hyped garbage

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

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 Bulldog Drummond film is considered so rare that even Leonard Maltin doesn't include it in his books that do list all of the other entries in the series. I managed to get hold of a decent-quality copy, though one part of the film near the end (how they get inside the ship) seems to be missing entirely. The main strengths of this film come from its cast: every major cast member seems to be well-suited to his/her role, with Warner Oland effective as the villain, Loretta Young yummy as the girl-in-distress (oh, those big eyes of hers!), and Charles Butterworth & Una Merkel cute as the comic relief. There are several running gags in the film that work well, like the constant interruptions of Butterworth's and Merkel's wedding night, or the constant disappearances of witnesses from Drummond's own house. However, the story on the whole is fairly middling, and moves at a snail's pace. **1/2 out of 4.

This is the fifth Bulldog Drummond film, and the second and final one starring Ronald Colman as Drummond. It has the same title as the eighteenth Drummond film, released in 1947 and starring Ron Randell, but the stories have nothing whatever in common despite the common title of the two films. This film was a 20th Century Fox release, and has correspondingly higher production values than normal, being produced by Daryll Zanuck and with a script by Hollywood regular Nunnally Johnson. Colman is as charming and debonair as ever, and carries this off wittily and with energy and zest. The female interest is the young and beautiful Loretta Young, who is not just a limp fainting wisp of a thing but someone with character and verve. Drummond's valet is here called Parker, not Tenny, and E. E. Clive who was later to play the valet called Tenny so many times in Drummond films, here appears as a London bobby. He and fellow-bobby Halliwell Hobbes perform some hilarious routines together, and Clive is truly magnificent as a clowning idiot. Algy Longworth in this film is played by Charles Butterworth, as a forgetful and charming semi-idiot. He is the antithesis of Colman's chum Algy Longworth in 1929, when Claude Allister played Algy as an effete upper-class twit with a monocle and a whinnying voice. Butterworth blinks engagingly, forgets things constantly, and occasionally remembers things urgently. Having been in the signals corps in the War, he is called upon to break a code of a message, which he does satisfactorily, though he has to swallow it whilst held at gunpoint. Warner Oland is wonderful and powerful as a 'foreign prince of an Oriental country', who is a sophisticated but ruthless baddie, aided by Mischa Auer. The story evolves in a London fog, with Drummond entering a mysterious house and finding a dead man by a roaring fire with candles lit on a grand table and no one else in sight. When he comes back with a policeman, the body has disappeared. C. Aubrey Smith is rather irritating as the Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, Colonel Nielson, who keeps roaring and threatening Drummond for waking him up all the time with disappearing corpses and kidnap victims. The story really is a good one, albeit rather over-melodramatic. This is an excellent thriller done with style and although it has never commercially been for sale, and can be obtained only with the greatest difficulty in a poor off-the-air DVD recording, it will not disappoint dedicated Drummondonians in the least. It is well worth searching for, and you also get the thrill of the chase as an added extra, which is very Drummondesque in itself. So go for it!

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.