Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back

I have been lucky enough to collect all the old Bulldog Drummond movies and I believe that this one is the best all-around offering.

Ropnald Coleman comes across as sophisticated without being pretentious, as adventuresome without being an unreasonable risk-taker. In fact his whole demeanor is one of having fun and inviting the audience along for the ride.

Loretta Young is as beautiful as ever and plays the damsel in distress in true 1930s melodramatic splendor.

Warner Oland comes across with one of his classic, pre-Charlie Chan villian portrayals that is both menacing as well as full of oily charm, also common in the 30s adventures.

I loved it when I first saw it a year ago and I have brought it out for several viewings since then and I have enjoyed it every time.

In short it is the kind of movie that reminds the viewer of how charming and full of fun Ronald Coleman was on the screen.

Ronald Colman gets to repeat the role he made his talking picture debut in with Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back. Though it did not yield an Oscar nomination as his first essay of the Bulldog did it is still a marvelous entertaining film. There's also a distinct improvement in the casting of Charles Butterworth instead of Claud Allister as sidekick Algy Longworth.

I remember so thoroughly disliking Allister as Algy in the first Bulldog Drummond, he was more of an annoyance than anything else. Butterworth was an actor possessing a nice droll presence on screen and he handles the part so much better. Even when he screws up as he does in this film it's really not his fault and in fact he covers up a vital clue that the villain wants badly.

That villain being Warner Oland who plays a rich Middle Eastern tycoon who has relocated to London. Oland has a very important cargo coming in on a freighter he owns and nothing must stand in the way of his receipt of said cargo. That includes murder, the murder victim being Loretta Young's father who knew about the cargo and had a mysterious coded radiogram from the ship which he was killed for.

Colman's English charm was working on all cylinders in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back. He managed not to get thrown in jail by C. Aubrey Smith of Scotland Yard and that in itself is a feat as he thoroughly annoys Smith with his constant calls for assistance. Similarly poor Butterworth has just gotten married and leaves his bride Una Merkel twice on the wedding night to come to Colman's assistance. Not to mention Loretta Young who is captivated by Colman as most of the English speaking world was.

Incidentally a pair of London bobbies lend timely assistance to Colman twice inadvertently as he is in the clutches of the villain. Those scenes are truly funny as Colman emerges from the clutches of Oland debonair as ever.

Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back is a great introduction to the debonair charm and class of Ronald Colman, possessor of the great voice in the English speaking world.

Bulldog Drummond was sort of the James Bond of the 1930s (not least because in both cases, a rather thuggish and brutal book character was made more gentlemanly and dashing on screen). Ronald Colman had a huge success with 1929's Bulldog Drummond, which is fairly creaky as a film but unquestionably showed him off as one of the first actors to understand acting for talkies, and remains watchable today because of his relaxed and charming presence.

Where it took three or four increasingly over-the-top Bond films before the spoofs started coming, two of the next three Drummond films (all made in 1934) were at least semi-tongue-in-cheek-- sort of like if Casino Royale and In Like Flint had followed immediately after Dr. No. While the British Return of Bulldog Drummond (with Ralph Richardson as the only screen Drummond apparently as racist and violent as the original) was serious, Bulldog Jack starred the rather dire comic Jack Hulbert as a nebbish ineptly posing as Drummond (with Richardson again, phoning in a performance as a shaggy-haired villain). And then there's this sort-of sequel to the 1929 Colman film ("sort of" because apart from Colman it's a completely different cast, crew and even studio), which is ostensibly a straight thriller, and quite suspenseful in parts-- yet has a self-mocking, absurdist edge far beyond anything in the 1929 film.

Under the fast-paced direction of Warner Bros. veteran Roy Del Ruth, there's a definite screwball influence here, with bodies disappearing and reappearing and Colman reacting to it all with a kind of bemused unflappability that goes well beyond even Powell and Loy's approach to detective work in The Thin Man. For a 1930s film it's startlingly self-referential and conscious of being a movie-- Colman declines a ride because he says it fits his image better to be seen disappearing into the fog, and at one point he flat out predicts that this is just the moment when a beautiful woman in distress should appear at the door, which of course she does. You half expect Basil Exposition's father to turn up and help him advance the plot.

