F. Richard Jones | Bulldog Drummond / 1929

drop of a spoon

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sidney Howard and Wallace Smith (screenplay, adapted from a play by Herman C. McNeile), F. Richard Jones (director) Bulldog Drummond / 1929

 

Demobilized British officer Bulldog Drummond (Ronald Colman) is bored at The Conservative Club, a gathering of moribund elderly men so intent on silence that even the drop of a spoon by a waiter causes a near revolution. Interestingly, the same opening scene is repeated in the 1935 film Top Hat where Fred Astaire is equally bored while waiting in the equally silenced Thackeray Club where he is waiting to meet his best friend Horace Hardwick (Edward Everett Horton), soon after tap dancing a thundering goodbye to the club. Drummond, evidently a club regular, who wishes that someone would throw a bomb to wake things up, shocks club members by whistling his way out of The Conservative Club with his friend Algy Longworth (Claud Allister) in tow.

     Algy, in fact, plays the same role as does Horace, a constantly confused queer who has been given a script which necessitates his pretending to be a heterosexual. His real role is actually to provide a humorous gay cover to the dapper hero, in this case Colman, who like Astaire, falls in love with a troublesome woman with whom he purposely engages.

      In this case Drummond is so bored that he determines, upon Algy’s jocular suggestion, to post an advertisement in the newspaper, calling for someone seeking to bring adventure into his life. He gets several offers, most of them criminal in nature, some of them involving murder; but the best of the requests is a cry for help by a seemingly desperate woman, Phyllis Benton (Joan Bennett), who has already arranged rooms at the Green Bay Inn along the London Road so that she might explain her dilemma.

      Both Drummond’s valet Danny (Wilson Benge) who serves a role similar to Horace’s man Bates (Eric Blore) and Algy, who alas can’t quite get up the energy to play out his namesake—the aesthete Algernon Moncrieff of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest—are worried that the Captain may actually take his gameplaying seriously and, the moment Drummond drives away in his Mercedes, Algy and Danny follow in his Rolls Royce, another of Drummond’s many autos’ in order to intrude upon their friend’s “insanity” before it goes too far.

      Upon discovering them in his room, Drummond suggests that if he’d wanted help he would have sent for his maiden aunt who is more of man than Algy, the script’s clear indication of just where Algy stands on the scale of sexual identity.

      Upon a knock on the door, Drummond quickly shuffles the two prisses off into his bedroom where Algy discovers something in the closet, “Danny, there’s a hole!” Danny responds, “A peephole,” Algy excitedly reacting, “Let’s peep!” I should add, they insist upon taking turns with no prejudice of social class, making the whole event sound like another kind of hole in the wall gay men sometimes use of peeping along with other activities.

      And indeed, the young lady, a voluptuous mystery figure just as Drummond had imagined her to be, appears to be quite mad, describing a strange hospital where who uncle, having supposedly undergone a nervous breakdown, has been taken against his will and is being held by the doctor in charge, Lakington (Lawrence Grant) and his co-conspirators, Carl Peterson (Montague Love) and Irma (Lilyan Tashman)—all this without a shred of evidence. The peeping toms Danny and Algy believe the girl herself to be an escapee of the institution, while Drummond, is intrigued by her wild story, particularly when she reveals that her uncle is none other than the wealthy American businessman John Travers (Charles Sellon).

       The rest of the story consists basically of the evil trio absconding with Phyllis, after which Drummond pays a visit to the oddly isolated hospital where he discovers that they are drugging Travers in an attempt to make him sign away his wealth.

        Drummond, gun in hand, escapes with Phyllis and her uncle, with no help by the intruding duo of Danny and Algy. And soon after, Peterson, Irma, and Dr. Lakington regain possession of Phyllis and her uncle—without realizing that Drummond is now pretending to be Travers, the real version of whom is on his way with Algy back to London. Threats are made, drugs injected, secret steel doors rolled into place; yet Drummond and Phyllis save themselves from certain sexual abuse and death. The villains pretend to arrive as the police and escape, while Drummond and Phyllis finally find a moment, despite further intrusions of Algy and Danny, to express their heterosexual feelings for one another, determining to let their foes escape in return for their marital bliss.

       Where Algy and Danny end up is undetermined, although at one point we see Algy in a seemingly homoerotic slumber with Travers in the back of the car, and we can only image that Danny has now joined him in a similar position on their voyage back into the city.

      In short, in Bulldog Drummond, everyone seems to end up quite content, having had a series of adventures in their otherwise highly regularized lives.

      Director Jones, a popular figure in Hollywood who had helped Mabel Normand in her early films and through her late drug addiction difficulties, taught Stan Laurel, so the actor claimed, everything he knew about comic timing, and boosted Douglas Fairbank’s career with The Gaucho, as well as having helmed the 1919 LGBTQ wartime comedy Yankee Doodle in Berlin. He ended his career with this film, an early talkie that was praised for the quality of its sound. In this entertaining adventure work gay and straight figures coexist seemingly without restrictions in sharing the complete storyline, while by the very next year queers would pop up more like jack-in-the-boxes for brief comic moments before the lid was shut down upon them permanently, silencing their behaviors just as did The Conservative and Thackery Clubs throughout the USA and England to their august members.

 

Los Angeles, June 11, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).