Algy, Hugh Drummond's right hand man has gotten married. At the wedding Drummond (Ronald Coleman) tells Algy that his days of adventuring are over since the partners must retire together. As Drummond walks home he becomes lost in the fog and deciding to phone for help he walks up to the nearest house. Once there he finds the door open and a dead man on a divan. After racing to find a cop he returns to the house and finds the body gone and Prince Achmed (Warner Oland) and his group acting suspiciously. After the cop and Drummond leave together, Drummond returns to investigate where Achmed warns Drummond to leave the matter alone or die. What follows is a round and round affair through the night as Drummond attempts to rescue a damsel and get to the bottom of matters, all the while not letting anyone, including the newlyweds, sleep.Good little thriller is better once things get going about a half an hour in. Coleman is an amusing hero and his battle with Oland, particularly towards the end, is rather amusing since it leaves Oland's character completely apoplectic, something we never saw in all of the Charlie Chan or Fu Manchu films that Oland made. The film's mix of danger and comedy doesn't always work, especially when we find out what is really going on, the denouncement is much darker than some of the earlier silliness suggests, and I for one felt rather uneasy laughing at what Oland and his crew was really trying to do.A solid thriller of the sort they don't make any more, and didn't make as an A film that often after this was released. Worth a look if you get the chance.Around 7 out of 10.

You've seen this plot before: someone sees a body and then it disappears. Flustered unbelieving cops, Irish because of the era. In this case, that same device is pulled three times on the cops, then in the finale is turned around and pulled twice on the bad guys. Here we have a charming detective who takes enough nonchalant risks to get himself in trouble, and enough pluck to get himself out. But we have some cool narrative devices that play with the detective genre, not yet quite fully formed, but formed enough to honk with. Our detective remarks that the mystery would be more interesting if a beautiful woman in distress appeared. In a few seconds this happens, with absolutely no reason. Its as if he just wrote it that way. She mentions that he is like someone out of a book. Later, he calls in a story to the bad guys and they believe it.Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

This is not only the best Bulldog Drummond film, it is simply one of the best series detective films ever made and I would even go so far as to say it is one of the ten best classic (e.g. pre-1950) detective films ever made. It is not a mystery in the sense that the perpetrator is evident from near the start of the film...the real mystery is why the crimes, including kidnapping and murder, are being committed (another crime is why until recently we have not been able to buy watchable home video copies!). The merits of this film are well stated by the late William K. Everson in his book "The Detective in Film" but for the record: the director Roy Del Ruth does a great job of keeping the action moving; the lively cast, including Ronald Colman, Loretta Young, C. Aubrey Smith, Charles Butterworth, Una Merkel, and of course, Warner Oland, is first-rate from top to bottom; the script by Nunnally Johnson is witty and intelligent; and its production values including fabulous sets like Oland's living room in his cavernous London mansion, are untouchable. This film, which is part screwball comedy as well as detective film, is in my view the only one which comes close to being as good as The Thin Man (1934) in weaving the two genres together. I can not believe there is anyone who thinks this is a bad film -- those who rate it low must be having a bad day or confusing it with the 1947 Columbia "B" remake of the same title with Ron Randall! It is too bad that copyright hassles have never made it available for television broadcast in North America; otherwise I think this would be a very well known and regarded film rather than one known mainly to die-hard genre specialists.

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.