versions are being included. The good news is that it's discounted to $20 at the moment.

Click to expand...

Two discs.

Ordered two copies

I placed my order back in December of 2023, happy to hear it was worth the wait.

Robert Harris said:

The included booklet, courtesy of Mr. Blair for HTF:

An ArtCinema Production released by United Artists on November 29, 1930



Producers Joseph M. Schenck, Roland West

Director Roland West

Screenplay Roland West [uncredited]; Based upon the

play The Bat by Mary Roberts Rinehart and

Avery Hopwood

Photography Ray June (35mm)

Robert M. Planck (65mm Magnifilm)

Settings Paul Roe Crawley

Editor James Smith

Sound J.T. Reed (35mm)

O.E. Lagerstrom (65mm)

Production Assistants Roger H. Heman, Ned Herbert Mann,

Charles H. Smith, Helen Hallett



The Cast, In Order of Appearance:

Police Lieutenant Chance Ward

Mr. Bell Richard Tucker

The Butler Wilson Benge

Police Captain DeWitt Jennings

Police Sergeant Sidney D’Albrook

Man in black mask S.E. Jennings

Miss Cornelia Van Gorder Grayce Hampton

Lizzie Allen Maude Eburne

The Caretaker Spencer Charters

Dale Van Gorder Una Merkel

Brook William Bakewell

Dr. Venrees Gustav von Seyffertitz

Detective Anderson Chester Morris

Richard Fleming Hugh Huntley

Detective Jones Charles Dow Clark

The Unknown Ben Bard




Restoration Work

Although originally shot in both standard 35mm and 65mm “Magnifilm,” the widescreen version of THE BAT WHISPERS was believed lost until the 65mm original negative was found in the vaults of the Mary Pickford Company, and the UCLA Film & Television Archive undertook photochemical restorations of both versions of the film with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

For the widescreen version, Richard Dayton and Pete Comandini of YCM Laboratories modified a 65mm printer, made available by Linwood Dunn, to handle the shrunken nitrate camera negative, and create a new 65mm master positive. The optical soundtrack was on a separate strip of 35mm nitrate film, recorded at a speed of 112.5ft/min instead of the normal 90ft/min. This difference is due to the fact that 65mm film has an image that is 5 perforations high instead of the typical 4 perforation image on 35mm film. An optical recorder was specially modified by Ralph Sargent of Film Technology Company to run at this higher speed and transfer the sound to magnetic stock. Since the expense of 70mm black and white release prints was prohibitive, a 35mm reduction dupe negative was made using an anamorphic lens to squeeze the 2 to 1 aspect ratio image onto the smaller film. Printed with a new 35mm track negative, new 35mm prints were created of the widescreen version to be projected with a “Cinemascope” anamorphic lens to unsqueeze the image on the screen.

At UCLA, the standard 1.33 to 1 ratio 35mm version was preserved from the original camera negative made for foreign release. The camera negative for the domestic version had been lost years earlier and only a master positive “lavender” existed. The foreign release version was chosen as the basis of the restoration due to its superior image quality, though it did consist of alternate takes, varying slightly in performance from the original filming.

VCI Entertainment took UCLA's photochemical restorations one step further and performed digital restoration to remove as much of the remaining dirt and scratches with minimal digitally introduced artifacts as possible. Tiffany L Clayton, digital restoration specialist for VCI Entertainment, has developed a restoration process involving software rendering and manual removal of dirt and scratches while maintaining the original grain structure. It is our hope at VCI Entertainment that these films, and many other classics like these, will be enjoyed for years to come.

