As the final film in the series opens, Drummond (John Howard) and his infinitely patient fiancée, Phyllis (Heather Angel), are once again planning their wedding, this time in the French countryside. To muck things up, criminal mastermind Henri Armides (Eduardo Cianelli) robs a bank and hides the loot in Drummond's radio set before escaping the cops by impersonating a madman. When he comes back for his money, he runs head on into the adventurer, who lets slip that he had sent to the radio to Phyllis in France. Before long Cianelli, Howard, best friend Algy (Reginald Denny) and butler Tenny (E.E. Clive) are all racing to intercept the radio with Drummond's Scotland Yard contact, Col. Neilson (H.B. Warner), hot on their trail. Can the good guys recover the loot in time to get Phyllis to the altar at last? Perhaps the film's shooting title, Mr. and Mrs. Bulldog Drummond, supplies a clue to that mystery.
By the eighth film in their Bulldog Drummond series, Paramount was going more for comedy than thrills. Though there's a pretty good rooftop chase and fight at the climax, there's also a great deal of time devoted to comedy, most of it supplied by bumbling best friend Denny and Cianelli's apprentice in crime, Garvey (Gerald Hamer).
According to the credits, the film is based on "Bulldog Drummond and the Oriental Mind," one of the last Bulldog Drummond stories written by the character's creator, H.C. McNeile, who signed his Drummond pieces "Sapper." The piece was published posthumously in the Strand's October 1937 issue. This film may have the most tenuous connection to its original story of any other in the series. McNeile dealt with Drummond's attempt to help a client's uncle deal with a mysterious cousin who suddenly turned up at his home with a sinister Asian servant, but not a single character or plot turn ends up in the movie.
With Bulldog Drummond's Bride, Paramount would lay the series to rest, though adaptations of work by McNeile and his successor in writing about Bulldog Drummond, Gerald Fairlie, would continue just a year later with Bulldog Sees It Through (1940), a British film starring Jack Buchanan. There would not be another film series until 1947, when Columbia released two films starring Ron Randell as Drummond. Howard would have one more major role, as Katharine Hepburn's stuffy fiancé in The Philadelphia Story (1940), before service in World War II kept him off the screen for five years. He never regained any career momentum after that. Angel got to play one of the Bennet sister's in MGM's adaptation of Pride and Prejudice (1941) and the pregnant Mrs. Higgins in Alfred Hitchcock's Lifeboat (1944), but she, too, found her days as a leading lady were soon over. The other regulars in Paramount's Bulldog Drummond series were character actors, a much more long-lived breed than leading players. Denny, who had been involved in aviation since 1930, developed a more efficient target dummy for aerial combat training during World War II. He also continued playing strong supporting roles, most notably as Cary Grant's architect in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948). Warner continued working steadily, though advancing age would finally cut back on his screen appearances. He played himself as one of the "waxworks" playing bridge with Gloria Swanson's Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and finished his career with a small role in old friend Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments (1956). For Clive, however, the end was near. After finishing the Bulldog Drummond series, he continued acting steadily as one of the screen's chief embodiments of English virtue in films like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939) and Pride and Prejudice, but then died of a sudden heart attack in 1940 at the age of just 59.
Director: James P. Hogan
Producer: Stuart Walker
Screenplay: Stuart Palmer, Garnett Weston
Based on the novel "Bulldog Drummond and the Oriental Mind" by H.C. 'Sapper' McNeile) Cinematography: Harry Fischbeck
Score: John Leipold
Cast: John Howard (Capt. Hugh C. 'Bulldog' Drummond), Heather Angel (Phyllis Clavering), H.B. Warner (Colonel Nielson), Reginald Denny ('Algy' Longworth), E.E. Clive ('Tenny' Tennison), Elizabeth Patterson (Aunt Blanche), Eduardo Ciannelli (Henri Armides), Gerald Hamer (Garvey)
By Frank Miller
