Tue 5 Jun 2018
A Silent Movie Review by David Vineyard: CAPTAIN SWAGGER (1928).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Reviews , Silent films[3] Comments
CAPTAIN SWAGGER. Pathé Exchange, 1928. Rod La Rocque, Sue Carol, Richard Tucker, Victor Potel, Ulrich Haupt, Maurice Black, Ray Cooke. Directed by Edward H. Griffith.
This silent comedy opens in France in 1917, where gallant American pilot Rod La Rocque as just returned from Paris, “an hour and three quarts away…†still on the windward side of soused, but ready to volunteer to dare the skies against Baron Von Stahl (Ulrich Haupt), due to make his daily bombing run.
Sure enough our hero is true to his word and shoots Von Stahl down over his own lines, but when he fails to see the gallant enemy pilot emerge from his burning plane he lands and rescues him. The grateful German recognizes a fellow knight of the sky and presents him with his own engraved Luger, then helps him to escape the German troops who spotted his plane come down.
A decade later back in good old New York, our hero, who has earned the nickname “Captain Swagger†from his numerous bill collectors is on his last dime, a playboy who has run out of funds and friends, so taking the engraved Luger he decides to do what any self respecting Twenties gentleman would do: turn elegant bandit (top hat, white tie, formal coat, and white silk scarf).
As luck would have it, all he succeeds in doing is rescuing beautiful Sue Arnold (Sue Carol) from a wolf with a convertible. A bust at banditry, Captain Swagger returns to his soon to be former residence with the girl, and resolves he will have to try a more honest form of survival.
With the girl, he manages to form a dancing act at one of the more upscale clubs and they are an instant hit. Sue is ready to breathe a sigh of relief: he has finally given up the gentleman bandit game when the club his held up, and one of the hold-up men is Baron Von Stahl.
Will Captain Swagger stay on the straight and narrow for the sake of true love, or will he fall under the sway of his old enemy and comrade of the skies?
And why, should you care?
There is a reason, the reason I have been so careful not to reveal the true name of Rod La Rocque’s Captain Swagger, you see his real name is one you will almost certainly know:
It’s Captain Hugh “Bulldog†Drummond.
Brought to the American screen for the first time, H. C. “Sapper†McNeile’s two-fisted, beer-guzzling, jovial and homicidal hero not only becomes an American, he loses his entire reason for being, looking for adventure in boring old peacetime, misplaces Carl and Irma Peterson, leaves the trenches for the skies, and ends up dancing at a night club.
What would Algy Longworth say? What would Dick Hannay say? What would they say at his club? What would Phyllis say?
He can hardly show his face at those old Etonian dinners again, one would think. At least Raffles had the good taste to get shot in the Boer War. Even the Saint might think twice about rubbing shoulders with half of a cabaret act.
La Rocque isn’t bad in the lead. You can imagine him as Drummond, and fortunately a year later Samuel Goldwyn had the good taste to stick much closer to the book and play with an all talking film, cast Joan Bennett as the soon to be Mrs. Drummond, Montagu Love as dear old Carl, and Ronald Colman as Hugh, an especially good idea as Colman managed to get nominated for the first Best Actor Oscar for playing Drummond (he lost out to Warner Baxter’s the Cisco Kid in In Old Arizona the last time two series characters or films would be nominated).
But such is Bulldog Drummond’s first sojourn onto American screens, and I suppose we should be grateful the Brits didn’t retaliate by casting Jack Buchanan as a singing and dancing Philo Vance. There’s no telling where this kind of thing might lead. Can you imagine Mr. Moto, Burlesque comic; or Charle Chan with simple songs and snappy patter; Ellery Queen and his amazing Poodles; or, Fred and Ginger as Nick and Nora?
The blood curdleth.
June 5th, 2018 at 10:39 pm
Fred and Ginger as Nick and Nora — clever.
June 6th, 2018 at 12:20 pm
Actually, the Brits themselves did Sapper quite enough harm, thank you, with Ralph Richardson looking damn silly in THE RETURN OF BULLDOG DRUMMOND (1934)
June 10th, 2018 at 10:00 pm
Putting lipstick on a pig does not make it a beauty and calling the role played by Rod La Rocque in “Captain Swagger” Hugh Drummond does not make it a true Bulldog Drummond movie, but unlike the pig, “Captain Swagger” has its own esthetical merits without the necessity of being canonical Bulldog Drummond. Witty throughout, although at times the wit is dim; the silent film does not lack for its lack of sound for the contretemps and the absurdities are ready built for theater audience to crack wise. Those for whom the movie was made would have probably recommended it for a pleasant night out at the Bijou or the Rialto.
Early in the film, arriving back to the airbase by automobile moments before Drummond took to the air to search out the enemy ace Baron Von Dictor, the besotted fop flopped through a suddenly opened door from the floor of the car where he was entwined with the legs of a mademoiselle. As he staggered to his feet, he was kept upright by clinging, covetous arms curved about his neck through an open car window; the rest of the body beyond those arms is hidden in the car and in our imagination. A man so deeply in his cups was not fit to report to his superior, and certainly unfit to fly, but this movie was governed not by rationality but by rashness.
Although aerial spectaculars were not a novelty, the audience unlikely had been too jaded to not enjoy the dog fight between the baron and Drummond over France. These crates were little more sturdy than a cart hitched behind a horse yet men flew them to astronomical heights. Seeing the characters soaring and swooping like eagles still would be thrilling.
After shooting down the baron, Drummond’s rash decision to land in enemy territory was probably more fueled by alcohol still circulating in his system than it was by bonhomie. The exchange of the baron’s engraved pistol provided a mechanism to advance the story later on and the baron’s facile bluffing of the arriving German troops searching for the enemy pilot showed that no real danger existed in this film. “Captain Swagger” was more driven by the spirit of thing than it was by any thought of a plot.
Not enraptured by the plot, audiences would have chattered and laughed through the innuendoes and the joie de vivre of the scenes and the heavy-handed dialogue on intertitles written, most times unsuccessfully, to be witty. In a nod to the importance of prop and scenery in silent cinema, Hugh Drummond now a cabaret dancer was sprung from a giant Jack-in-the-box to the dance floor. To bookend the aerial action at the beginning, a police car chase of Drummond and the baron led to the moving picture’s climax.
Throughout most the film, Sue Arnold the lead female character whose dreams of being a dancer were bigger than was her talent was fickle and feckless. Played by Sue Carol, the future well-known talent agent and wife of Alan Ladd, the character seemed peripheral and somewhat inconsequential until the end when she suddenly seemed complete. In silent film where the visual is paramount, she looked in the closing scene like one of those women whose faces were prominent on the covers of Love Story Magazine, where women often seemed more fully realized than depicted elsewhere.
Rod La Rocque’s insouciance made Hugh Drummond’s progression from air ace to highway robber to dancer sprung from a giant box seem natural if not logical. From The Secret Life of Humphrey Bogart: The Early Years 1899-1931 (Darwin Porter, 2003), a yellow-press biography of the tough-guy star; slightly obscene passages describe La Rocque during the early years of sound movies in the 1930s as being arch and somewhat campy. By 1937 when exuberant La Rocque played on film a conventional Lamont Cranston and rather staid Shadow in a pair of movies, it seemed as outlandish in the opposite way as was his wild portrayal of Bulldog Drummond in “Captain Swagger”