A new phantom stalks the stage.
Last time on Batman; Caped
Crusader, we were introduced to an old new Batman. In a mid-1900s Gotham,
Batman was investigating a series of bombings on Gotham Mafia kingpin Rupert
Thorne. His investigation led him to the Iceberg Lounge and Oswalda “Penguin”
Cobblepot. This lounge singing version of the black and white bird was working
on muscling in on Thorne’s turf, but her plans were being foiled by a stool
pigeon informing Thorne. She’s led to believe it’s one of her sons, a fella
named Aaron, whom she executes without remorse. The actual rat, her other son
Ronny, is terrified for his life after this and tries to rat her out to Jim
Gordon of Gotham PD. Oswalda turns her prized weapon, a long-range cannon, that
she’d been bombing the warehouses with on Gotham PD. Batman arrives at the Iceberg Lounge and the
two face off. Batman is able to hold her off long enough for Barbara and Jim
Gordon to execute the station, but Penguin is able to fire the cannon on it
anyway, destroying it. Penguin is arrested. It’s only after she’s gone that
Batman realizes that she was a much bigger played in Gotham’s crime politics
and without her, Thorne is easily able to absorb large parts of her territory
into his own. Damn. Enough recap. Let’s get to it.
Ep 2: …And Be A Villain
We open with a young woman named
Yvonne Frances (Lacey Chabert) being dropped off at her home. Someone is
watching her from the bushes and walks up to her when she’s alone. She gasps in
surprise as things go black.
We jump forward in time to Bruce
Wayne being interrogated by Detective Renee Montoya. Turns out, he’d been
seeing Yvonne and he’d been the one dropping her off. Bruce tries to offer
Gotham PD and Renee herself a sizeable check in order to keep his name out of
the papers, but Montoya tells him that not everything in Gotham is for sale. Montoya
also tells him that she’s not interested in smearing him either, she just wants
to find Frances. The interview continues, Bruce impressing Montoya with his
exact recall of when he dropped Frances off (10:52 pm). Bruce covering his
Batman-like slip by saying he was watching the clock carefully because Yvonne
had an early call time the next morning and he was watching the clock. They’re
interrupted by the arrival of Bruce’s lawyer, Lucius Fox (Bumper Robinson) who
chastises Montoya for interrogating Bruce without him present. While Fox is
chewing her out and making it clear that any other questions for Bruce go
through him, Bruce slips a microphone into Montoya’s coat. He tells her it was
nice meeting her and the two men head out.
As Alfred drives Bruce home, he
comments that Bruce might have better luck conducting his own investigation.
Bruce, fiddling with his radio to get his bug’s signal, says that Montoya is a
sharp officer, refused his bribe and honest, he thinks she could be an asset.
Alfred asks if this means they’ll find Frances that much sooner, and Bruce
halfheartedly adds yes to that too. He gets the radio working and hears Montoya
talking with Gordon. She says she thought she was getting to Bruce before the
Lawyer got there, but Alfred alibis him and she doesn’t see him as suspect.
Gordon tells her that they need a crime to have suspects and right now they
have a missing person. Montoya says that Frances, a movie star, has been
missing for two days without a peep, which gives her a bad feeling. She tells
Gordon her next step is to head to the movies.
She hits up Monoscope Pictures
studio and goes to speak with one of the actors there. We meet Basil Karlo (Dan
Donohue), he’s one of Monoscope’s biggest stars. We learn a bit about his
working relationship with Yvonne. They
worked opposite each other in several films, her being the damsel in distress,
screaming as he, the heavy, stalked/menaced her. He says this picture would be
the first time he’d seen her in months, and he’d heard rumors she’d fallen in
with a bad crowd since they last worked together. He rushes her out the door a
moment later, saying he has a meeting with Edmund Haynes, the director of his
new movie. Montoya goes to speak with a secretary that brings her some of the
latest headshots of Frances. While looking through the glam shots, she finds a
picture of Basil staring at Frances in a crowd and realizes he lied about not
seeing her recently. She asks where Basil is meeting with Haynes, and the
secretary says that there is no meeting with them today and Montoya storms off.
She asks a gate guard if Basil is still on the lot and learns he left an hour
ago. She gets his address from the gate guard and heads over, Batman tailing
her from the roofs. She reaches Basil’s apartment in time to hear him scream,
she opens the door and finds him on the ground with a knife in his back. She
calls for an ambulance as a man in a black coat and red scarf watches from a
window. Batman spots him and the two
have a chase across the rooftops. Batman catches him by the scarf, causing the
man to slice it free with another knife, revealing a ghoulish face. He runs
down a fire escape and loses Batman.
