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.
