Bulldog Drummond on AllMovie

Filmed in England, this first movie version of the stage melodrama Bulldog Drummond featured a miscast Carlyle Blackwell in the title role. Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, the soldier of fortune created by "Sapper" (H.C. McNeile), was a combination old-school-tie British gentleman and brutish fascist. Blackwell could handle the "gentleman" part, but wasn't quite up to the tough, two-fisted aspects of the character. Still, the story itself is a good one: Bored by inactivity, Drummond advertises for "adventure" in the Times, and gets adventure aplenty when he becomes involved with a plot to kidnap an industrialist. The film's tension highlight was the scene in which the villainous Lakington (Warwick Ward) taunts a bound Drummond by fondling unconscious heroine Phyllis Benton (Evelyn Greeley); handled rather perfunctorily in the silent version, the sequence was vastly improved upon in the 1929 sound remake, which starred Ronald Colman as Drummond.