More Turkish Delight (Part Two)

Yarasa adam - Bedmen (1973) is a Turkish movie which reimagines Batman and Robin as a pair of gun-toting insurance investigators who attend strip clubs and drive an Austin 1100.  As usual in the wild, wild world of sixties and seventies Turkish films the production is entirely unauthorised by the characters' copyright holders and the whole thing is made on a shoe-string budget.  While the film's date of production might imply that it was inspired by the camp sixties Batman TV series, in truth it has little in common with that production, instead owing more to old cinema serials and James Bond movies and their imitators.  Indeed, identifying the two heroes as Batman and Robin often seems like an afterthought for the sake of marketing.  The fact that they work for an insurance company and for some reason don masks and costumes to carry out their two-fisted investigations could well be a reference back to The Masked Marvel (1943), an old Republic serial where the title character is eventually revealed as one of a group of insurance investigators.  Then again, it could have been inspired by the two late sixties Richard Johnson starring Bulldog Drummond movies which reimagined the character as a swinging sixties insurance investigator.  The plot is pure pulp, involving ten people - mainly women - who have won some kind of award from a magazine being murdered.  They've all been insured by the magazine's owner (who is himself on the list), making him the prime suspect, until he turns up dead himself.  Of course, it is Batman and Robin's company that has insured them all and so sends the caped loss adjusters out to resolve the situation.  The James Bond influence is evident in the fact that the villain is a bald guy whose face we don't see (until the end), who is forever stroking a cat as he sends his cohorts out to kill people and/or stop Batman and Robin.  In keeping with the low-rent nature of the production, rather than a pedigree cat like Blofeld's, this villain's cat is a common or garden tabby moggy.  (It is somewhat reassuring to find that Turkish cats are as bad actors as other feline thespians - this one seems fascinated by the camera and keeps staring directly into it).

In common with many Turkish costumed superheros of the era, Batman and Robin frequently take their masks off and sometimes don't even bother with their costumes.  Their fighting style is so gymnastic that they nearly always ditch their capes before getting to grips with the bad guys.  This, of course, seems to mean that their identities are anything but secret from either friend or foe.  Imdeed, despite the fact that Batman receives his orders via a tape recording, (clearly Mission Impossible was also popular in Turkey, although the tape doesn't self-destruct, Batman has to destroy it himself, in keeping with the film's low budget ethos), implying that his identity is secret even from his employers, this isn't the case - a senior executive turns up at the end to thank an unmasked Batman for saving the company so much money.  So non-secret is his real identity that this Batman even has a girlfriend who knows who he is, not that this stops him from using the notoriety of his Batman identity to pull and sleep with other women as well, working his way through most of the female characters.  Compared with Adam West's portrayal on TV, this is a decidedly sleazy Batman, who happily visits strip clubs as part of his 'investigations' and has no qualms about gunning down villains when a fist fight isn't going hos way.  His lack of compassion for any of the victims of the insurance plot is noteworthy - when he and Robin find the stripper they went to protect dead in her dressing room, he merely shrugs.  Even when he hears that another female victim, who he had been bonking, has been murdered, his grief is short-lived, (he's in bed banging another random naked chick he's picked up at the time).  By making Batman and Robin employees of an insurance company, the film, of course, completely changes the dynamic of the characters - they aren't interested in keeping the citizens of Gotham City, or Istanbul, safe from villains, but rather in preventing fraudulent insurances claims.  If the people they are supposedly protecting die, well, just so long as they can prevent an insurance payout, it's no biggie.  (I also assume that their employment status is the reason for their 'Batmobile' being an Austin 1100 - clearly, it's a company car).

Which is just as well, as this dynamic duo are actually pretty crap - they eventually only prevent one murder.  Even then, it is only because the main villain has decided to kidnap and rape the last insured girl before he kills her, giving Batman and Robin time to crash his headquarters and save her virtue - Batman breaks the villain's neck as he's about to get down to it - but not her modesty, as she's already topless by then.  Their investigation gets nowhere for most of the film due to their inability to ever capture any of the henchman alive - if they don't shoot them then they give them enough time to take cyanide pills or smoke poisoned cigarettes.  They really are amongst the most incompetent superheros committed to film.  Perhaps this is intentional.  Maybe this was intended as a parody of superheros, debunking their heroic image by showing them as flawed and human.  These things are all too easily lost in translation, (especially when relying upon English sub-titles which seem to be auto-generated, so bizarre does some of the dialogue seem).  The levels of sex and female nudity also imply that the film was aimed at an older, perhaps more sophisticated audience, than most of these films.  Regardless of the target audience, the plot is as perfunctory as ever, (the villain's real identity is painfully obvious, despite an attempt at misdirection), existing only to provide a way of stringing together a series of furious fights and car chases, most of which are well-staged and choreographed in the Republic serials manner.  The aspect of the film that seems to attract the most comment in the English speaking world is the apparent underlying homoeroticism in the relationship between Batman and Robin.  There's no doubt that it sometimes comes over that way - Robin's look of disappointment every time Batman dismisses him so that he can get it on with a chick implies an unrequited love, for instance, let alone their fighting style which involves lots of lifts as one throws the other at the bad guys - but I very much doubt that it is intentional.

On a technical level, the film, or at least the publicly available prints, looks awful.  Shot in black and white, it is grainy and scratchy and, worse, has clearly been overexposed in places, bleaching out the picture.  Moreover, as with most Turkish films of the era, there is a total absence of optical effects.  Continuity is also often absent - one moment Batman and Robin are driving in their car in street clothes, the next minute they are leaping out in full costume, for example, while the musical score, as ever, is pirated, (mainly from On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969), just t ram home the Bond influence, although Edwin Astley's theme from The Saint TV series and some Led Zeppelin, amongst others, are also present).  That said, the direction is, in fits and starts, superior to many of its contemporaries.  Early on, for instance, there is a very impressively staged point-of-view tracking shot as Batman enters the building where he is to receive his tape recorded mission instructions.  There is also a well staged car chase along winding roads, shot in a series of long, unedited takes, while some interesting angles and framing shots are used - the stripper in club is shot from a very low angle, (affording an unusual view from below pf her breasts as she strips - I'd like to think this was an artistic choice, but I strongly suspect it was merely audience titillation. But, running at just over an hour, Yarasa adam - Bedmen isn't a taxing watch. Indeed, of the Turkish movies I've so far seen, I have to say that it is the most entertaining and I have to say that its radical reworking of the subject matter makes a refreshing change from most Hollywood treatments of the superhero genre.  Let's face it, this is the movie that Joel Schumacer should have made instead of Batman and Robin - George Clooney's Batman as sleazy company man, more interested in bedding the ladies and undoubtedly falsifying his expenses claims on a big studio budget is something I'd happily have paid to see.