Batman (1966)

Leslie H. Martinson's Batman arrives in 1966 with a shark, a bottle of repellent, and no discernible interest in the moral renovation of its audience. Adam West plays the Caped Crusader with the serene conviction of a man reading a tax form aloud, and the picture concerns itself chiefly with a dehydrating ray, a penguin-shaped submarine, and four villains who wish to hold the world for ransom. There is a bomb on a pier. There is a porpoise that gives its life for the cause. Nobody pauses to explain what any of it means, which is, in this critic's exhausted estimation, the film's quietest virtue.

The picture does assemble a United World Organization Security Council of Japanese, Soviet, Israeli, Nigerian and assorted European ambassadors, but they exist to be kidnapped, dehydrated, and then rehydrated speaking one another's languages. The joke is about swapped mannerisms, not about equity. A viewer hunting for a thesis on representation will find only a Cold War gag and a closing wish that people might learn to live together. It is a hope, not a sermon.

Camp is the entire enterprise, and camp is not a political program. The film has no interest in gender, wealth, bodies, climate, or the interior lives of anyone who is not wearing a cape. Catwoman is a villain with a mask and a scheme. The villains want money because villains want money. The final scene asks whether humanity might be improved by tampering with the dust of diplomats, and Batman declines, on the grounds that we should probably sort it out ourselves. That is the whole of the film's moral instruction, delivered in under a minute and never mentioned again. We are left with a picture that entertains ruthlessly and lectures not at all, a rare vintage. Score it as it is: a relic of pure play, untouched by the anxieties of a later decade.