Ruggles of Red Gap and national stereotypes

Ruggles of Red Gap. Laughton (centre), at this point still a butler, has been asked to drink with two noisy and raucous Americans, who have just annoyed the entire cafe by jumping on each other's backs and running around. I’m with Laughton here: I'd rather be somewhere else.

The 1935 Hollywood comedy, Ruggles of Red Gap is rated positively by all the reviews I have read, and yet I found the film deeply disturbing. Perhaps I am over-reacting; there are plenty of other films of that decade in the US that have similar sentiments. My appalled fascination in the film is from its success as a work of propaganda, both at the time of its release (it was very successful) but also today. In its way, this film is as insidious as the Catholic Church instilling an outdated morality on generations of believers. In this case, the believers are the American public, and the power providing the propaganda is the Hollywood studio. 

The plot is simple. We are in Paris. Charles Laughton plays Ruggles, a butler to English aristocrat the Earl of Burnstead, memorably played by Roland Young. Ruggles finds himself traded in a game of poker and won by Egbert and Effie Floud, a nouveau riche couple from the American West. Effie is a would-be social climber, but her husband, Egbert, prefers check suits, and the saloon rather than the Parisian café.   

Ruggles travels with the Flouds back to their home town of Red Gap, in Washington State, and for the remainder of the film we are entertained by an English butler trying to come to terms with the raw West. We pass over in silence the fact that Ruggles has been won in a card game, which sounds like slavery to me (in fact, Laughton himself calls it “the country of slavery”). In the end, Ruggles declares his freedom and gives up being a butler. He opens a restaurant and decides who can eat (and who can’t eat) in it. We are expected to be entertained by the rip-roaring genuineness and bonhomie of the uncultured but genuine Americans, contrasted to Laughton’s excessive reserve after a lifetime of service. 

Leo McCarey is the director. You would expect him to be a master of comedy: He paired Laurel with Hardy, back in the 1920s, and directed many of their best early films. Hence, you would expect him to have a sense of comic timing. 

My claim is that Hollywood was responsible for much of the complacency, populist xenophobia, and blatant dishonesty of much of the 20th-century USA. It’s all here: misogyny, racism, but worst of all, a smug satisfaction with mythical American values that did not represent the American people, yet were foisted on them by the studios. 

1. The land of equality. This is a theme repeated by many of the characters, and even, by the end, by Ruggles himself. Yet when Ruggles first arrives at Red Gap, where everyone is supposedly equal, he encounters black and Chinese servants. Clearly, the land of equality is not for everyone. And not mentioned is the fabulous wealth of the Flouds, who can afford to destroy all the clothes they have just purchased, not once but twice in the film. The vast inequality in income seems to be countered by Egbert Floud’s fondness for drinking in the saloon: in other words, he is one of us.  
2. Laughton’s character is not fully fleshed out. The story attempts to show his “gradual liberation from generations of class predestination” [Village Voice] yet fails miserably at that one attempt of character development. We enjoy Laughton’s reserved British butler, but his attempts to look drunk, and his transformation to independent thinking, don’t convince. Comedy is not Laughton’s forte.
3. The so-called “liberal” American values celebrated seem to comprise boorish behaviour, heavy drinking, treating sales people (in Paris, of course), and ignoring others. The scene depicted in the still from the movie shows Laughton drinking with two back-slapping Americans, who greet each other so loudly that they bring an entire café to a standstill by their antics.
4. You will say the film is a caricature both of Americans and of Europeans. But by the film’s own terms, that caricature is what Laughton chooses to be part of. The film attempts to be both serious and caricature, and fails to reconcile the two. Laughton displays his new-found fondness for equality by bodily ejecting a diner from his restaurant – just like throwing someone out of the saloon. 

If you think I am exaggerating, ask yourself: how many American comedies include a complete retelling of the Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln? Let’s look at that scene in detail. We are in the Red Gap saloon. One character is not able to remember any of the words from Lincoln’s famous speech. It is funny, of course, that nobody in the saloon can remember even one word of perhaps the most quoted speech in US history. But then follows a blatant betrayal of the principles of film-making: don’t repeat the point too many times. The camera follows the bartender as he asks everyone in the saloon if they know the words. Nobody does. OK, it’s funny, we get the point, so why does the film have to repeat the question six or seven times? Twice, at most three, would have been plenty. 

It gets worse. With each repetition of the question, we laugh less. By the fifth or six time, we start to question the director’s ability to gauge his audience’s  response, so we should not feel too surprised when the climax of the scene, presumably what the director (or studio) must have felt was the film’s most important moment, is when Laughton quietly reveals he knows the address in full. The full Gettysburg address is only 272 words, and took Lincoln just two minutes to recite, but two minutes in a comedy is at least a minute too long. Mercifully, the rendition begins with Laughton speaking so softly, it is several sentences before you realise what he is saying. Unfortunately, once we do recognize the speech, it becomes clear he is going to recite the whole thing. At this point, Laughton switches gear to his classical serious theatre pose (which means he takes even longer over the speech, another error in the comedy) – but his delivery is aimed at the viewer, not the other characters. Yet, unbelievably, in case we didn’t get the message that is so clumsily imposed on us by the director, the camera moves around the room to show the raucous drinkers and gamblers in the saloon, silenced and transfixed by Lincoln’s words. It is simply not believable; a grotesque error of timing; an offense to the audience that the director so blatantly instructs us how to respond by depicting an utterly improbable silence and reverence. I don’t doubt that the Gettysburg Address is moving, but if I recited it in a Western saloon, it would be laughed down. Unless, of course, you are a Hollywood studio boss, shamelessly and crassly exploiting the vast entertainment machine you have created to try to influence popular feeling. And what happened to the “lowbrow good, highbrow not to be trusted” tone of the movie? 

The worst aspect of Lincoln’s address is that his words about equality did not apply in Red Gap, and were still being forgotten for over a hundred years after he said them. 

It is one of the most blatant and sickening examples of club-footed populism in Hollywood cinema. The worst of it is that, here in the 21st century, almost one hundred years after the film, critics praise the film to the skies, and, specifically, that recitation of the Gettysburg Address! Here are some comments by others on the film: 

In its optimism and faith in the American principle of equal opportunity, Ruggles of Red Gap ranks among other great movies about outsiders who transform their lives through political study [Kozak’s Classic Cinema, June 30 2018) 

Its big scene – Laughton … reciting the Gettysburg Address in a saloon, as the camera pans across the awed faces of the cowhands. It’s a bit much, but it works like magic. [Pauline Kael, New Yorker, 2007] 

this is the archetypal film they don't make any more, partly because comedy has now grown too raucous to favour the quiet drollery of players like Charlie Ruggles and Mary Boland [Time Out, 2012] 

The director celebrates the friendship, openness, spontaneity, joie to vivre, and solidarity of the Americans. [Guide des Films, Laffont, Paris, 1997] [perhaps the French reviewer is warming to a mythical image of a republic]

Ruggles of Red Gap left me feeling uncomfortable, in the same way that, in a night out with a group of friends, they drink too much and start behaving badly to bystanders, and you feel you either tolerate uncomfortably their bad behaviour, and feel uneasy about it, or become ostracised for standing up for the rights of others. It’s not a situation I want to be in, and I certainly don’t want to be celebrating a piece of back-slapping populism that leaves a bad taste in the mouth. 

Ruggles encounters American liberal values