Un'ombra nella nebbia

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.

This was Ronald Colman's second and last appearance as Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond - although there were a couple of unrelated Drummond films since the 1929 original - and, while made at a different studio (Fox as opposed to Goldwyn), the film-makers seem to have learned their lesson by approaching the whole as if it were a spoof on the genre (in my review of the earlier film, I had criticized the star's unflappable nature for being incongruous with the melodramatic narrative involved)!

Incidentally, I was initially disappointed to find here a very similar plot of a girl's extended relatives (these damsels-in-distress never seem to have parents, siblings or even boyfriends, only elderly – read: useless – uncles and aunts!) being victimized by the villains for some reason or other...but the denouement of this one does contrive to expose a foreign potentate's nefarious plot to infect the United Kingdom with cholera (again, the necessity to think big in this department has, sensibly, been taken in stride). Interestingly, the chief heavy here is none other than Warner Oland – concurrently engaged to play famed Oriental sleuth Charlie Chan in a long-running series at the same studio!

Anyway, Colman has not only changed his 'home' here but also his central sidekick, Algy – resulting in a less buffoonish, and amusingly laid- back, interpretation by Charles Butterworth (he spends the entire movie, which unfolds during a single night, coming and going, at Drummond's behest, to his patient brand-new wife Una Merkel); even the leading lady (Loretta Young) is, for lack of a better word, more up his alley...though she still does little more than look frightened and faint! Another notable character, who would become a fixture of the series when it moved over to Paramount, is that of Col. Neilson (a typically splendid C. Aubrey Smith, who would reunite with Colman on his best film i.e. the definitive 1937 version of THE PRISONER OF ZENDA) – whose slumber Drummond frequently interrupts with tall tales of murder and intrigue, only to have the evidence subsequently disappear on him (years before the comedy team of Abbott & Costello made this a classic routine)! So flustered does the elderly Scotland Yard man become with the hero's 'ravings' that he appoints two 'bobbies' (one of them being archetypal British 'twit' E.E. Clive) to prevent him from further importuning Oland at his mansion; still, this whole business leads to delightfully Hitchcockian sequences in which Drummond actually finds the police's intervention a blessing!

The extended climax, too, is wonderful: having rescued the heroine and her aunt beforehand from the oblivious baddies, the imprisoned Drummond then takes pleasure in disorienting Oland & Co. (including Kathleen Burke from ISLAND OF LOST SOULS {1932} as the evil Prince's daughter – exotically made-up but given little to sink her teeth into, though she is involved in the movie's biggest laugh-out-loud moment when forced to take shelter behind a settee with one of her minions upon entering Colman's house to kidnap a wary Young! – and an unrecognizable Mischa Auer) by phoning from the dungeons to let them in on his supposed feats in liberating the captives!; eventually, he and Algy escape detention and race to the docks to destroy the contaminated vessel – with Oland bowing out by his own hand, having graciously conceded defeat. The "Bulldog Drummond" series was singled out by the late British film critic Leslie Halliwell among his second batch of favourites, yet he opted for a title from the lesser later efforts, BULLDOG DRUMMOND COMES BACK (1937), rather than either of the character's initial Talkie adventures! For the record, I still have 18 of Colman's vehicles lying unwatched in my collection...and a future 1947 entry in the series landed the exact same title as this one (a curious fate which also befell BULLDOG DRUMMOND AT BAY)!!

... 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.

This has got everything: a damsel in distress, dastardly sinister foreigners, a haunted house, disappearing corpses and an evil plot which only our dashing English adventurer can foil.

Bulldog Drummond was astonishingly popular in the 20s and 30s. He was James Bond, Indiana Jones and Poirot all rolled into one. Ronald Colman is wonderfully, fantastically and magnificently over the top as the epitome of the English gentleman. "You're like something out of a book" Loretta Young tells him and that's just what he is. He doesn't try to be realistic, he's a super hero pure and simple.

It's rare that you can say this about a film from this era but every single second is exciting. It's one of Daryl Zanuck's first productions from his new 'Twentieth Century Pictures' since he broke away from Warner Brothers and for this he poached top director Roy del Ruth from his old studio. Their result is superb. Everything works: the pace is perfect, the story is intriguing and exciting and the cast were surely born to play these roles.

Lastly, if you've not seen a 1930s Loretta Young picture for a while you'll be absolutely staggered by how insanely beautiful she was back then. Although she's also a marvellous actress, she's not actually the star in this. Obviously Ronald Colman steals the show but close on his heels is Charles Butterworth, the comedy relief. Often the comedy relief in a 1930s film was just an annoyance but he's brilliant in this. That dry wit and befuddled insouciance is one of the many highlights of this hour and a half of joy.

They knew what they were doing when they made this - pure entertainment.

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.