Film review – The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1934)

‘Now, listen worms, my friends and I don’t like your type.  You meet in secret places and your slimy minds concoct foul schemes which – incredible to relate – meet with a fair measure of success …’

‘Sapper’ (H.C. McNeile) introduced Captain Hugh ‘Bulldog’ Drummond, who turned to heroics because he found peacetime boring, in his novel Bulldog Drummond (1920).  This immediate success led to many further adventures in print, on stage and on film.  Sapper wrote a book called The Return of Bulldog Drummond (1932)*, but this film is based on The Black Gang (1922), the second Drummond yarn.  By 1934, Bulldog Drummond had already been filmed a couple of times in Britain and Hollywood.  In the process of adaptation, the brute of a hero acquired dandyish polish – first in a successful play, then in the screen person of slick-moustached Ronald Colman.  The Return of Bulldog Drummond isn’t a sequel to any specific earlier film, with a lumpy Ralph Richardson cast as an unlikely action hero, but the script includes back-references to Drummond’s earlier ‘rounds’ with Moriarty-like arch-nemesis Carl Petersen.  Silly-ass, monocled sidekick Algy Longworth is played by Claud Allister, who also took the role in Bulldog Drummond (1929), with Colman, and Bulldog Drummond at Bay (1937), with John Lodge.

Written and directed by Walter Summers (Dark Eyes of London), the fast-paced ripping yarn stumbles interestingly as it tries not to be quite as politically embarrassing as the novel.  As in the book, apparently diffident ex-officer Drummond forms a vigilante group who dash about on motorbikes or in ‘expensive cars’, wearing tight black shirts and goggles, giving evil (often foreign) conspirators sound biffings and tossing rotten politicians into streams.  By 1932, enough real-life anti-leftist factions were making fashion statements which rendered Drummond’s leather lads suspect.  The novel’s Black Gang become the film’s Black Clan, which makes them sound even worse.  Sapper wrote Peterson’s confederates as anarchists in the employ of international Bolshevism, but Summers evens things up roping in a sham patriotic ‘Up England’ movement and a cartel of ruthless capitalist arms profiteers who want to foment war to stay in business (a couple of snarling Yank gangsters are included in the rotten crew of ‘specimens’ Drummond breaks up).  League of Nations booster Zadowa (Harold Saxon-Snell) unwisely trusts his secretary (Joyce Kennedy), who is clearly up to no good, to drive him to his next speaking engagement.  She runs out of petrol in the middle of nowhere and legs it for the nearest garage as a passing car pulls off a (surprisingly gruesome) Chicago-style tommy-gun-riddling of the pacifist.  This atrocity prompts the Black Clan to take action against Up England’s top-hatted boss (Wallace Geoffrey) and barging into an operation run by foreign nasties.  Long, talky sessions are set in the Ritz and the conspirators’ country house but Summers breaks into exciting montage when a phone ring-around gathers the Black Clan and they roar off to adventure.  William K. Everson pointed out that in his cycling get-up, Richardson’s Drummond prefigures Captain America – though his supporting cast of adventurers (mostly given short shrift here, except fathead Algy) also set a precedent for the gangs of stalwart pals who back up Biggles, Doc Savage, Dick Barton and others.

A running theme in the novels is that Carl Peterson is so chameleonlike he’s unrecognisable in each appearance, except for a finger-twiddling tell only Drummond notices.  Sapper created Peterson a little before Norbert Jacques and Fritz Lang gave their Dr Mabuse the same mastery of disguise – though there was a precedent in Grant Allen’s Colonel Clay, who wears many faces in An African Millionaire (1897).  As Peterson, Francis L. Sullivan adopts several disguises (bearded arms dealer Zabaleff** and unctuous clergyman Reverend Longmoor) though his instantly-recognisable bulk gives him away.  However, he’s a welcome, slimy villain, relishing every chance for perfidy and finally zapped to death by his own electric fence.  Ann Todd manages to add extra syllables to her dialogue as Drummond’s wife Phyllis, who exists only to be kidnapped and threatened with drowning in the bath.  Joyce Kennedy is subdued as Peterson’s femme fatale sidekick Irma, who also gets a couple of disguises.  A little of Allister’s drawled slang goes a long, long way, but Richardson tries hard in an out-of-character role, speechifying to baddies, escaping from a car that has been driven into a river, thumping many rotters and defending Britain without making a fuss about it.  Richardson would return to the franchise as a villain in the superior spoof Bulldog Jack.

‘Melodrama of the old school is rampant,’ wrote ‘Jolo’ in Variety, ‘with enough incidents to make them interesting.  Picture, however, is spasmodic and episodic, rather than sequential, and, while some of it is very good, other sections of it won’t bear close scrutiny.  Finish has a ‘”terrific” fight between Drummond’s band and the hordes of aliens.  The way the two sets of contestants struck into each other would give the impression of acute femininity of the clinging-vine type***.  There is more than sufficient in the picture, plus the drawing power of the title, to cash in on it as a top feature for England, and it could easily be utilized as a second feature in a double program in the US’.

*The first edition cover has tricksy typography which throws up a phantom alternate title The Return of Bull-Dog Drummond.  It was serialised in The Strand Magazine as ‘The Mystery of the Studio’ and the plot involves a Hollywood film being made in Britain.  Perhaps because of Summers’ film, the book which has never been adapted.

**After real bearded arms dealer Basil Zaharoff (1849-1936), presumably.  Zaharoff was the model for many ‘merchant of death’ baddies in 1930s thrillers – note ‘Basil Bazaroff’ in Hergé’s L’Oreille cassée (Tintin and the Broken Ear, 1937) and ‘Zaroff’ in the Tom Mix serial The Miracle Rider (1935).  Ian Fleming modelled Ernst Stavro Blofeld on Zaharoff.

***Me-owww!