The Bat Whispers

The Bat Whispers (1930)

Greatest All Talking Thriller

Infamous burglar "The Bat" commits a daring jewelry theft despite heavy police presence. Soon after, a bank theft occurs, which may be the work of the criminal as well. Meanwhile, Cornelia Van Gorder has various people arrive at her old mansion, including her niece, Dale, a bank employee, and police detective Anderson. When guests start turning up dead, Cornelia begins to suspect that The Bat may be lurking around the estate.

Date of release
1930-11-13
TMDB
6.6 / 10 (35)
Runtime
1h 23m
Genres
Mystery, Comedy, Crime, Horror, Thriller
Director
Roland West

Casting

Interesting facts

The Bat Whispers is a 1930 American pre-Code mystery film directed by Roland West, produced by Joseph M. Schenck, and released by United Artists. The film is based on the 1920 mystery play The Bat, written by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, and is the second film version by the same director, previously adapted in 1926. An early talkie and one of the first widescreen films, West financed the cinematography, which required two cameramen and several techniques. It was considered a lost film for many years, but was restored from duplicate filmstock in 1988. As a work published in 1930, it entered the public domain in the United States on January 1, 2026.

Production background

An early talkie, this film is the second film version of the 1920 hit Broadway play The Bat, written by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, based on Roberts 1908 book The Circular Staircase. The first film version of the play, The Bat (1926), was also directed by Roland West. Just as in the play and the first film, people explore an old mansion looking for a hidden treasure while a caped killer picks them off one by one.

The film was shot in three versions: a pair of 1.33:1 aspect ratio, 35mm negatives for US and foreign prints; and a 2:1 aspect ratio 65mm widescreen "Magnifilm" version (misspelled "Magnafilm" in some ads). The domestic negative was cut down to 72 minutes for the 1938 Atlantic Pictures reissue, and subsequently was lost.

In 1988 the UCLA Film and Television Archive restored and preserved the 35mm foreign version and the 65mm Magnifilm from the original camera negatives. UCLA gained access through the Library of Congress upon Mary Pickford's death in 1979 when she willed them her film collection, The Bat Whispers (65mm) was among it.

This film was remade again in 1959 as The Bat with Agnes Moorehead and Vincent Price.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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