I seem to remember that, when I was a little kid – it must have some time in the late 1950s or early 1960s – my parents took me to London to see a Batman movie. I had no idea who Batman was at the time (although I seem to remember that my parents were a bit surprised that I didn’t know). My parents did not really approve of American comic books, so I never had any as a kid, or ever developed much interest in them. (I did have a school friend, a bit later on, who was heavily into Green Lantern, and showed some of his comics to me. I was not much impressed.) I do not remember the plot of the movie very well – probably I was too young to really follow it anyway – but one incident has stuck in my memory for some reason. One of the bad guys burnt a photograph that was vital evidence of something, but Batman collected the ashes and was able to reconstitute them into a copy of the original photograph with some special machine he had. I think (but can’t be 100% sure) that the movie was in black and white.
It was certainly well before the Adam West TV version of Batman (certainly well before that was on TV in Britain, anyway, in the later 1960s), because that I remember quite well and used to watch fairly regularly. By that time I was old enough to understand the plots, and maybe even to get that it was all largely meant as a joke. The movie must have been several years before. The trouble is, I can find no trace of anything that looks like it at the IMBD or in Wikipedia’s list of Batman films. There is this one from 1966, but that seems way too late (I would have been 14 by then), appears to have been in color, has Adam West and Burt Ward, and is apparently in the campy spirit of their TV series. The movie I saw struck me as rather gritty (though perhaps that was me as a child not getting it), and I don’t recall it having the sort of weird, mad, campy super-villains that the Adam West series (and more recent movie versions) have had. (Did the older Batman comics always have this sort of villain?)
I am prompted to ask by reading this article on Cracked.com, which describes an (apparently crappy) Batman TV series from the 1940s (well before I was born), and then says:
I think this must have been the movie I saw (though I don’t recall the audience laughing at it). At least it gives me hope that my memory is not a complete hallucination. However, as I said, I can’t find anything that looks like it listed at the IMDB or by Wikipedia. The Cracked article does give a link, but itis an odd one, that goes only to a Google books page for something called Dun’s Review and Modern Industry, Volume 87 
, in snippet view, showing nothing relevant except the words “Friend of Batman”. Maybe that was the movie’s title, but there does not seem to be any more information available there. Googling “Friend of Batman” didn’t help.
Does anyone else except me and the Cracked author remember this movie or know anything more about it? Why does it seem to have been written out of “official” movie history (online anyway)? It may well have been total crap, but I do not think that is usually a criterion for excluding something from the IMBD and/or Wikipedia (which does list the, also apparently dreadful, 1940s TV series). What is more, if Cracked is correct, the movie actually played a crucial role in the history of Batman on screen, as it led to the Adam West series which in turn inspired the more recent movies.