As "Batman" moved into its third season, the novelty of comic-book characters portrayed in live-action television with winking campiness had worn thin, forcing the comedy series to revive flagging interest. Enter Yvonne Craig's Batgirl, the first female superheroine to co-star on American TV, while Eartha Kitt, now cast as one of the principal villains, Catwoman, helped to pioneer substantive TV roles for African-American actresses.
Moreover, the series now tapped explicitly into countercultural tropes (Louie the Lilac's flower power, Joker shooting the surf-movie curl) in an attempt to stay contemporary, which is where "Nora Clavicle and the Ladies' Crime Club" comes in. Writer Stanford Sherman might not have planned to write a political manifesto, but he wound up penning one for the ages.
Make no bones about it: Nora Clavicle (Barbara Rush) is probably the dullest "Batman" villain of the series, and just on narrative strength and production values alone, this episode is nigh-impossible to beat for sheer lameness. Nevertheless, what exactly were men in general, and Sherman in particular, afraid of?
The true value of TV shows and movies from decades past is their reflection of attitudes and assumptions at the time of production. In the 1960s, civil rights and protest against the Vietnam conflict were significant social and political movements, but even such progressive causes still manifested patronizing, sexist attitudes toward women, thus spurring the rise of feminism--and provoking a backlash by ostensibly enlightened men.
In "Nora Clavicle," the backlash involves constant caricature, both blatant and subtle, of women starting with Nora herself. Presented as a feminist activist, Nora manipulates Millie Linseed (Jean Byron) into pressuring her mayoral husband (Byron Keith) to sack Gotham City's entire police department, replacing it with women. Then Nora double-crosses Millie by planning to destroy the city for a huge insurance payout using swarms of mechanical mice that are not only programmed to explode en masse, they incapacitate the female cops through a "Looney Tunes"-inspired terror of mice.
Nora is the stereotypical femme fatale--devious, calculating, ruthless. In film noir, "mouse" refers to a compliant, ordinary woman, the kind you marry while lusting after the femme fatale. Indeed, Rush plays it cool and bland until it's time to put Batman, Robin, and Batgirl into the kinky Twister-gone-lethal deathtrap called the "Siamese human knot"--then Rush suddenly cackles in psycho-sexual ecstasy we now call "beeyotch be crazy."
Had series writer Stanley Ralph Ross, who went on to co-develop "Wonder Woman" for TV in the 1970s, written this episode, it might have avoided Sherman's snide parade of tired tropes about female fatuousness that masks Sixties male insecurity. Instead, we get his mouse droppings preserved for posterity.
