“1929's Bulldog Drummond was an enormous commercial and artistic success, easily one of that year's best pictures, and, largely by virtue of Ronald Colman's dashing manner and debonair diction, transformed him instantly from a modestly popular silent star to a talkie star of the first magnitude. This follow-up, done in much the same tongue-in-cheek vein, is in some ways even better than its predecessor. As a post-Production Code picture, it has to deny both its villains and its hero the leeway in cheerfully amoral behaviour that they enjoyed in the earlier film. But its full-blooded self-satire is more restrained, and wittier, and all the better for it. The plot is actually an offshoot of that famous actual occurrence at the Paris Exposition at the end of the last century.... The welding of mystery, menace and light-hearted comedy is superbly smooth. Colman became so typed as idealistic Empire-builders (Lost Horizon, Clive Of India) that one tends to forget how perfect he was in light froth such as this.”