Though fourth-billed in Columbia's 1943 Batman serial, former Miss California Shirley Patterson has little to do in the role of Linda Page, unsuspecting girlfriend of Gotham City millionaire Bruce Wayne--aka The Batman--until chapter 13, "Eight Steps Down." Having been abducted in the previous chapter by the minions of the nefarious Dr. Daka (J. Carrol Naish), an agent of Imperial Japan who hopes to complete an atom disintegrator that will render America defenseless and make him "one of the future rulers of the world," Linda narrowly escapes being burned alive in a factory fire meant to kill the Caped Crusader. Shifted crosstown to Daka's Little Tokyo headquarters--a labyrinthine complex hidden behind the grotesque blandishments of a house of horrors devoted to Japanese war atrocities--Linda is reunited with her long-missing Uncle Martin, whom Daka has transformed into a mindless zombie. Daka threatens Linda with the same fate, unless she confirms the villain's suspicion that Bruce Wayne and The Batman are one and the same. Drifting from Columbia to work at MGM and the Poverty Row outfit PRC before putting her career on hold to raise a family, Patterson returned to acting in the mid-50s to star, under the stage name Shawn Smith, in a trio of B-movie science fiction classics--a World Without End (1956), The Land Unknown (1957), and It! The Terror from Beyond Space (1958)--before a skiing accident forced her retirement.

by Richard Harland Smith