Summary
In the soot-choked twilight of post-war Europe, a battle-scarred captain—equal parts dandy and death-bringer—stalks through a continent still smelling of cordite and compromise. Rumor whispers that a steel tycoon whose fortune could tilt the balance of nations has been spirited away, not to a castle dungeon or a fog-laced dock, but to the manicured purgatory of a seaside nursing home: gabled roofs, hydrangeas, and morphine taps. Behind the lace curtains, Teutonic surgeons and Slavic poisoners pose as cherubic nurses; their hypodermics drip slow death to pry stock-market secrets from addled veins. Drummond, natty in Savile-Row tweeds yet nursing a knuckleduster in his cigarette case, follows a breadcrumb trail forged in blood: a dead code-breaker’s pocket watch, a music-box lullaby encoded with railway timetables, a single white rose pressed in an unsent love letter. Each clue drags him deeper into a hall of mirrors where loyalties invert—old comrades now auction intel to the highest bidder, while supposed enemies sacrifice themselves with quixotic grace. The climax erupts in a candlelit sanatorium ward during a thunderstorm: Drummond duels a hulking mastermind across a catwalk of medical charts, the magnate’s EKG blinking like a Morse curse overhead. When the final shot ricochets off oxygen tanks and the wall portrait of Queen Victoria crashes down, the captor’s grand scheme collapses into soapy shards and leaking ether. The tycoon, frail yet defiant, is carried out on a stretcher made of union-jack blankets; Drummond lights a cigarette, declines a knighthood with a wink, and strides into the surf where dawn bruises the horizon—another lonely victory in a world too tired to cheer.
A captain saves a kidnapped magnate from a nursing home run by foreign agents.
Review Excerpt
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Somewhere between the last echo of Great War artillery and the first crack of jazz-age champagne, cinema birthed a hero who preferred fisticuffs to feelings and trench-coats to tiaras. Bulldog Drummond, directed by an unheralded cadre of Dutch craftsmen with Anglo ambitions, lands like a blackjack on velvet: swift, bruising, unexpectedly elegant. Forget the monocled matinee idols of the West End; Jan Grader’s Drummond prowls with the coiled menace of a man who has smelled chlorinated trench ga..."
