The Caped Crusaders (Adam West, Burt Ward) face their most perilous adventure as four the their most sinister adversaries, The Joker (Cesar Romero), The Penguin (Burgess Meredith), The Riddler (Frank Gorshin), and Catwoman (Lee Merriwether) have banded together in a plot to take over the world.
If you are going to be camp, own it. Released between seasons 1 and 2 of the Batman TV show, Batman: The Movie is the series on steroids. It’s the same general kind of fun, but amped up. There’s a lot more humor and the absurdity of the pop-art Batman world is intensified. Yet somehow they manage to insert character development and a plot—of sorts. Batman has never been so passionate—in a hysterical junior high way—as he is with Miss Kitka (Catwoman in disguise), quoting poetry and generally giving us the funniest love scene captured on film.
The cast is basically that of the TV show. Adam West and Burt Ward are the true blue caped crusaders, with Alan Napier, Neil Hamilton, and Stafford Rett to aid them as Alfred and the police. As this is a movie, we get a collection of villains rather than one, played with manic energy by Hollywood greats Cesar Romero and Burgess Meredith along with relative newcomer Frank Gorshin. Unfortunately Julie Newmar was unavailable to reprieve her sensual version of Catwoman, but Lee Merriwether is an amiable replacement and follows Newmar’s take on the character. Since the villains all work together, sharing scenes and bouncing one-liners off each other, it never feels like the villain overload that would mark the ‘90s films.
The gags here are no mere clownishness (as with the two Schumacher Batman films) but come from the characters. Batman’s sincerity and passion are a source of much of the humor as is his need to do good—his routine of trying to dispose of a bomb but finding innocents everywhere is as fine a comedy bit as you’ll find. The villains each have their own personalities, and their own gags. My favorites involve Gorshin’s Riddler, who manages to be crazy in a world where everything is a bit insane.
The only problem with the film is if you just can’t deal with a funny, joyful, good-time, camp Batman. I can.
The character was rebooted for Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, and Batman & Robin, then rebooted again for Nolan’s Dark Knight Trilogy: Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, and The Dark Night Rises, and rebooted a third time for Zack Snyder’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The ’60s Batman was brought back for the 2016 animated feature, Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders.