Scanialara You won't be disappointed!

Dorathen Better Late Then Never

Taraparain Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

binapiraeus This is certainly an absolute highlight of the long and prolific 'career' of amateur sleuth Bulldog Drummond. A very clever story, not quite unlike Hitchcock's "The Lady Vanishes": a young woman knows someone is in great danger, but a very influential person has instructed everybody around her to tell her lies until she almost thinks she's crazy - and while in "The Lady Vanishes" it was Michael Redgrave, here of course it's charming, nonchalant and fearless Ronald Colman alias Bulldog Drummond who rushes to her aid - happy that he's stumbled upon a mysterious case again at last, while he was just about to 'retire' to Essex...But this time the madness goes even further: while Drummond thinks he's got the girl in a safe place, she disappears - and when he manages to 'kidnap' her aunt in turn from the baddies and take her to his home, she disappears too - and now his old friend from Scotland Yard, Colonel Nielsen, thinks Bulldog's mad! But of course he's not...So there's plenty of entertainment and examples of British humor here amidst the contrasting creepy, foggy night streets of London with mean faces lurking in the dark: Bulldog spoils his best friend Algie's wedding night asking to assist him in this strange case, and he doesn't let poor old Colonel Neilsen get a minute of sleep all night with his constant disturbances, who in turn threats he'll hang him someday...In short, a real feast for every fan of classic murder mysteries with a good dose of humor - laughs as well as shudders guaranteed!

robert-temple-1 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!

bensonj This is an enjoyable light murder mystery, but I might have enjoyed it more if I hadn't recently seen BLIND ADVENTURE, made the year before by Ernest B. Schoedsack for RKO. The plot elements, as I recall, are strikingly similar: a foggy London night, the hero accidentally going into a house and finding a body, which is then missing when he comes back with help; a young girl's relative disappearing, and a foreign ambassador of some sort who seems legit but is a bad guy; constant breaking into the house in question; all the action occurring in one evening; and the hero and the girl-in-distress an item by the evening's end. And, in both instances, comedy relief that actually adds to the film! Roland Young was very pleasing in BLIND ADVENTURE, but no one can match Butterworth at his best, which he is here. Once again, one feels that he had to have written many of his lines. Here, he's married that very day to Una Merkel, who affectionately calls him "Mousey." Colman: "Never leave your wife." Butterworth: "I'll speak to her about it." When Drummond finds adventure, he calls up Butterworth and asks him to tag along, without a care that it's Butterworth's wedding night. Butterworth isn't really an innocent here, he knows what he's missing out on. In response to one of these calls, he says, "we've reached sort of a critical moment." Robert Armstrong in BLIND ADVENTURE seems a more real, more interesting character. Here, both the script and Colman play it as a not-to-be-taken-seriously, boy's-own adventure, a tacit acknowledgment that this is just another caper in a series. One nice addition here is that the inevitable policeman who doesn't believe there's a problem is C. Aubrey Smith. You're on his side, really. Why doesn't this boy scout let him get some sleep?Apparently Butterworth was an off-screen drinking buddy of such literary wits as Robert Benchley and Corey Ford. Note that Benchley wrote "additional dialogue" for BLIND ADVENTURE, presumably for Young's Butterworth-like character.

cjellis-1 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.