Discover two feature films that helped fuel the imagination of Bob Kane and designer Bill Finger to create the Batman.
When the management of National Comics Publications (future DC Comics) noted the phenomenal success of Superman, it asks its authors to create more superheroes. This is the moment that Bob Kane chooses to have the idea of a masked vigilante whom he would baptize Batman. But this idea did not come to him out of nowhere.
More specifically, it came to him from two films:
1- The Sign of Zorro
A masked vigilante appearing in the heart of the night, what better way to inspire the Dark Knight? In 1920, the silent film The Sign of Zorro was released, worn by Douglas Fairbanks, inspired by a story from the magazine All Story Weekly and titled The Curse of Capistrano. Fairbanks himself co-signed the adaptation which became an adventure film for which – as usual – he also did the stunts.
United Artists Douglas Fairbanks, the first Zorro of cinema
Incredible success of the cinema, it breathes new life into the career of the actor, mired in romances. He becomes the new fashionable action actor, continuing with an adaptation of The Three Musketeers, Robin Hood, becoming in turn The Thief of Baghdad, The Black Pirate, The Gaucho, The Iron Mask, etc.
United Artists
The film inspires Bob Kane so much that several of the origin stories of Bruce Wayne (the death of his parents in Crime Alley), will specify that the cinema from which the Wayne family comes out was precisely… The Sign of Zorro.
2- The Night Owl
This film is inspired by a successful three-act play by playwright Avery Hopwood, based on a novel: The Circular Staircase. It tells how the masked criminal who calls himself “The Bat” visits a house while its inhabitants are looking for stolen money.
Roland West Productions
The silent feature film The Bat (L’Oiseau de nuit en VF) directed by Roland West in 1926, already poses certain characteristics that will be taken up for Batman: a mask with disproportionate ears, a burglar’s tool kit prefiguring the gadgets and a bat shaped business card.
Roland West Productions
Batman’s mask (yes, it’s scary!)
This film will benefit from a better-known talking remake, The Bat Whispers, by the same director, released in 1930. It takes up the same story more or less, always with this camera in a summer residence which also includes a butler who may have inspired Bruce Wayne’s faithful Alfred.
Feature Productions
The Bat 10 years later
And obviously, when you mix a masked criminal burglar with tools with a leaping masked vigilante and righter of wrongs, it gives, in the spirit of Bob Kane and the designer Bill Finger the mythical Batman, become iconic and which still today today, more than 80 years after its creation, fascinates readers and spectators all over the world.