NFR Project: 'Ruggles of Red Gap' (1935)

NFR Project: ‘Ruggles of Red Gap’

Dir: Leo McCarey

Scr: Walter DeLeon, Harlan Thompson, Humphrey Pearson

Pho: Alfred Gilks

Ed: Edward Dmytryk

Premiere: March 8, 1935

90 min.

The most American of all screwball comedies is a gentle tale of an Englishman. From faceless subordinate to sole proprietor, the gentleman of the title comes to the New World and, enchanted by its possibilities, throws himself into the democratic and capitalist experiment with vigor and enthusiasm. His appreciation of his freedom transforms those around him, and makes him the most American of subjects – a naturalized citizen and an independent businessman.

The conceit of the movie is concise. In Paris, an English lord loses his butler Ruggles (Charles Laughton) in a poker game to a nouveau riche American, played by the great Charlie Ruggles. (His social-climbing wife wants a butler for the prestige it brings.) They live in the little Western town of Red Gap, Washington, so off they return, bringing a reluctant but tactful Ruggles with them.

Soon Ruggles is mistaken for a former colonel in the British Army, and paraded and feted around the small burg. He is harassed by a resentful, snobbish local, Belknap-Jackson, but maintains his poise. Soon Ruggles realizes that he no longer want to be “in service” to another man. Instead, he wants to open a restaurant. He does so with great aplomb. His former master the Earl comes to collect him, but finds Ruggles an entirely different person, one motivated and happily self-sufficient.

Director Leo McCarey was already a comedy expert, having directed some of Laurel and Hardy’s best movies, along with entries collaborating with the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, and Mae West. Here he deflates Ruggles’ assumptions about class quickly and insistently. “I’m no better than you, and you’re no better than me,” insists Ruggles’ new American employer Egbert Floud, who keeps calling Ruggles “Bill” and inviting him to sit down and have a snort with him.

The centerpiece of the film is Laughton’s performance, and this great film actor, who usually played villains and oddballs, here portrays perfectly the quintessential Englishman – reserved and polite – but also gives us all the swinging, dizzying sweep of emotions that swim in Ruggles’ eyes as he stands patiently still, responding politely and complying with his fate. Without cracking a smile or frown, Laughton lets us know what Ruggles thinks of the crazy situation he’s in at all times, and his sympathetic vulnerability puts us on his side immediately. Ruggles is in some senses a babe in the wood, unexposed to democratic realities as he is.

Ruggles quickly takes to American ways. In a moving scene, everyone in the bar Ruggles is standing in tries to remember the words of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Quietly and somberly, but with great feeling, Ruggles recites the immortal words, transfixing everyone around him. (Laughton would become famous for this recitation.) Sometimes it takes the perspective of someone outside your cultural context to make you appreciate it.

So Ruggles creates his restaurant, earns the plaudits of the town, and wins the love of a local widow (the great Zazu Pitts). It is one of the most unvarnished and wel-earned happy endings in the cinema of the day.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Top Hat.

NFR Project: 'A Night at the Opera' (!935)

 

NFR Project: ‘A Night at the Opera’

Dir: Sam Wood

Scr: George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind, Al Boasberg

Pho: Merritt B. Gerstad

Ed: William LeVanway

Premiere: Nov. 15, 1935

91 min.

MGM ruined the Marx Brothers.

Not a popular opinion, as A Night at the Opera is often considered their best film. No, no, not so; that distinction goes to Duck Soup. Why? Because that film cut out the corny romantic/musical subplot found in their first two films, The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers.

Let’s backtrack. The Marx Brothers’ first two films were based on stage shows. It was customary then for a romantic subplot, featuring a singing ingenue and a lead boy, to take the stage to provide relief from and variety to the evening’s entertainment. In their first two films, the musical interludes remain. In Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup the comedy got more filmic and less stagebound; filler was no longer needed.

When the brothers left Paramount for MGM, they came under the sway of wunderkind producer Irving Thalberg, who had his own ideas on how to present them. First, they got rid of Zeppo. Then, they turned the remaining three brothers into something akin to magical helpers, who advance a plot concerning two young singers in love.

