A Film Canon

 

 

Ruggles Of Red Gap would be a fairly standard comedy of manners, were it not for the unusual performance of Charles Laughton as butler Marmaduke Ruggles, who finds himself suddenly transplanted to America, where the social conditions upon which his service is predicated are (supposedly) meaningless. Laughton's innovation is to take Ruggles' hereditary inclination for butlerdom literally, such that etiquette becomes a physiological phenomenon; or, more accurately, a way of cauterising his sensory access to the world. Thus his first 'American' experience - the moment at which his new patron invites him to drink at the same table - disorients him with respect to his own body, producing a blankness that is quickly followed by a series of occasional, seemingly inexplicable, physical outbursts; a slippage between thought and action encapsulated in his bulging stare, which gives the impression that his eyes are operating independently of his brain, and adds an ambiguous, subversive surplus to his conversational contributions. Given that this American sensorium is identified with physical camaraderie, especially as it manifests itself in eating and drinking, it makes sense that Ruggles' eventual compromise between hereditary and environmental factors should take the form of "The Anglo-American Grill", where, as chef and proprietor, he participates in its indulgences from a decorous distance.