Captain Swagger

Silent and totally unlike the talkie BDs. After WWI, Hugh is a playboy who spends over his means, meets a flapper who is also poor for now, tries to be a top hatted highwayman and then performs as a Russian cabaret dancer.

He has no mystery to solve and, thankfully, no annoying sidekick Algy.

The copy I saw was incredibly blurry but worth finding and watching.

America's first attempt at a Bulldog Drummond movie gives silent star Rod La Roque the chance to once more be effortlessly debonair, but the material is a little threadbare until the final reel. It was apparently shot as a part-talkie, but surviving prints are silent.

"Captain Swagger" is a late silent film that has slipped into the public domain. Considering how inconsequential the movie is, I can understand why its copyright was allowed to expire.

Then the film begins, it's World War I and Hugh Drummond (Rod La Rocque) is a devil-may-care pilot. During one engagement with the infamous German ace, Van Stahl, one ends up saving the life of the other through some stupid sense of chivalry*. The war ends and Hugh has trouble establishing himself and makes a few bucks working for films doing stunt flying. He then meets a nice young lady who is also down on her luck. To win her, the audience things Drummond has resorted to a life of crime (the summary on IMDb is wrong about this by the way) and in the process meets his old nemesis Van Stahl--who really IS a crook. Drummond decides to help him straighten up his act and the film ends.

This is a very inconsequential film and the plot never makes much sense. It could have used more acting, a more complex script and a reason to watch it in the first place.

*I am so happy that Drummond and Van Stahl became buddies and looked on each other as comrades. This does seem ludicrous, however, in light of 17,000,000 dead.

Sapper (H. C. McNeile) published Bulldog-Drummond, first in the series of novels about the clubland hero, in 1920. It was adapted for the stage in London in 1921 and, by this time, there had already been two British films made - Bulldog Drummond (1922) by the company Hollandia, one of several British-Dutch co-productions at this time (see for instance the 1920 Fate's Plaything and the 1921 Circus Jim)but probably lost and Bulldog Drummond's Third Round (based on Sapper's second novel in the series), again probably a lost film.

This is the first US attempt at a "Bulldog Drummond" film, Americanised so that Drummond is now a New York dandy rather than a London clubman and is not I think strictly based on any of the Sapper novels.

As well as clubland hero, Drummond is also the quintessential "postwar" hero in the sense that he is the typical upper-class chap who finds himself at a loose end once the First World War was over. This notion of postwar "ennui" features continually in British popular literature between the wars and is peculiarly British. The French and the Germans had both suffered too greatly to feel nostalgic about the war; the British had suffered significantly but also significantly less.

Drummond is a typical postwar hero too in that he is relatively impoverished, reflecting the fact that the depression that followed the war war brought a marked decline in the wealth of the British upper and upper-middle classes.

None of this makes quite so much sense in a US context, where the involvement in the war had been considerably less profound, its social effects negligible and and where the postwar economic effects had largely been beneficial until the European economic depression began to react back on the US economy at the very end of the twenties.

This film was supposedly a part-talkie but the version I have seen (and possibly the only version that survives) is silent. The definitive film Drummond would be played by British actor Ronald Colman in the full talkie Bulldog Drummond of 1929.

As I watched Captain Swagger, I became suspicious that persons only seen in talkies were in this film. Checking IMDb, I see it used the Photophone system. As another reviewer notes, it was supposedly a part-talkie. I suspect it was more than that, because I see no scenes that stop dead for talking; all the scenes seem to flow. In any event, the version available has no sound, so it's impossible to tell. I suspect that Pathe simply added intertitles to the sound version, wit out any re-shoots.

The plot contains a lack of adventure after the war beginning. Contrast this to the 1929 Coleman version, which after a slow start, moves at a fast clip, with splendid villains and sets. Larocque is adequate, tall and handsome, but the lack of sound removes any conviction from his role. The coincidences and motives are not believable. Worth seeing once for the historical perspective.