Bulldog Drummond Comes Back (Paramount, 1937; reissued by "Congress Films")

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at about 10:15 p.m. I ran another movie from the “Crime Wave” 50-CD boxed set, Bulldog Drummond Comes Back, the first in a series of eight films with John Howard as Herman Cyril “Sapper” McNeile’s famous character. The movies were produced by Paramount between 1937 and 1939 and featured a delayed-marriage gimmick between Drummond and his fiancée, Phyllis Clavering (Louise Campbell in this and the earliest films in the series, later replaced by Heather Angel) in which – stop me if you’ve heard this before – Drummond’s marriage plans are constantly being derailed by one super-villain’s attack on London or other. I once did a moviemagg blog post on all the Howard Drummonds, as well as two more movies featuring the character – the 1929 Bulldog Drummond with Ronald Colman (who, even though he only played him twice, was the Bulldog Drummond the way Basil Rathbone was the Sherlock Holmes) and the 1951 Calling Bulldog Drummond, an MGM “frozen funds” movie shot in Britain with Walter Pidgeon as an older version of the character: https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2009/05/before-there-was-bond-there-was.html. I titled that post “Before There Was Bond, There Was Drummond,” making the point (as others have observed as well) that the Bulldog Drummond films of the 1930’s come closer to the James Bond movies of the 1960’s and beyond than any other movies from Hollywoold’s classic era.

John Howard seems to have landed the part of Drummond mainly because he’d just played Ronald Colman’s brother in the 1937 classic Lost Horizon, and though Howard and Colman were tons apart in charisma and star quality, they looked similar enough as brothers that the casting worked. (Howard’s most familiar role is probably in The Philadelphia Story, as the stuffed-shirt suitor divorcée Katharine Hepburn’s character is about to marry when she dumps him and, after a brief affairlet with James Stewart’s reporter character, wisely gets back together with her ex, played by Cary Grant.) I remembered Bulldog Drummond Comes Back as a better movie than it seems now. Screenwriter Edward T. Lowe, Jr. (whose later credits included one of the best of the Universal Sherlock Holmes films with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, 1942’s Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, as well as two of the omnibus Universal horror films from 1945 that tried to crowd as many monsters as they could into one film, House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula) based his story on an actual McNeile novel, The Female of the Species, and the plot is a good one.

Irena Sodaris (Helen Freeman) is out to get revenge on Drummond for having got her late husband, a murderer, convicted and executed. She;s enlisted her former brother-in-law, Mikhail Valdin (J. Carrol Naish) pronounced “Michael Valdeen,” to help her in her plot, which is to kidnap Phyllis Clavering on the eve of her wedding to Drummond, hold her hostage at an undisclosed location, and send Drummond doggerel verses either written on paper or delivered on records (at a time when home recording machines existed but both the recorders and the blanks for them were rare and expensive). The idea is to lead Drummond on a merry chase throughout England (or at least those parts of it that could be represented by Paramount’s standing sets) to find different clues in various locations. One solemn warning Irena gives Drummond is that if she sees any sign that Drummond has notified the police, she will kill Phyllis instantly. This leads Drummond’s friend, Colonel Nielsen of Scotland Yard (John Barrymore, who because of his former stature got top billing over Howard, which according to William K. Everson angered younger audiences who had no idea who John Barrymore had been), to adopt a series of bizarre disguises so he can follow Drummond around and hopefully run down Phyllis’s kidnappers without them finding out he’s on the case and killing her as threatened.

There are some delightful scenes in the film, including one set in a country pub called the “Angler’s Inn” in which a large woman (former music-hall star Kay Deslys) delivers a rousing version of “What Shall We Do with a Drunken Sailor?,” and another in which a woman hired by the baddies to deliver one of the clue records to Drummond has no idea what’s on it and thinks she (and we) are going to hear some nice music. There’s also a good scene in which Nielsen is putting on onbe of his disguises and he muses about his long-ago days in amateur theatricals; the joke then and now is that John Barrymore could have ever considered an alternate career choice besides acting. But for the most part it’s pretty ordinary, leading to a bizarre series of chases in which Drummond keeps getting himself locked into confined spaces and has to figure out how to free himself, including a water-filled dungeon which he escapes by realizing that a trap door on the floor opens out into the Thames River and he can just open it and swim to safety. It also doesn’t help that Helen Freeman and J. Carrol Naish speak with such outrageously phony accents it’s almost impossible to tell what ethnicity they’re supposed to be playing; as Tom Weaver noted in his book Poverty Row Horrors!, Naish throughout his long career played every conceivable nationality except his real one, which was Irish. Bulldog Drummond Comes Back is an O.K. movie, a pleasant enough time-filler then and now but with almost nothing special about it.