Cubussoli Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Kaydan Christian A terrific literary drama and character piece that shows how the process of creating art can be seen differently by those doing it and those looking at it from the outside.

Zandra The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

Marva It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

binapiraeus Just like "Underworld" is the 'grandfather' of the classic gangster movies, so is "The Bat" for the classic mystery genre. The subject HAD been very popular for quite a while: both "The Bat" and "The Cat and the Canary" had been playing on the stage for years - but "The Bat" was the first to become a movie. And WHAT a movie! Starting from an obscure plot about a criminal mastermind the police just isn't able to catch and a big bank robbery, it soon leads us straight to the banker's old dark mansion - the PERFECT setting for a classic mystery - which an eccentric writer and her slightly hysterical housekeeper have just rented.And then the REAL mystery spook begins: turning bookshelves, secret passages, suspicious visitors, the lights going out, the shadow of a bat on the wall, a shot from the dark... And in the end - the plot dilutes... But we've got to keep it a secret, as we'd been told from the beginning! Explaining the whole complicated story to the audience certainly wasn't easy in a silent film, but the directing and acting is excellent, and the suspense is kept up from the first to the last moment - and in between all the murderous ongoings, there are also some great moments of fun! So this film provides about the COMPLETE pattern that mystery movies would follow for the next 20 years - a REAL prototype for a wonderful genre that's entertaining, puzzling and making us shiver until this day...

MartinHafer This is a film that could never be made today. The idea of a master criminal running about in a bat costume is pretty silly--and the outfit is actually rather cute. Oddly, today we cannot imagine such silliness in a criminal but we COULD in a crime fighter! However, there are many more silly moments in this film--so many that it's hard to take it all very seriously. The plot is also amazingly convoluted...so trying to figure it all out isn't particularly important.The film begins with a bank robbery. The trail to the robber goes to an old mansion and inside are some innocent folks. However, when people start appearing, the chaos begins. Heck, after a while it's all pretty funny, as detectives, private detectives, bloody strangers and gardeners who know nothing about gardening all show up unannounced. It's a typical whodunnit style film morphed with an old dark house movie and it never seems to take itself very seriously.While there are MANY logical errors throughout the film (too many), the whole thing is pretty entertaining and you can't help but marvel at the set and cinematography. The film certainly looks good--and it doesn't hurt that the print they recently unearthed is, for the most part, rather pristine.Overall, for silent movie fans, this is an excellent picture. For others, however, it may all just seem too silly and trite to make it worth seeing. My advice is that if you aren't a silent fan, try watching some other silents first--this one probably isn't good enough to make you a fan of the genre...and it's all a bit silly.

Spondonman First time of viewing The Bat holds up remarkably well for me. The opening scenes especially but also throughout the camera angles, zippy story and editing are quite modern in feel - no good thing in itself but make it easier to follow sometimes.I watched this expecting to see "the granddaddy of haunted house mysteries". Well, I suppose it was, but the house was as big as an aerodrome meaning a different kind of atmosphere was generated, not like The Cat and the Canary etc at all. The sets are absolutely stupendous and remain in the imagination long after the film has finished. The darkness and brooding shadows help the rather stagy acting through some flatter bits. But why was Conrad Fleming skulking about on the roof?The mysterious Bat (I'm fore-sworn to secrecy) looked a bit silly to me at first, but as his similarity to Donnie Darko's rabbit grew on me he looked more and more sinister and evil as the film progressed. I realise that this association was not West's intention but I can't help it now! It helped me anyway, so maybe it's best to watch DD first!I'm definitely going to watch this one again after a decent interval!

sbibb1 This 1926 film is one of the first films in the "spooky house" genre. The plot is simple, "The Bat" is a killer who is trying to get a wealthy woman and her niece out of a huge mansion that was left over when a bank president dies. Hidden in the house is $200,000 in cash, and its a race to try and find the money before "The Bat" gets to it.The film stars are probably not very well known today, Emily Fitzroy plays the wealthy Aunt, always doing her knitting, her companion/housekeeper is played by Louise Fazenda, with over the top/slapstick type of comedy. Jack Pickford plays the newly hired gardner, this is before his wife, actress Olive Thomas died of a drug overdose, and not too long before he himself was the victim of an overdose.The real "star" of the film is Jewel Carmen. She was married to director Roland West at the time. Years later both West and Carmen, long after they were out of the spotlight both would play roles in one of the biggest of Hollywood mysteries, the death of actress Thelma Todd.West was a business partner in Thelma Todd's Sidewalk Cafe along the West Coast Highway in Los Angeles. Todd and West were having an affair at the time of her mysterious death.The coroner set Todd's death at a certain time, but Jewel Carmen, a friend of Todd's testified under oath that she saw Todd out driving in her car with an unidentified man, well after the corner had claimed she was already dead.Some authors have speculated that Todd, who was found slumped dead behind the wheel of her car in a closed garage; a victim of supposed Carbon Monoxide poisoning, was accidentally killed by West when he locked her out of her apartment.