Produced in the second full year of World War II, Columbia Pictures' 15-chapter Batman serial did its best to aid the Allied effort by cashiering the Caped Crusader (Lewis Wilson) and Robin, the Boy Wonder (Douglas Croft), into service for the US State Department. With their usual supervillain antagonists restricted to the comic book and funny pages, the Dynamic Duo is free to devote its energies to ankling the evil Dr. Daka (J. Carroll Naish), a Nipponese spy whose Gotham City lair is secreted within a sideshow house of horrors devoted to the atrocities of Imperial Japan. In "The Phoney Doctor," Daka's hunt for radium to power a death ray capable of blasting the United States of America back to the stone edge puts him on the trail of prospector Ken Colton (Charles Middleton), who has discovered a mine rich with a necessary component of radium and has been placed by the Batman into protective custody. When Daka nabs Colton via the use of a bogus physician, the Dynamic Duo swings into action to get him back. Only 23 at the time of filming in the summer of 1943, Batman star Lewis Wilson was married to Dana Natol, a budding actress whose second husband was Albert Broccoli, co-creator of the James Bond Film franchise; Wilson and Natol's oldest child, Michael G. Wilson, has produced every 007 film since Moonraker (1979).

By Richard Harland Smith