A viewer doesn’t need to be far into The Bat Whispers--just a couple of minutes will do--to realize that this is no run-of-the-whodunits early talkie. Start with its status as one of only two surviving 1930 features shot in an innovative wide-screen process. Beyond that, its breathtaking photographic effects, dandy cast, and keep-’em-guessing plot ensure that The Bat Whispers is hardly your standard filmed play. Even so, like many films of its era it did begin on the Broadway stage, where The Bat opened on August 23, 1920 for a nearly unprecedented two-year run. Star mystery writer Mary Roberts Rinehart, working with playwright Avery Hopwood, had transformed her 1908 novel, The Circular Staircase, into a gripping piece of theater. Along with ample comedy, it had a newly-added title character unmasked at the final curtain. Nearly overnight, The Bat became a template for such thrillers, on stage and film, as The Cat and the Canary,The Monster, and The Gorilla, as well as One Exciting Night, directed by D.W. Griffith after he was unable to buy The Bat’s film rights. The show’s influence and popularity were enough to cause a not-unfamiliar phenomenon: it would ultimately be considered too familiar and dated for revivals. By 1959, when a third film version of The Bat appeared, it was judged an antique.

Something of an American Agatha Christie, Mary Roberts Rinehart was both prolific and adventurous. Along with an output that included more than four dozen books, she served as a foreign correspondent during World War I, narrowly escaped murder by a vengeful employee, and following a mastectomy in the 1940s became an early public advocate of breast examinations. Although co-author Hopwood had many successful plays to his credit, Rinehart’s most striking collaborator on The Bat Whispers was its audacious director, Roland West.

Moving from vaudeville to theater and films, West quickly demonstrated a gift for writing and directing twisty, inventive works dealing mostly with crime and retribution. His list of director credits, as idiosyncratic as it is frustratingly short, comprises only fourteen films between 1916 and 1931. (Stretch it to fifteen by counting both versions of The Bat Whispers.) While most of his early work is lost, his 1925 film The Monster, starring Lon Chaney, survives as, significantly, a mystery-comedy adapted from a Broadway hit. It led directly to West serving as producer, director, and co-writer of the successful 1926 silent adaptation of The Bat. While his next film, The Dove (1927), fared less well, his 1929 production of Alibi was immediately hailed as one of the best-made of the new talking pictures. As with The Bat, it embellished a somewhat familiar story with imaginative direction and dynamic photography. As was his custom, West took his time moving on to the next project, which turned out to be a remake (perhaps “reimagining” is the better term) of his silent success The Bat. The slight title change assured audiences that this time it’s a talkie.

With typical bravado, West decided that this new Bat would be filmed twice: in the conventional square-ish movie ratio and in a nearly-twice-as-wide process, a 65mm format christened Magnifilm. (Only eleven early wide-screen features were shot, including Happy Days, Kismet, and the only other survivor, The Big Trail.) While using Magnifilm would obviously raise the budget, West was so intrigued by the idea of a wide Bat that he reportedly financed the cost increase himself. He also oversaw the creation of some incredibly detailed miniatures and a huge scaffold that would allow the camera to prowl and swoop in batlike fashion. In both incarnations, The Bat Whispers,remains a tour-de-force, embellishing its standard (sometimes static) mystery elements with sudden bursts of energy and imaginative composition, lighting, and use of sound. The two versions are reasonably congruent, each artfully composed to suit the shape of its frame, with minor differences in gesture and line delivery. When The Bat Whispers opened late in 1930, the spell and influence of the play were so great that critics focused on the mystery, not the dazzling technique. (Photoplay, however, observed that “only in certain much-discussed foreign pictures have there been camera feats of equal effectiveness.”) Unfortunately, very few audiences had the opportunity to see the Magnifilm Bat Whispers. Having recently paid for installing sound equipment, theater owners were unwilling to put in a twice-as-wide new screen and make the other necessary adjustments. Wide-screen film would resurface only in the 1950s with CinemaScope, Todd-AO, and the others.

