This film, released in the USA as 'Alias Bulldog Drummond', was the seventh Bulldog Drummond film. It was made a few months after 'The Return of Bulldog Drummond', the highly political Mosleyite Drummond film in which Ralph Richardson played Drummond for the only time. In this film, Richardson plays the villain, Morel (or Morelle). Drummond himself is briefly played in this film by Atholl Fleming, who was not very well known and only appeared in eleven films in his entire career. Drummond is injured and confined to hospital near the beginning of this film and asks another man to take his place at a meeting with a mysterious woman and report back to him, and authorises him to impersonate him and pretend to be Drummond himself. This bizarre idea was cooked up by actor Jack Hulbert, who wrote the story, as a vehicle for himself. Hulbert was a popular comedian and tap dancer in British films of the 1930s and as unlikely a man to be in a Bulldog Drummond film as can be imagined, or could be imagined then, for that matter. Hulbert was a strange-looking man with a hatchet face and an enormous pointed chin, rather like Mr. Punch. Despite these unfortunate looks, he dressed, behaved and acted like an irresistible Romeo in many films, including this one. Hulbert cast his younger brother Claude Hulbert in this film as Drummond's sidekick Algy Longworth, and that was very successful, as Claude Hulbert had no difficulty at all in acting like a twit. (Whether he was one I wouldn't know, but many were in those days.) All these men with slicked-down hair and top hats and effete manners grate on the nerves today, but it was ever so fashionable in the 1930s. Fay Wray plays the girl in distress in this film, an undemanding part which she had no trouble in mastering. The butler Tenny is played very boringly by Gibb McLaughlin in this film, where he is called 'Denny', which was a mistake, as all Drumondonians will know. The film was directed very adequately by Walter Forde. It is treated very much as a comedy thriller, with jolly music of a humorous intent laid on too thick, and people colliding on stairs, and that sort of thing. It must not be taken seriously as a Bulldog Drummond thriller, as that was not the intention at all. The chief interest of this film historically is that a lot of it was shot in the recently decommissioned (25 September 1933) Central Line underground station known variously as 'Museum' or 'British Museum', depending on the time one refers to. In the film, the stations' names are changed, so that Holborn becomes 'High Holborn' (the name of the road above), and Museum becomes 'Bloomsbury' (the area in which it lies). Museum Station lay and still lies between Tottenham Court Road Station and Holborn Station, and I have recently suggested to Mayor Boris Johnson its reopening in order to relieve the desperate overcrowding at Holborn Station, which has become intolerable and a danger to the public owing to the intensity of office development in that area and the thousands of extra people who use the station every day. This film made free use of the abandoned Museum Station, and one sees a great deal of it as it was two years after closing, when it was still in what is called in Britain 'pretty good nick', meaning 'pretty great shape' in American dialect. In the story, this abandoned station is linked to the nearby British Museum by a tunnel, through which villains gain access to priceless ancient treasures. The yarn is good, the film is not bad, one can have fun and stare incredulously at Jack Hulbert's chin, and imagine the 'lost underground station' being restored to its former glory.
