Why it's the last John Barrymore Bulldog Drummond

I'm responding to the "Did You Know" that quotes ben Mankiewicz on TCM as saying that John Barrymore was so drunk on Bulldog Drummond's Peril that it was his last in the series and that he was replaced by H.B. Warner, and also to the blog "Dr. Frankenstein's lab and John Barrymore."

I think that in the first two Barrymore-Drummonds, he's fine. He seems thinner, he appears sober, trying hard in a supporting role, and he indulges in makeup disguises to mask his handsome features, something that handsome people like Albert Finney sometimes do and that Barrymore did in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1920. I admit that in Bulldog Drummond's Peril he seems more like the Barrymore who would be in the Great Profile and Playmates in subsequent years. Perhaps he was drunk in Peril. He seems heavier and wild eyed.

But I think Mankiewicz's pronouncement that he was fired from the series is one of the good stories people in Hollywood make up. They were clearly refashioning the series. Louise Campbell doesn't return to the series after Peril either. She's replaced by Heather Angel. If Barrymore was fired by Paramount, you'd think they wouldn't hire him any more. But he was in Spawn of the North and then later the great Midnight for Paramount. He even worked for his old studio M-G-M in Marie Antoinette, which wasn't a terribly tolerant studio. I think for a period of time, from 1937 to 1939, ending with the great The Great Man Votes, Barrymore was delivering for the people he worked for. He did 12 films in those three years. There was clearly a demand for his services. My favorite line in Midnight, as delivered by Barrymore, is after Claudette Colbert says that she thought things were going well, that they were all going to land in a tub full of butter. Barrymore says, "Well, we landed in something--but it's not butter."

After he left Hollywood to return to the stage for a year and came back doing The Invisible Woman and Playmates, that was indeed Barrymore in decline.

Mankiewicz has been known to get it wrong.