User Reviews

This is -- ironically -- a distinctly un-British Bulldog. (Not only does our hero sport an American accent, but he delivers lines such as "It's a quarter of two {o'clock}", and "Ready or not, here we come!") As a quick half-hour's entertainment, it's lively, and manages to pack a surprising amount of plot into a short running time, although said plot is quite literally formulaic -- and I for one managed to guess the real culprit from a very early stage, when the motive is laid out before us on a plate...

There is a rousing theme tune, and a good deal of driving around very fast in sports cars; Drummond doesn't seem to have any worries about the subtleties of tailing people, or else the shooting schedule didn't allow for such niceties. I couldn't help feeling that the villains could scarcely have ignored him! The surviving print is of fairly poor quality, such that the opening titles are initially unreadable due to lack of contrast and most of the paler areas of the picture are washed out. The action can easily be followed, however, and ironically the characters' expressions are actually clearer in the moments when the screen darkens prior to a fade-out.

On the evidence seen here, I'm not entirely surprised that this pilot didn't make the proposed series, but then I don't know what the competition was like. The banter between Drummond and his man Kelly is nicely done -- and stays just this side of annoying -- and we get glimpses of the hero's robust and unorthodox approach to detection. This is a curiosity, but not without its charm.

If you haven't seen this, you haven't missed anything. It is the twenty-second Bulldog Drummond film, if a 30 minute TV pilot can legitimately be called a film. There is an error in the IMDb database which suggests that this is the twenty-third Drummond film. However, the supposed twenty-second Drummond film listed with IMDb is a phantom film which never existed. This is due to a curious state of confusion over the dates of 1952 and 1957. This TV pilot appeared as Episode 13 of Season 5 of the American television series 'Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Presents'. It was the Fairbanks series, not this episode, which commenced in 1952, and this gave rise to a misunderstanding that a film called 'Bulldog Drummond' starring Robert Beatty had been produced in 1952, which never happened. The only time Beatty played Drummond (although he had appeared as another character in the 1951 film 'Calling Bulldog Drummond' starring Walter Pidgeon) was in this short film. Over the final credits of this film, the voice of Fairbanks (who was going to be the presenter of a Drummond series) can be heard saying that Bulldog Drummond will be appearing every week, with adventures in various foreign capitals, 'because that is the business of Bulldog Drummond'. However, the Bulldog Drummond TV series was never made, and if you see this appalling pilot, you can see why. Robert Beatty is so boring as Drummond, that even going to sleep is not good enough, you need to be drunk as well. There is a surprising amount of second unit location film of London in the late 1950s used here, over-used in fact, because there was so little else. The story about an anti-biotic formula which the scientist wants to give away to humanity, hence is kidnapped to force its sale, is hackneyed, and the production is simply appalling. Although set in London, Beatty has a Canadian accent, and the one limp effort to suggest that he and his butler were in the Second World War together as British soldiers falls very flat. The butler is played as a jolly cockney bloke by Michael Ripper, who towards the end of his life played the Drones Club porter in six episodes of 'Jeeves and Wooster'. John Le Mesurier plays the police inspector with his usual droll manner, and has half a dozen lines. There are no production values. What a dreary film this is. Thank God the series wasn't made.