NR | 1 h 30 min | Comedy | 1935
If you’ve read P.G. Wodehouse’s side-splitting novels on the English valet Jeeves, you’ll appreciate the whiplash humor in “Ruggles of Red Gap.” If you haven’t, director Leo McCarey shows you what you’re missing.
England’s early 20th-century Earl of Burnstead (Roland Young) loses his beloved valet, Marmaduke Ruggles (Charles Laughton) in a game of poker to nouveau riche American couple Effie (Mary Boland) and Egbert (Charlie Ruggles) Floud. In America, Effie hopes to use Ruggles’s refinement to climb the social ladder in her town of Red Gap. Egbert wants nothing more than a back-slapping buddy.
Ruggles first resists America’s charms with every “please,” “pardon,” “indeed,” “but of course,” and “quite so” he can muster. Then he succumbs. Accustomed to his status as a manservant under England’s entrenched elitism, he warms to America’s idea of him as a free man.
Screenwriters Harlan Thompson and Walter DeLeon draw on Harry Leon Wilson’s hilarious novel to make a serious point. Freedom isn’t a whim, concerned merely with what you’d like to eat, drink, wear, or where you’d like to live. Instead, it’s a sacred, universal right, concerned with fearlessly voicing your thoughts, having a shot at your ambitions, freely picking your friends. Once Ruggles spots how empowering America’s ideals of equality are, England loses its hold on him.
If anything, Wilson indicts aristocrats like Burnstead and aspiring aristocrats like Effie. Neither sees Ruggles as capable of anything beyond serving them, with his identity and his fulfillment dependent on theirs. Ruggles’s itch to strike out on his own stems from his discovery: Status must be earned, not inherited. He explains to Burnstead how double-edged status is “When people think you are someone, you begin to think you are.”
Easy-going Egbert’s the one coaching Ruggles into replacing Britain’s tradition of curtseying conformity with America’s tradition of informal individuality. But he’s also hinting that freedom is a state of mind. Although nationality may at best offer the opportunity to live free, you can still be enslaved. Effie, though American, is as elitist by bent as the British Burnstead is by birth.
Laughton fits the role like a glove, his moves practiced, his delivery deadpan and his stiff upper lip intact, that is, until he stirringly recites Abe Lincoln’s Gettysburg speech in, of all places, a laid-back saloon to spellbound barflies and cowboys. It proved to be one of his most moving scenes.
Laughton’s comic timing is impeccable. As Burnstead haltingly breaks news of Ruggles’s impending move to America, Laughton swivels his head. His stare registers shock as his eyes widen, shrink, then glaze over, in what could be capitulation, but could just as well be contempt.
A Gentleman’s Gentleman
Some of the supposed American rusticity of Egbert and his buddies is overdone. But Effie’s pretensions of importing British snootiness are spot on; she’s in thrall of the monarchy, with its euphemisms and honorifics. Boland’s fluttering eyelashes are the perfect counterfoil to Laughton’s upturned eyebrow. Watch for the photo-op where a photographer asks Effie, riled at Ruggles’s Egbert-inspired indiscretions, to smile at Ruggles, and he at her.Irony abounds. Ruggles is the outsider who remembers and respects every line in Lincoln’s speech; the locals can’t recall a word. McCarey’s saying that sometimes those who adopt America might be more American, through their patriotism and self-reliance, than born Americans who take their country for granted. Yet, he delivers his message with such a light touch; it’s easy to miss.
Effie: “Oh, yes, you are.” Egbert: “No, I ain’t. I got … as much use for one of them as a pig has for side pockets!” Ruggles tries to assert himself with his former master. Ruggles: “Am I someone or am I not?” Burnstead: “Well, I only just got here, you see, so I wouldn’t know.”
Did Wilson’s Ruggles inspire Wodehouse’s Jeeves? Wodehouse admitted as much. Like Ruggles, and unlike Jeeves, Wodehouse built his success and lifelong friendships in America. Like Ruggles, Wodehouse never returned to England.McCarey’s cast must have giggled a lot on set but imagine the commotion: A certain Charles playing Ruggles and, confoundingly, a certain Charles Ruggles playing Egbert.
