I recently watched The Devil Bat's Daughter (1946), a PRC potboiler that was ostensibly a sequel to the 1940 Bela Lugosi chiller The Devil Bat but in reality is merely a commonplace murder mystery. Former Miss America Rosemary LaPlanche stars as the imperiled heroine, and is surprisingly adequate to the task. But the real find here is SPOILER ALERT Michael Hale as the villain, one of those nasty psychiatrists so popular in the Freudian post-war era. Michael who? you ask? Well, I asked that, too, but he remains a cypher. Hale, who apparently hailed from Merry Olde Englande, was at one point considered a new Leslie Howard by Warner Bros., Howard having tragically perished in the last war. Alas, The Devil Bat's Daughter and a few early television roles were about it for the performer, who disappears entirely from cast lists around 1958. But enjoy him in The Devil Bat's Daughter, which is in public domain and available everywhere.
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