I Watch FIlms: Bulldog Drummond At Bay

 

Bulldog Drummond At Bay

An early one in this sequence of Bulldog Drummond films, and so inevitably the one I saw last. Drummond, his pal Algy and his manservant Tenny investigate the disappearance of a scientist who has designed a robot aeroplane – a drone perhaps? In any case it turns out this is related to international investor Kalinsky, a very suspicious foreign name.

Kalinsky is head of a pacifist organisation called The Key Club. One thing he does is buy up prototype weapons. The ones that work he sells on, the ones that don’t he announces to the club to rapturous applause as having stopped them being used. This is pretty silly, the politics I leave to the reader.

There’s a lot of sneaking about and getting locked in places. The fight scenes are chaotic, not well choreographed, looking very much like some men trying to wrestle each other to the ground. This unexpected note of realism conflicts slightly with the heightened reality of foreign spies and witty banter – when Drummond comments that a woman has tried to poison his tea Algy suggests fooling her by having coffee instead. Stuck in a laboratory they make guncotton to escape before an odorless gas rises high enough to disable them, playing lipservice to the actual difficulty in making the stuff.

Watch This: Fun, silly, pacy 30s spy thriller
Don’t Watch This: The dubious underpinnings of period are very clear without the later nonsense of Drummond always trying to get married