Ruggles of Red Gap
                   
Director: Leo McCarey
Year:  1935
Rating: 9.0
This is one of the most pitch perfect comedies of the 1930's. It gets pretty much everything right. Directed with sly understated zest by Leo McCarey who has a couple other classic comedies to his credit - Duck Soup and The Awful Truth. It is a film I like to revisit whenever I start feeling down about this country. It portrays the American spirit in the manner in which we have mythologized it and hold close to our hearts. There are times when you can feel it slipping away and this is one of those times. So a bit of Ruggles of Red Gap to bolster our spirits. There is a scene in which the Gettysburg Address is recited by Ruggles that is as simple and poignant as anything you will ever see and it speaks so much to a lost America of civility and decorum and a reminder of what our ideals once were.



This film had been made twice before in 1918 and 1923 (starring the wonderful Edward Everett Horton as Ruggles) but I don't think either are available. There was also a version of the story starring Bob Hope in Fancy Pants in 1950. It is based on a book by Harry Leon Wilson written in 1915 that is available for free on Kindle which contains much of the same droll comedy as the film.




It has a wonderful ensemble cast of not really well-known actors other than Charles Laughton - character actors who shine in this film - Charles Ruggles, Mary Boland, Zazu Pitts and Roland Young play off one another like a well-practiced 5-piece band. There is so much pleasure here in just watching them work together. Laughton in a rare comic role is delightful using his eyes, smile, walk and body language to continuously express his changing emotions and shock at his newly found circumstances. Laughton's parents had been very much service people - his mother a maid - and he had worked at a hotel when he was younger - and Laughton grew up with total disdain for the higher classes and so I think the theme of this film very much appealed to him.



It is a film about class but mainly about America. It begins in Paris in 1910 where Ruggles (Laughton) is third generation man-servant to an Earl (Young) and who is the impeccable perfectly proper and poised butler who can anticipate every need of his employer. But the Earl loses Ruggles in a poker game to a hick American (Charles Ruggles) whose wife (Boland) wants to bring some class back to Red Gap so that she can be accepted into the upper crust of Red Gap society. So off they go to America where Ruggles learns about the ideals of America, democracy and equality. They change him and he reminds them of the ideals that they try to aspire to. Simply wonderful.