Hey, we just caught Sneezy! Any other dwarves back there?
Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937) has the elements of a good story, but they don’t come together. Drummond, whose place in life is never made clear, makes a dramatic entrance by ignoring landing tower instructions and landing his plane in a dense London fog, ignoring reporters’ questions, and driving off towards the hospital where his longtime friend, Algy, is waiting for his wife to give birth. From there, he heads for home to meet with the Commissioner of Scotland Yard.
But before he gets there, a young & attractive woman appears out of the foggy darkness and collapses as he skids to a halt. Stopping as any chivalrous lad would do, he puts her in the car and then runs off to investigate a gunshot. Upon discovering a dead body next to a marsh, he dashes back to the car, only to discover it’s gone. Hearing a splash, he returns to the body, only to discover it is gone, too.
Resuming his journey by foot, eventually his car drives up with his butler, Tenny, at the wheel, who announces it was found in a ditch. Finding clues in his car, they continue to home, where Commissioner pleads with him to be quiet, as the Commissioner is on vacation. Meanwhile, at nearby Greystone Manor, an old friend of the Commissioner, Norman Merridew, is caring for the young woman, who we learn is Phyllis Clavering, and when Drummond follows the clues to the manor, Merridew explains the situation, proclaiming her driven mad with grief at the recent death of her brother, and a more distant death of her father.
However, when Drummond returns her handbag to her personally, she contrives to secrete a message in his hat; when he later recovers the message, it consists of nursery rhymes. The fun continues, between Algy, who joins Drummond at his call, leaving his wife to have the baby by herself and him hyperventilating over it, Tenny, who deliciously gets just about every good line in the movie and delivers them in the driest British manner possible, the bad guys, who are plausible and not buffoons, and the damsel in distress, who makes for a damsel who’s more than willing to take care of herself, yet finds Drummond irresistible.
The problem? It’s not the plot, it’s the presentation. Drummond, played by Ray Milland, shows little emotional range; it’s almost as if he’s bipolar and currently in the manic phase, an outgoing optimist who shows little concern about the artillery his opponents may be lugging about, and while his daring choices do make a certain sense, his insensibility of the chances he takes makes him a little hard to take. This is Milland comparatively early in his career, with only traces of his future trademark style (far as I can make out, it consisted of speaking through his nose, but an effective technique), and his features rarely remind the audience that This Is Ray Milland! The latter is a good thing, but his racy delivery of lines seems to be a mistake.
Algy, Drummond’s friend having his first baby, is painfully two note – either panicking over the baby, or a spear-carrier with no personality. Sidekicks are hard to respect if they’re not given a good backstory, and Algy is not.
On the plus side, Phyllis the damsel is, as I noted, given quite the personality for a lady of the era. Most damsels of the time waited around for someone to rescue them, and were little more than Wonder bread with saltless butter, but Phyllis, while happy to accept help, doesn’t shrink from helping the cause along. Her proactive approach to her dilemma, her spunk (to use my Arts Editor technical jargon) makes her an unexpected charmer.
But perhaps the best, if most limited role, is that of the butler, Tenny, whose wry observances of how the plot is going are unexpected gems of dry humor, to be gathered, cherished, and saved from Drummond’s blundering feet. Even with a black eye, he delivers every line with a spoonful of relish.
It didn’t help that the print we saw was quite muddy, both in its visual and audio qualities. But that just accentuated the problems with the presentation, and were not the source. It’s too bad, because the story actually has some fun twists to it, especially as the Commissioner gets the last laugh on Drummond. But Tenny’s gems are too infrequent to make the journey from plane to denouement worth the travel.