We cut to Yvonne Francis, who’s
being held in a luxury bed by a man in lab coat and glasses. The man, Jack
Ellman (Jeff Bennett) applies makeup to her face, telling her to relax to not
ruin it. It’s at that point that she realizes she’s chained to the bed. He
tells her to stay calm as she’ll need her energy for her big scene.
At the police station, Montoya
laments what happened to Karlo. She was sure he was a suspect but turns out he
was a victim. Gordon points out that Karlo lied, and if she can find out why,
maybe that’ll led her to Francis. Montoya says that she let him down, and
Gordon says no she hasn’t. Outside in the bullpen, Harvey Dent is chatting with
the cops and telling dirty jokes. He breaks away from them when Montoya comes
out, wanting to talk to her. He tells her if she can close the Yvonne
Francis/Basil Karlo case, he can put on a hell of trial and make them both look
good. Montoya isn’t interested, saying she couldn’t care less about his mayoral
campaign. He warns her to start caring, as when he wins, she’ll want to be on
his good side.
We cut back to Monoscope Pictures
where the head of the studio, Lew Valentine, is screaming at his casting director
that they’ve got thousands of dollars of rented mad scientist gizmos on the lot
and they’re being charged by the day. If he doesn’t want that overage to come
out of his pocket, he needs to find a replacement for Frances. His secretary
comes in to tell him Hayes the director
wants a meeting with him, he asks what could he want now that their
movie as of this moment starts a missing person and a corpse, and his secretary tells him Hayes probably
wants to know if there’s a movie to direct. He tells her to set it up. When
alone, he takes a shot from a flask
before being attacked by the man in black,. He blinds Valentine with lights,
causing him to fall back and break some of the mad science gear, spilling water
everywhere. The man in black then knocks over a light into the water,
electrocuting him.
At the Batcave, Alfred is watching
one of Yvonne Francis and Basil Karlo’s movies for clues, I guess. Batman asks
if he found anything, and Alfred says that while pretty, Francis is no Gloria
Swanson. Batman then asks if he found anything useful, to which Alfred says no.
He then sarcastically asks if Batman found anything useful. Batman has found
some unusual silicate on the scarf. Which makes sense if you know who our…
malleably faced assailant is. He looks over the scarf and finds it has a blank
id spot. He uses a mercury vapor lamp to determine that it’s from the Monoscope
Pictures Wardrobe. Batman realizes this means that the killer has access to the
studio.
Batman rushes to the studio, making
it in time for Montoya’s next round of questioning. She interviews another
actor, Darryl Manning, who sings Basil Karlo’s praises, saying he’d be one of
the best actors of today if he had the looks for it. Montoya asked if a rumor
about him and Francis dating a few months ago were true but Darryl denies it.
Montoya then goes to speak with the costume department. The head designer says
that Karlo and Francis worked together a half dozen times, and their last
picture was Tower of Fear. She reveals that Karlo had a not too subtle crush on
Francis, but didn’t feel confident asking her out because of his face. Side
note, they keep talking about this guy like he’s got some Phantom of the Opera
(Erik) deformity to his face but he’s no uglier than Peter Cushing or Vincent
Price. Not winning any beauty pageants but hardly hideous. Anyway, Karlo had a
crush he couldn’t do anything about because not pretty. The costumer didn’t
think Francis reciprocated his feelings, but she did have respect for him. She
once said that he should be a leading man if it wasn’t for his face. Montoya
intuits that meant a lot to him, the costumer confirming and saying that that
also made him desperate to fix his face. We cut to Edmund Hayes, the director.
He tells Montoya the same stuff, Karlo is a great actor with a face that meant
he was exclusively typecast as villains. He thinks that drove Basil Karlo to
Jack Ellman, a makeup artist at the studio that promised a miracle treatment
for Basil that would ‘remake his career.’ Karlo paid Ellman a lot of money but
got no results, leading to a fight on the lot that ended with Ellman being
fired. We learn that the fight that got Ellman fired was about two months ago. Batman
watches the interview from across the street and listens in on the bug in
Montoya’s coat.
Sometime later, Batman is still
snooping around the lot. He sees Hayes trying to direct a scene and verbally
abusing Basil Karlo’s replacement when he can’t follow his directions before
storming off. He’s attacked by the man in black, but Batman intervenes, kicking
him in the face. He chases the man in black to a soundstage where they have a
sword fight on a set. The man in black cuts a line, collapsing the set on
Batman. He gives a salute, thinking Batman dead before running off. Batman, as
it turns out, escaped through a trapdoor. Under the stage he finds the bodies
of Lew Valentine and Darryl Manning. He radios in to Alfred, telling him to
call the cops in two minutes and report the deaths. He also realizes that if
Manning is here then something weird is happening since he’s been dead for at
least a day but just had an interview with Montoya.