What did this mean? It meant that show-stopping sequences of music and singing infest the story of Opera. Instead of being able to mock and question everything around them, as they do in best films, the Marx Brothers are forced to do the one thing they don’t do well – take things seriously. They are tamed; they are no longer dangerous; they are castrated.

The emphasis on musical sequences, except for those that highlight Harpo an Chico, slows down the film immeasurably. In addition, the logic-twisting verbal comedy of Groucho and Harpo’s surreal improvisations are here replace by simple slapstick, often as not executed by stunt men. Thalberg didn’t trust the essence of the group’s success – its ability to confidently refute reality.

The story is in some respects a typical one. Here Groucho is Otis P. Driftwood, a shady musical promoter who seeks to exploit the rich and oblivious Mrs. Claypool (the always-wonderful Margaret Dumont). He signs an up-and-coming young tenor, and schemes to get him onto the New York Opera stage. This he does after a bunch of misadventures and unlikely plot development. It’s very contrived.

Individual sequences stand out. The “party of the first part” contract sketch, the stateroom scene, and the manic destruction of an opera performance are all fine, and stand out from the general lassitude of the rest of the movie.

In the end, the film was a huge success. Some Marx Brothers was better than none. But the quality of the scripts they were given would continue to slip. There would be notable moments of brilliance, but the bold anarchic quality of their best work was over.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: Ruggles of Red Gap.

NFR Project: 'Naughty Marietta' (1935)

 

NFR Project: ‘Naughty Marietta’

Dir: Robert Z. Leonard, W.S. Van Dyke

Scr: Frances Goodrich, Albert Hackett, John Lee Mahin

Pho: William H. Daniels

Ed: Blanche Sewell

Premiere: March 29, 1935

103 min.

Ah, operetta! Though largely forgotten today, the operetta was a key link between the worlds of opera and the development of the musical comedy. Operettas are different from operas in that they contain spoken dialogue between numbers, and usually focus on a comic or romantic theme.

Beginning in the 1850s, composers such as Offenbach and Johan Strauss II created important operetta works such as Orphee aux enfers and Die Fledermaus. In America, wildly popular creations by composers such as Rudolph Friml and Sigmund Romberg ruled the stage from the middle of the 19^th century through the 1920s.

The king of American operetta composers, though, was Victor Herbert, who wrote a remarkable 43 operettas. Naughty Marietta is his best-known work. In fact, the only reason many know of it is because its hit song, “Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life” was used to great comic effect in Mel Brooks’ movie Young Frankenstein. The joke, funny in itself, takes on more hilarity when considering the sweet, fairy-tale context of the song’s introduction.

Naughty Marietta was first produced in 1910. Set in 1780, it tells the story of a French princess (here, the great soprano singer Jeanette MacDonald) who flees her country to avoid an unwanted marriage. She disguises herself as a commoner and joins a cargo of women shipping off to the New World to make wives for lonely men there. She winds up with them in New Orleans, where they are briefly captured by pirates before being saved by a platoon of soldier-volunteers led by Captain Warrington (the marvelous baritone Nelson Eddy). The rest of the story outlines their at first prickly courtship.

The show contained no fewer than five hit songs, so it was a well-known entity to people of the day, many of whom would attend the 1935 film in a wash of nostalgia. They got their money’s worth – the film is lavishly produced, and makes use of the filmic space to expand the story, including an exciting clash with pirates and an extended cruise through the bayou.

The movie rests though, on the combination of Eddy and MacDonald. They were two powerful singers, and they could act (OK, Eddy is definitely more wooden). Together, their marvelous duets were enormously entertaining, and audiences of the day ate it up.

They made seven more musical films together over the next seven years. Box-office favorites, they were the top couple in film during those years. Offscreen, they carried on a tumultuous decades-long affair, even though married to others, often living together, until MacDonald’s death. They were real-life sweethearts. Even though the music is now deemed too saccharine and sentimental, it represents a key link in the evolution of music onstage. There are very few places in the culture ny more where two people in love sing bee-yoo-tiful melodies to each other under the soundstage’s arc lights.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: A Night at the Opera.