With Paramount's Drummond films a thing of the past, Columbia Pictures picked up the rights to the stories and characters through Lou Appleton and Bernard Small's new Venture Pictures unit. They chose to start a proposed series of films with an adaptation of Herman C. McNeile's 1935 novel, which had been filmed in England in 1937 under the same title. John Lodge played the adventurer in that version, with Victor Jory as the lead villain.
Western specialist Frank Gruber, who had also written some of Universal's Sherlock Holmes films, stays closer to the original novel than most of the other Drummond films. As in the original, Drummond is vacationing in his country cottage when somebody throws a stone through one of his windows. Attached to the stone is a claim check from Victoria Station with a coded message written on its back. Before long, a series of intruders start showing up, including blonde beauty Doris (Anita Louise), all trying to find the ticket and the treasure to which it leads. At this point, the film goes off in its own direction, as Randall takes on a band of jewel thieves with the help of O'Moore, cub reporter Seymour (Terry Kilburn) and Scotland Yard Inspector McIvar (Holmes Herbert). In the original, Drummond infiltrated a band of pacifists to find the enemy agents using it as a front. That wouldn't have played as well in the post-war era, so instead the quest was for a fortune in jewels owned by a family that had betrayed England during World War II.
Randall had been acting in his native Australia since the late '30s. Long before international audiences were even aware of Australian cinema, he caught Hollywood's attention with Pacific Adventure (1946), a biography of the Australian aviation pioneer Sir Charles Kingsford Smith. Although he had appeared in a bit in Warner Bros.' To Have and Have Not (1944), he made his official U.S. debut as Bulldog Drummond, a role he would repeat in the series' second film, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1947). He would continue in mostly B films, even playing another intrepid adventurer, the Lone Wolf. Most notable among his A pictures were a brief appearance as Cole Porter in MGM's Kiss Me Kate (1953) and the role of the centurion converted to Christianity in King of Kings (1961).
After making two Bulldog Drummond films at Columbia, Appleton and Small parted ways. Appleton produced a few more films before moving into assistant directing for such television series as Father Knows Best and The Doris Day Show. Small set up his own Bernard Small Productions, which produced three films for 20th Century-Fox. Included among those were two more Bulldog Drummond films, now starring Tom Conway, who had played the Falcon for RKO earlier in the 1940s. Oddly, neither of those films featured Drummond's name in the titles.
After that, Drummond moved to MGM for Calling Bulldog Drummond (1951) starting Walter Pidgeon as the now-retired adventurer. The character would not return to the screen until the late 1960s, when he was repackaged as a bush league James Bond and played by Richard Johnson in two films for J. Arthur Rank in England.
Director: Sidney Salkow
Producer: Louis B. Appleton, Jr., Bernard Small
Screenplay: Frank Gruber
Based on the novel by Herman C. 'Sapper' McNeile Cinematography: Philip Tannura
Score: Joseph Dubin, John Leipold
Cast: Ron Randall (Hugh C. 'Bulldog' Drummond), Anita Louise (Doris Hamilton/Doris Meredith), Patrick O'Moore (Algy Longworth), Terry Kilburn (Seymour - Cub Reporter), Holmes Herbert (Scotland Yard Inspector McIvar), Lester Matthews (Shannon Eskdale)
By Frank Miller