Montoya heads to Jack Ellman’s
apartment in the East End of Gotham. She radios for back up. Flass answers the
radio, saying they’re on the way, but he and Bullock turn off their radio and
continue to eat their dinners. Montoya waits for them for a bit but then heads
in. She meets Jack Ellman who invites her in for an interview. Batman,
meanwhile, checks out Basil Karlo in the morgue. He pulls out the body and
pokes at his face, discovering it is extremely malleable, like rubber or… clay.
Ellman attacks Montoya with a pipe. She shocks him in the face, crumbling it
like it was made of clay. He knocks her out with a blow to the head.
Montoya wakes up strapped to a
chair. The man in black, Clayface, reveals himself and Montoya realizes it’s
Basil Karlo. She asked what happened to his face. Basil, the monologist, tells
her the story. Basil wanted to fix his face and Ellman offered him a treatment
that turned into a miracle, an injection into his face that made it soft and
malleable like clay. He reshaped his face into a more conventionally handsome
version of his face. He went to Yvonne to show her, thinking his new looks
would win her over but she rejected him. Basil snapped, his face melting and
deciding that if Yvonne wouldn’t play her part willingly, he’d make her. He
brags about his new powers, saying that he has a face to match his talent, and
with it he can play any part and fool anyone, including her. Montoya realizes
that he was Manning. Clayface flips a switch and reveals Francis strapped to a
table, her mouth gagged. Clayface admits that it took losing his original face,
career and obsessions (he says love but we all know Francis was a prize to him,
not a person) to realize that he was perfect to play the villain. It’s at this point that Francis, having
gotten the gag out of her mouth, says she doesn’t believe him. Clayface is
taken aback by this remark, saying that he did kill Valentine and Ellman, to
which Francis critiques his performance. She says he’s chewing scenery and
relying on makeup to enhance a weak character. This infuriates Clayface, who
says he’ll show her what’s real, just as Batman breaks in.
He frees one of Montoya’s hands
with a batarang as Clayface activates a swinging pendulum to kill Francis.
Montoya frees herself as Batman and Clayface fight, and then rushes over to
free Francis. She gets her lose just before the pendulum sliced her stomach
open. Batman pummels Clayface, knocking him out with a good hook. Montoya pulls
her gun on Batman telling him not to move. It’s just then that Flass and
Bullock burst in. Batman escapes out the window again. Flass handcuffs
Clayface, snidely asking Montoya if the Bat solved her case for her. She says
they’re the idiots that let him get away. The others leave, but when Montoya
goes to retrieve her hat, the microphone falls from her coat. She realizes who
was listening in on this and tell Batman that things aren’t over between them.
Ya know, if this time last year you
told me I’d see an adaptation of Clayface’s original origin story, I’d have
shaken my head in disbelief. But here we are. Clayface first appeared in Detective
Comics #40 Batman, with Robin the Boy Wonder: The Murders of Clayface.
In it, Basil Karlo is a horror movie actor that uses the guise of one of his
most well-known characters, Clayface, to murder anyone involved in a remake of
that film. There’s a lot of chasing and punching and he and Batman end up
fighting on a set, so I think the sword fight was an homage to that. The
biggest change to the story, weirdly, wasn’t adding a woman that spurned him
but giving Clayface powers. Yeah, for decades Basil Karlo was the only one of
several Clayfaces that had no shapeshifting powers at all. He gained them a
decade or two back, but for a good long while he was a wholly human villain. I
can see why they decided to add the shapeshifting face to him, once you
introduce superpowers to a character it’s just silly to take them away. So,
anyway, yeah, the second they named dropped Basil Karlo, I was aware how this
was going to go. That said, it was fun seeing Batman and Montoya work through
the clues and situation to figure out who the murderer was. Props to Dan
Donohue as he did Karlo’s big villain monologue extremely well. He comes across
as a complete psycho, I’m not sure what Yvonne was saying. That said, I do love
her bit critiquing Basil’s performance. I’m a sucker for the “acts like a ditz
but is actually smart” trope. After hearing Alfred and a few others mention
that she’s not very good at acting, it was satisfying to hear her give a
critique. It implies without outright saying that she puts on the act of being just
a pretty faced scream queen to get parts. This was also a good full
introduction to Renee Montoya. She had a few appearances last episode but I
don’t believe had any lines, so unless you knew who the woman with the broad
shoulders was you’d think her a background character. Like Harley Quinn,
Montoya was originally introduced in Batman: The Animated Series and had
a few episodes devoted to her as being one of the other cops that doesn’t
distrust Batman. I believe she’s been rolled into the comics since, but she
hasn’t really had any appearances outside there in years. I believe Bruce Timm
and his crew have a soft spot for her, though, so she gets a lot of screen time
going forward. So yeah, overall, a great follow up. Have a good night,
everyone.
Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/110856271
Twitter: @BasicsSuperhero
No comments:
Post a Comment