Warner Oland makes a nicely exasperated villain, part straight man and part genuine menace, and though Charles Butterworth's exceedingly dim Algy is a bit tiresome (when Algy turns out to be a ex-wartime cryptographer, you're startled to discover he can even read), it's a genuine delight to see C. Aubrey Smith playing a real character and not Stock Crusty Old Gent #1.

Now then, if this is so good, why haven't you ever seen it? Unfortunately, 20th Century (not Fox yet) only owned the rights to the story it's based on for a certain period, so though they still own the film itself, they no longer have the legal right to exhibit it in the US. So it's never been released to TV here (although for some reason they have shown it on TV in Britain, and passable copies reportedly circulate in this country duped from British TV broadcasts). Fox ought to look past the constant repackaging of its ten most famous movies, write a small check to the McNeile estate for permanent rights and then make a big ballyhoo about the rediscovery and video release of a lost classic from the golden age of Hollywood.

This is an enjoyable light murder mystery, but I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't recently seen BLIND ADVENTURE, made the year before by Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO. The plot elements, as I recall, are strikingly similar: a foggy London night, the hero accidentally going into a house and finding a body, which is then missing when he comes back with help; a young girl's relative disappearing, and a foreign ambassador of some sort who seems legit but is a bad guy; constant breaking into the house in question; all the action occurring in one evening; and the hero and the girl-in-distress an item by the evening's end. And, in both instances, comedy relief that actually adds to the film! Roland Young was very pleasing in BLIND ADVENTURE, but no one can match Butterworth at his best, which he is here. Once again, one feels that he had to have written many of his lines. Here, he's married that very day to Una Merkel, who affectionately calls him "Mousey." Colman: "Never leave your wife." Butterworth: "I'll speak to her about it." When Drummond finds adventure, he calls up Butterworth and asks him to tag along, without a care that it's Butterworth's wedding night. Butterworth isn't really an innocent here, he knows what he's missing out on. In response to one of these calls, he says, "we've reached sort of a critical moment." Robert Armstrong in BLIND ADVENTURE seems a more real, more interesting character. Here, both the script and Colman play it as a not-to-be-taken-seriously, boy's-own adventure, a tacit acknowledgment that this is just another caper in a series. One nice addition here is that the inevitable policeman who doesn't believe there's a problem is C. Aubrey Smith. You're on his side, really. Why doesn't this boy scout let him get some sleep?

Apparently Butterworth was an off-screen drinking buddy of such literary wits as Robert Benchley and Corey Ford. Note that Benchley wrote "additional dialogue" for BLIND ADVENTURE, presumably for Young's Butterworth-like character.

... with better sound technology than in Colman's first sound film, Bulldog Drummond (1929).

The film opens with Colman's friend Algy (Charles Butterworth) getting married. After the wedding Drummond decides to take a walk in the fog. First he accidentally says "Excuse me" to a tall post he mistook for a person, which, for some reason, makes a passing woman (Loretta Young) frantic, and she walks away talking to herself and seemingly angry at Drummond. Drummond then gets lost and goes to a nearby house to find out where exactly he is located. He finds the door of the large house ajar, the lights all out, a roaring fire in the fireplace, and a dead man on the couch. Drummond goes to get a local policeman. But when he returns the door is locked and a butler answers the door, the house is well lit, and there is a man on the couch alright, but he is asleep, claiming to have been asleep there for hours, since after dinner. What goes on here?

Drummond gets in trouble with his friend Colonel Nielsen as Drummond cannot prove that any of the bizarre and nefarious things that he experiences that night have actually happened and he repeatedly returns to the mystery house only to have the police arrest him for bothering Prince Achmed (Warner Oland), the homeowner, who is well regarded in the community. Drummond is also no favorite of Algy or his bride before the night is over, because he keeps interrupting their wedding night at key junctures.

Warner Oland did this between Charlie Chan films, and it was a bit of a gamble for Fox to place him in a film as a villain under the circumstances. It's a fun entry and a great goodbye to Colman in the role.