Of all the film restorations that happen every year, VCI’s Bu-ray release of 1930’s The Bat Whispers is this year’s most impressive find.

Based on The Circular Staircase, the first novel of Mary Roberts Rinehart, known as the American Agatha Christie, first published in 1908, the work was a whopping success as a book, play, and film several times over.

The Circular Staircase was first filmed in 1915 with Eugenie Besserer (later Al Jolson’s mother in The Jazz Singer) as the lead character, a mystery writer who has leased a mansion where several murders take place. It was redone for TV in 1956 with Judith Anderson in the role.

In 1920, it became a smash hit Broadway play as The Bat, cowritten by Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, with Effie Ellsler as the mystery writer and Edward Ellis (later the titular character in 1934’s The Thin Man opposite William Powell and Myrna Loy) as the local doctor. It was filmed in 1926 with Emily Fitzroy (Pathy Ann in the 1929 film version of Show Boat) as the mystery writer and Louise Fazenda (Hal Wallis’ first wife) as her frightened maid.

Roland West, who directed the 1926 silent film, also directed the 1930 talkie remake called The Bat Whispers, one of only fourteen films made in the early 65mm widescreen process called “Magnifilm.” The only surviving print of the process was thought to be Raoul Walsh’s 1930 film, The Big Trail until UCLA Film Labs discovered a print of The Bat Whispers in the Mary Pickford Company’s vaults when they went looking for the 35mm version of the film in 1987.

Pickford had purchased the film, intending to remake it with Humphrey Bogart and Lillian Gish but that never happened.

There were three versions of the film. Only eighteen theatres in the U.S. and none anywhere else in the world were capable of showing the 65mm version, so it was filmed in two different 35mm versions as well, one for the rest of the U.S. market, and one for the British market. UCLA Labs restored all three version and are currently working on restoring the 1926 silent version.

The VCI release includes all three versions as well as the 1959 remake, a side-by-side comparison of key scenes from the 1926 and 1930 versions.

The only advertised star of The Bat Whispers was Chester Morris who played the detective who investigates the murders at the rented mansion with Una Merkel and William Bakewell as the mystery writer’s niece and her boyfriend also prominently featured in the film’s marketing. The lesser-known Grayce Hampton played the mystery writer, Gustav von Seyffertitz (later Marlene Dietrich’s nemesis in Dishonored) played the doctor, while Maude Eburne all but stole the film as the frightened maid.

The film was Bob Kane’s inspiration for Batman, although the batman in this work is not the hero. He is a villain whose identity is not revealed until the end of the book, play, and film.

The 1959 remake, the rights to which RKO obtained from Pickford, included as an extra on the Blu-ray set, starred Vincent Price as the doctor and Agnes Moorehead as the mystery writer.

It was remade for TV in 1960 with Helen Hayes as the mystery writer, Jason Robards as the detective, and Margaret Hamilton as the frightened maid.

Warner Archive has released a sparkling Blu-ray upgrade of 1939’s Idiot’s Delight, based on the 1936 Pulitzer Prize-winning play by Robert E. Sherwood who adapted his play for the screen.

Directed by Clarence Brown, it is part screwball comedy, part dire warning of the rise of Naziism. Norma Shearer is top-billed as she was in all her films, but the film is built around Clark Gable playing against type as a song-and-dance man opposite Shearer’s con artist vaudevillian masquerading as an expatriate Russian aristocrat.

The strong supporting cast includes Edward Arnold as Shearer’s munitions manufacturing travel companion, Charles Coburn as a doctor looking for a cure for cancer, Joseph Schildkraut as an authoritative army captain, Burgess Merdith as a French pacifist, and Laura Hope Crews, soon to be Aunt Pittypat to Gable’s Rhett Butler in Gone with the Wind, as a phony fortune teller.

MGM, skittish about German reaction to the film made just before the outbreak of World War II, does not name the Alpine country in which it mostly takes place.

The film, which has always looked dull on TV and in previous home video releases, looks absolutely stunning in this release. It helps that the ending is the one made for international distribution in which Gable and Shearer face an uncertain future as opposed to the one made for American audiences which has an unrealistically imposed happier one. That ending is included as an extra on the disc.

The highlight of the film remains Gable’s singing and dancing to Irving Berlin’s “Puttin’ on the Ritz.”

Warner Archive has also released a splendid looking Blu-ray of 1940’s Northwest Passage, directed by King Vidor.

Based on the first part of a bestselling novel, it was supposed to have been followed by the second part of the book, but that was never filmed due to cost overruns on the first part. It was probably just as well, as star Spencer Tracy hated working with the authoritative Vidor and refused to work for him ever again and never did.

Taking place during the French and Indian War (1754-1763), Tracy as Major Robert Rogers, the leader of Rogers Rangers, Robert Young as his mapmaker, and Walter Brennan as Young’s friend, do the heavy acting, but the film is so politically incorrect it’s astonishing that Warner Archive would put this out over so many better films in their library.

The film is mostly a long trek to and from an Indian village during the war in which the colonist rangers massacre all the Native Americans of fighting age. Rogers later became a traitor during the Revolutionary War.

Happy viewing.