Bulldog Drummond

No less than 13 different actors have impersonated Sapper's perennially gentlemanly hero in films, ranging from Carlyle Blackwell in 1922 to Richard Johnson in 1966 and 1968. In theory, at least, Colman is perfect casting, well able to cope with both the suavity and the built-in humour, and his talkie debut (with its Chandlerian plot about a girl trying to rescue her uncle from a sanitorium where he is being coerced into signing away his fortune) was a huge success at the time. If the pre-Bond formula and the military clubman hero prove a little jaded now, there is compensation in the careful Goldwyn packaging: direction by a graduate of the Sennett school, sets by William Cameron Menzies, low-key camerawork from Gregg Toland.