The Batman

An Evening with Batman and Robin from 1943 is a tough film by today's standards because the 1940s film series is a phenomenon that isn't talked about contextually that much. We've got the famous silent series, all those Louis Feuillade hits or Pearl White action movies, and then it's like there's nothing after. But here we meet the budding Batman franchise, which had only been out for 4 years at this point. There are two major specifics that complicate the path to knowledge and evaluation. There is also the fact that this was a B production and wartime censorship limited the fictional Batman world as much as it could. It is, therefore, hard to find the identical pleasures in a tale of two secret agents against the minion of Emperor Hirohito that can be found in the pages of Batman comics today. Most of the time it's a formulaic gangster flick with an ordinary sexy secretary named Linda Page, even though the action scenes of the masked hero and his sidekick should be the main attraction. History has dealt with this legacy in its own way. Batman was a funny series until the 1960s and finally in 1989 Tim Burton came along to show the world that it doesn't have to be an unintentional joke. (07/15/2017)

I have to say, I was definitely not blown away by this version of Batman. The problem is that the studio didn't get the proper rights to anything, so there's only Batman and Robin, no decent villain that people might know. This is also due to the fact that Batman hadn't existed for that long, but even as a standalone story it's nothing special. (10/22/2017)