Monday July 14, 2014
Hit Me With Your Best Shot: Batman: The Movie (1966)
Nathaniel Rogers over at The Film Experience has a long-running series, “Hit Me With Your Best Shot,” in which he and other film writers post favorite frames from favorite (or not-so-favorite) movies. It’s an always interesting and frequently surprising exercise. How can two people, for example, with all of those frames to choose from, choose the same frame? Yet it keeps happening.
It’s also difficult. Man. After deciding to participate in the latest (any Batman movie), and halfway through the ’66 “Batman,” starring Adam West, I wondered, “Wait. Do we want the best aesthetic shot or the shot that best represents the movie?” I was going with the latter. But kind of a moot point with Batman ’66 since the movie doesn’t have many great aesthetic shots. Just devastating ones.
I still think “Batman: The Movie” is the best superhero parody ever made, but then it doesn’t have a lot of competition. “The Specials”? Meh. “Superhero Movie”? Blah. Rainn Wilson in “Super”? More a parody of vigilante movies, and more gross than funny. “Kick Ass”? Buys into the very thing it’s parodying. It takes superheroes way too seriously.
Not Batman ’66. Basically it’s a parody of movie serials and the post-war pomposity that often accompanied them. (Donald Trump wishes he were as self-important as Adam West’s Batman.)
Maybe it helps to be several decades removed from the heyday of the genre? Serials were usurped by TV and died, then played for laughs (at least the “Batman” ones) at the Playboy Club, which led to this spot-on parody. But movie serials had the last laugh. In the next decade, first George Lucas (“Star Wars”) and then Steven Spielberg (“Raiders of the Lost Ark”), would revive the genre with A-list production values and a relentless pace, and we haven't gotten off of that roller coaster ride.
For “best shot,” I wanted a moment that captured the brilliant absurdity of it all. Here’s a slideshow of runners up.
SLIDESHOW
All good contenders, but here's my best shot:
Everything comes together. Robin, intense as ever, is in the midst of his signature move, pounding fist into palm, while Batman crosses his arms like a bat. Meanwhile you have that great comic look from Stafford Repp's Chief O'Hara.
It's really a meta-message on the absurdity of the dialogue. After Batman and Robin escape the magnetic buoy, a Polaris missile writes two riddles in the sky. ”What does a turkey do when he flies upside-down?“ ”He gobbles up!“ Robin says. That's actually a legitimate answer to a legitimate riddle. Less so the second one: ”What weights six ounces, sits in a tree, and is very dangerous?“ It's when Robin gives the answer, ”A sparrow with a machine gun!“ that O'Hara gives us this look. Gordon adds to the absurdity by saying, ”Of course," but the greater, unspoken absurdity is the fact that Gordon and O'Hara, a police commissioner and his chief of police, follow the lead of a man dressed like a bat and a short-tempered teenager in tights. That's why this one gets my vote.
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