Moody and restless, Roland West made only one more film, the 1931 Corsair. Then, in late 1935, his life changed forever when his companion, actress Thelma Todd, was found dead in her car in a closed garage. While her death was ruled accidental, Todd’s tempestuous relationship with West ensured that whispers and rumors would never again be completely absent from his reputation. Few of his films were available to reinforce his standing as a major director, and both the silent Bat and the Magnifilm Bat Whispers were eventually thought to be lost. The “standard” Bat Whispers was long available only in a truncated 16mm version, a situation which fortunately changed in the 1980s when it was discovered that all three films survived complete. Given a beautiful restoration by the UCLA Film and Television Archive, The Bat Whispers, especially in its “wide” incarnation and this sparkling new transfer, is every bit the thrilling experience that West intended. Not without some 1920s theatricality, to be sure, yet a virtuosic bag of tricks with a fine cast and, more than a century after he was first created, a memorable villain. Small wonder that cartoonist Bob Kane used The Bat--and The Bat Whispers--as his inspiration for Batman. But just remember, as its epilog cautions us: don’t reveal that ending!

This edition produced and restored by Mary Pickford Foundation.

DVD and Blu-ray publication produced by Henry Stotsenberg,

Elaina Friedrichsen, Aubrey Shepherd, Robert Blair, and Tiffany L. Clayton.



BOOKLET ARTICLE

Richard Barrios



PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY OF

Marc Wanamaker/Bison Archives

VCI Entertainment

Shutterstock



SPECIAL CONTENTS OF THIS EDITION

©2024 Mary Pickford Foundation



PUBLICATION AND DESIGN

©2024 Blair & Associates, Ltd. dba VCI Entertainment, Inc.



DIGITAL ENCODING & DISC AUTHORING

Tiffany L. Clayton


4kK DIGITAL SCANNING

Roundabout Entertainment, Inc.


DIGITAL MASTERING

VCI Entertainment



REPLICATION

CD Video Manufacturing



SPECIAL THANK YOU TO

The UCLA Film & Television Archive

​

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Thank you so much for all this information! I’m very excited!

Robert Harris said:

This entry is A few words (in progress).

I wanted to get something on line quickly about VCI's new Blu-ray of Roland West's 1930 The Bat Whispers, as it's one of the most important (and interesting) restorative classic releases of the year, and I have concerns that it will sell out before readers get a chance to grab a copy. It arrives in two weeks.

Photographed in both 35 (Ray June: Funny Face, Gigi, Secret Garden, Ziegfeld Girl) and 65/5 (Robert Planck: Little Women, Three Musketeers, Anchors Aweigh), it's a rarity that cannot be over-emphasized. While the 35 is derived from a foreign OCN, the 65 is pure OCN to a gorgeous 35 fine grain.

Both have been beautifully restored.

More on this when I have a moment, but I suggest that those who desire to own a copy, order one without delay.

One of the top restorations released to disc in 2024.

Need I mention that this presumably inspired a certain comic book character?

Image

Forensic - 10

NSD - 10

Audio – 10 (Monaural)

Pass / Fail – Pass

Plays nicely with projectors - Yes

Worth your attention - 10

Slipcover rating - n/a

Very Highly Recommended

RAH

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Thank you so much for all of this, Robert! We all really appreciate the unicorn juggling. I’m so excited about this release!

The poster has always been one of my favorites.

Is this a 4K disc for the 65mm version.? I have a few VCI releases in my collection and all of them were public domaine low quality affairs with encode issues. I’m sure the restoration work is solid but a lot can go wrong with disc production. Was your review based on a production run disc. Thanks.

bobclampett said:

Is this a 4K disc for the 65mm version.? I have a few VCI releases in my collection and all of them were public domaine low quality affairs with encode issues. I’m sure the restoration work is solid but a lot can go wrong with disc production. Was your review based on a production run disc. Thanks.

Click to expand...

This is a Blu-ray release.

bobclampett said:

Is this a 4K disc for the 65mm version.? I have a few VCI releases in my collection and all of them were public domaine low quality affairs with encode issues. I’m sure the restoration work is solid but a lot can go wrong with disc production. Was your review based on a production run disc. Thanks.

Click to expand...

Yes.

Not certain that this is PD, but doesn’t matter. The original elements are closely held by the Mary Pickford Foundation, and are uniquely used with their cooperation.