> Charles Laughton had wanted to take a break from dramatic roles and requested that Paramount allow him to make Ruggles of Red Gap. For his director, Laughton chose comedy veteran Leo McCarey, who had put Laurel and Hardy together and directed the Marx Bros. in their hit film Duck Soup (1933). Laughton spent many weeks working with McCarey and the writers, Humphrey Pearson, who made the adaptation and Walter DeLeon and Harlan Thompson, who wrote the screenplay. According to Laughton's wife, actress Elsa Lanchester, Laughton felt that the American writers had not made Ruggles British enough, so he brought in his friend, the playwright Arthur Macrae, who added many lines, but was not credited on the film.

> As his love interest, Mrs. Judson, Laughton had wanted to cast stage actress (and future Harold and Maude star), Ruth Gordon, but she was appearing on Broadway, and it was Zasu Pitts who got the role. Playing the beautiful Nell Kenner, who eventually marries Burnstead, was Leila Hyams, who would retire from films the following year to devote herself to her marriage to top Hollywood agent Phil Berg.

> Shooting began on November 6, 1934 on the Paramount lot, with exteriors shot at the Paramount Ranch, located in Agora Hills, California, about thirty-five miles north of Hollywood, which is still being used for television production today. The usually heavy Charles Laughton was ill during rehearsals with an abscess that required hospitalization, and looks uncharacteristically slim in the film.

> Critics and audiences alike loved Ruggles of Red Gap, with the New York Times declaring that it was "a privilege to watch Ruggles riding the Parisian carrousel, getting pickled with Cousin Egbert, posing as the Colonel of the Coldstream Guards and otherwise contributing to the cause of honest laughter in the cinema."

> Ruggles of Red Gap was nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, but lost to another film that starred Laughton, Mutiny on the Bounty (1935). Laughton was awarded the Best Actor award by the New York Film Critics, for both Mutiny on the Bounty and Ruggles of Red Gap. Laughton and many of the cast would recreate their roles on radio several times, including The Lux Radio Theater in 1939, The Screen Guild Theater in 1945 and The Academy Award Theater in 1946. Ruggles of Red Gap was later remade with Bob Hope and Lucille Ball as Fancy Pants (1950).

> Of all the roles he ever played, Charles Laughton often said that Ruggles was his favorite.

The Gettysburg Address

> One scene that was not in the original story, but has become the most famous in the film, is the one in which Ruggles recites Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg address. The residents of Red Gap get into a discussion about the address, but no one seems to know the speech - except the British Ruggles, who quietly recites it for the awed Americans.

> During filming, Laughton was living at the Garden of Allah apartments on Sunset Blvd, where he made several home recordings of the address so that he could get it just the way he needed it to sound. Future director Edward Dmytryk, who edited the film, later said that Laughton was so overcome with emotion at reading the Gettysburg address, that it took a day and a half to shoot. Laughton himself later said that it was "one of the most moving things that ever happened to me." When Ruggles of Red Gap was released, audiences often burst into applause at the end of the address. Not surprisingly, the speech got the film banned in Germany by the Nazi government.

> After Ruggles of Red Gap finished production, Laughton went into Mutiny on the Bounty , which he shot on Catalina Island with Clark Gable. On the last day of production on the island, Laughton recited the address for the crew, which he also did on the set of The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939). In the 1940s and 1950s, Laughton often toured the United States doing a night of selected readings from various works of literature. The Gettyburg Address was always very popular.

The Stars

> Perhaps the reason Charles Laughton had been overwhelmed with emotion while reciting the Gettysburg Address was that he considered Ruggles of Red Gap as the story of his own life. He had deeply felt class prejudice in his native England, where he was born on July 1, 1899, in Scarsborough. His grandfather had actually been a butler, and his parents ran a popular resort, which made him firmly middle-class. He later said that coming to the United States freed him from that, so that " I can hold up my head at last."

> Laughton was educated at Stonyhurst, a Jesuit academy, and joined the army when war was declared in 1914. Like many World War I veterans, he was injured in a gas attack by the Germans. After the war, he worked at the famed Claridge's Hotel, before becoming an actor, studying at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.

> He began his acting career in 1926, and earned fame for performing Shakespeare at the Old Vic theater. Like many theatrical actors, he moved into films, notably for producer Alexander Korda. One Korda film, The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), was a huge international hit and earned Laughton an Academy Award for Best Actor. It also made him a star.

> Unlike many of his British colleagues, Charles Laughton did not return to England when war was declared in 1939, which angered the British public and press, who felt that anyone who didn't come home was a slacker. Still stinging from his experience of class prejudice in England, Laughton despised the idea of royalty and grew to love America deeply, even naming an anthology of the readings he had performed The Fabulous Country . He and his wife became US citizens in 1950 and he remained in this country until his death from cancer in 1962.

> Charlie Ruggles, who played Egbert Floud, was a hometown boy, born in Los Angeles in 1886 to a druggist and his wife, who was tragically murdered by a home invader when she stepped between her husband and the thief. After her death, his father moved Charlie and his younger brother Wesley to San Francisco for a time.

Ruggles had intended to be a doctor and even studied chemistry before becoming a stage actor at the age of 19. He soon moved into the infant film industry in Hollywood, where his younger brother, Wesley, became a director, most famously for Mae West's I'm No Angel (1933).

> Ruggles was a staple of early 1930s Paramount comedies, co-starring with Mary Boland in fourteen films, often playing her hen-pecked husband, as he did in If I Had a Million (1932). Modern audiences know Ruggles for both playing the leopard-imitating hunter in Bringing up Baby (1938) and as Hayley Mills' grandfather in The Parent Trap (1961). He died at the age of 84 in Los Angeles in 1970.

> Mary Boland was born into a theatrical family in January 28, 1882. With her parents' encouragement, she left a convent at the age of sixteen to go on the stage. She first appeared in films as early as 1915 and traveled to France to entertain the soldiers in World War I. Boland costarred in the Broadway production of The Cradle Snatchers in 1925-26 with a very young Humphrey Bogart playing her lover.

> Boland was one of the top supporting actresses of the 1930s, in roles like Effie Floud in Ruggles of Red Gap and, most famously, as the Countess De Lave in The Women (1939) and Lizzie Bennet's mother in Pride and Predjudice (1940). Boland moved between film, the stage and later, television for the rest of her career, which ended in 1955. She passed away in 1965.