Today’s movie is the crime-mystery thriller, The Bat! This 1959 movie stars Vincent Price and Agnes Moorehead and features a female mystery novelist who turns detective to unmask a demented killer!
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old spirituals 
Alfred Hitchcock once said, “Making a film means, first of all, to tell a story. The story can be an improbable one, but it should never be banal. It must be dramatic and human. What is drama, after all, but life with the dull bits cut out.”
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I love Alfred Hitchcock! What a great quote. It’s a sign you bring him up… Mr. Hitchcock directed tomorrow’s Cold Snap Classic!
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Fun choice Kimberly! 1959 was a good year for Vincent Price fans! It started off with The House On Haunted Hill which was a gas and just before The Bat was released The Tingler hit theaters. It was a B & W film complete with a color scene when Vincent injects LSD and trips! Also, had a gimmick named “Percepto” courtesy of director/producer William Castle (also did the same for The House On Haunted Hill and other Vincent Price vehicles). Electric buzzers were attached to some theater seats and whenever The Tingler was onscreen the buzzers would send a jolt through the spine of the audience member sitting in one of the rigged seats. I saw a revival of the film about 25 years ago at the FilmForum in NYC. Audience members around me were shouting out with a mix of fun and fear whenever their seats were activated but I was sitting in a non-rigged seat and was a wee bit envious of others around me!
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Hi Rob! Those movie special effects sound fun! I don’t know if I’d be so pleased to find myself in a rigged chair though. I always thought it would be interesting if movie theaters had scents. For instance if someone on the screen is smoking, you’d get a little whiff of cigarette smoke. I’m sure there’s all kinds of issues with that idea!
This is the only Vincent Price movie I’ve seen but I may check out some of the other films you mentioned since I liked this one!
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There have been attempts to scent films Kimberly! Actually going back as far as the early silent days. These were usually fans blowing scents into the audience back then but at the 1939 World;s Fair a technique that eventually became named “Smell-O Vision’ was demonstrated. It would be used only once in movie theaters for a film aptly titled “Scent Of Mystery” that was released in early 1960. One month earlier around Christmas of 1959 another film “Behind The Great Wall” was released in a process named AromaRama (a take on the 3D process Cinerama). Their close release dates put the films in competition and both the public and critics had a field day with this, calling them the Battle Of The Smellies and other various funny names! Neither film did well both with critics and at the box office and the idea has basically been shelved. Interesting that the two feature films that were “scented” came out within a month of each other! There has been attempts since then including the use of scratch & sniff cards where you would be instructed onscreen when to scratch the card for the appropriate scene’s scent!.
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I never knew any of that! Smell-o-vision doesn’t sound too enticing but maybe this is just a branding issue. AromaRama is better. Fragrant Films? Scented Pictures? 😂😂 I better stick to my lane! Although, I will say scratch and sniff theatre sounds really fun. I might turn up for that!
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