Spotlight

Spotlight Date: 20-January-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium

Ruggles of Red Gap (1935)

Boy, have I got a movie for you. It has not been made yet (nor likely envisioned by anyone but me), but when it is, it will be a smash. Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, Sideways) directs Johnny Depp in a remake of Ruggles of Red Gap, a comedy which has already been filmed four times including a Bob Hope flick in the fifties. Funny and uplifting, it will touch upon societal quirks, mid-life crises, and old-fashioned American spirit and will earn Depp his very first Oscar. I can hardly wait.

In the meantime we can content ourselves with the 1935 version starring Charles Laughton, a decent picture which nevertheless does not live up to its potential. The story begins in 1908 when a British nobleman loses his valet in a poker game. (The Depp remake will not commit the sin of hijacking its characters into the modern era.) The lost piece of property is descended from a long line of manservants, christened Marmaduke Ruggles in his youth but addressed only by his last name in adulthood. He receives the news with apparent composure and moves into the temporary Parisian residence of an American tycoon named Egbert Floud (Charlie Ruggles, evidently destined to be in this movie). Egbert is a hard-drinkin', loud-shoutin', good-natured fella whose wealth has not softened his Western edges. On the other hand, his domineering wife Effie (Mary Boland) is determined to fashion herself and her spouse into icons of refined civilization.

After a choppy start in Paris, the Flouds and their trophy journey home to Red Gap, Washington, a recent frontier outpost trying to become a city. Egbert has taken to introducing Ruggles as a British colonel on holiday, since he is embarrassed by having a personal servant and the inequality such a position entails. Ruggles thus makes quite an impression on the locals, who have rarely if ever seen a European. He also begins to study the life of Abraham Lincoln and to dream of becoming his own man instead of the chattel of somebody else.

Whereas Laughton was not called upon to describe much of Ruggles' feelings and impressions, the remake will offer insight into his interior transformation upon finding himself in a rough but ready new land and his reasons for going along with the Flouds and their shams. It will also retain his unassuming romance with the widow Mrs. Judson (played by ZaSu Pitts in Laughton's day). I do not know if Payne could pull off Ruggles' recitation of the Gettysburg Address anymore, but certainly inspiration and nostalgia are still to be drawn from America's past ideals. The 1935 Ruggles of Red Gap is a good story passably told; the future version could be a touchingly comic, socially perceptive, quaintly historic, yet presently relevant winner.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.