In the second full year of World War II, America gained an unexpected ally in the fight against Axis criminals: the Batman. Created by artist Bob Kane for Detective Comics in 1939, the Caped Crusader and his teen helpmeet Robin the Boy Wonder shifted their focus from the Gotham City underworld to agents of Japanese emperor Hirohito in Batman (1943), a 15-chapter serial from Columbia Pictures. With the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler and other arch-enemies seemingly out of town, Batman (Lewis Wilson) and Robin (Douglas Croft) are free to double team Nipponese mastermind Dr. Daka (J. Carroll Naish) and his legion of occidental turncoats, who operate from a hidden lair in Gotham's Little Tokyo. Made in the heat of war, as the nation became aware of the full scale of the atrocities committed by the Japanese army, Columbia's chapter play is a product of its time and rough on the Asian race, demeaned in voiceover as "shifty-eyed Japs" but portrayed throughout by non-Asians. If one can get past a patriotic zeal that tips sharply into overt racism, the serial's first chapter, "The Electrical Brain," is a lot of old fashion fun. A less athletic Batman than subsequent incarnations, Lewis Wilson remains a charismatic and amusing superhero while Naish (the Irish-American actor received an Oscar nomination that same year for playing an Italian soldier in Zoltan Korda's Sahara) has fun as the oily Dr. Daka, a cross between Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu and Ian Fleming's Dr. No.

By Richard Harland Smith