“RUGGLES OF RED GAP”

Taranaki Daily News, 7 September 1935, Page 20 (Supplement)

“RUGGLES OF RED GAP”

LAUGHTON AT HIS BEST. SIMPLE, MOVING PICTURE. “Of all the parts I have ever played on screen or stage,” says Charles Laughton, “my favourite is ‘Ruggles of Ged Gap.’ I have tried to put into it all my love for America, and all my feeling for England. I hope it comes off. I think so.” It does, says C. A. Lejeune in the London Observer. The picture will be shown at the Hawera Opera House next Saturday. . . I have no hesitation in saying that “Ruggles of Red Gap” is one of the most moving pictures —honestly, simply mov-

ing, without a trace of catchpenny =entiment—that I have ever seen on a screen. Oddly enough, it is a roaring comedy, and still more oddly, it is directed by the same Leo McCarey, who has handled the screen appearances of tne Marx Brothers. But in spite of the laughs, which are long, and the situations, which are uproarious, the film has the wistful undercurrent of all true clowning. It is pure Chaplin, with the kindly Chaplinesque philosophy sharpened to a slightly political and social purpose. In addition, it has the full force and flavour of imaginative dialogue, which Chaplin himself has never felt free to use. , ‘ . The story of “Ruggles of Red Gap is something of an American classic, by that same Harry Leon Wilson, who wrote “Merton of the Movies.” It is the simple biography of Ruggles, an English valet cf 1908, who goes as man-servant to the little one-horse town of. Red Gap, finds his independence, and becomes a person cf consequence in the town. Into this easy framework, as you will see, almost any sort of picture can be fitted. When “Ruggles” was filmed in the silent days, with Ernest Torrence and Edward Everett Horton, it was a straightforward comedy of small-town manners. It was food fun, and no more. The modem version is different. It is, first and foremost, a psychological! study of an expatriate. It shows Ruggles, kindly, impersonal, the perfect manservant, suddenly flung into a country that has no inhibitions. He meets “a genuine blackamore,” he drinks beer with his master; at first he is tossed about blindly like a leaf in a storm. Then, slowly but surely, something wakes in him. He reads the words of “one Abraham Lincoln,” finds the truth in them that has escaped the natives; still with his staunch English ideas of forthright simplicity, he becomes more straightly American than the Americans, until in the end we leave him wondering, he, the son and grandson of a “gentleman’s gentleman,” that, “out of all these generations of servitude there Las come a man.”

With the slightest fumbling, as you can see, this theme would have become mawkish. It is one of those borderland themes, halfway between sentiment and sentimentality—that an emphasis too much here, a word too many there, could send hurtling to disaster. The scene, for instance, in which Ruggles recites Lincoln’s speech at Gettysburg is one of the most dangerous adventures ever undertaken by a director and player. Lesie Howard's Shakespeare piece in ■ “The Scarlet Pimpernel.” Franchot Tone’s lyric outburst in “The Bengal Lancer,” was nothing to it for sheer technical devilry. But Ruggles comes through triumphantly, as Howard and Tone did before him. Even to a public which has never heard of Gettysburg, and fancies, with Ruggles’ English master, that Lincoln cut down a cherry tree, the sense of that speech and the simplicity of its delivery carries the day. Charles Laughton, who should know, gives all the credit for this particular scene, and the credit for the picture generally, to Leo McC- -ey, the director. There is no doubt that McCarey, from the most difficult material, has evolved a sane, witty, moving, and quite unusual picture of Anglo-American relations. At the same time, it is only fair to add that Charles Laughton’s own Ruggles ministers to a cleverly-managed cast like a prince of gentlemen’s gentlemen. It is quiet, übiquitous, loyal, and infinitely comforting, the only full screen incarnation I remember of that motto of princes, “I Serve.”