Old Yorker

  • Ruggles of Red Gap

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Leo McCarey (1935)

    Paris, 1908.  By the end of a drunken poker game, the Earl of Burnstead’s heavy losses include his valet, Marmaduke Ruggles (Charles Laughton).   This English gentleman’s gentleman’s employer is suddenly, to Ruggles’ consternation, a nouveau riche American, who’s vacationing in Paris with his wife.  The first thing his new boss does is get Ruggles drunk, too.  The valet accompanies genially uncouth Egbert Floud (Charlie Ruggles [sic!]) on a Paris bar crawl – unwillingly until, along with Egbert and a kindred-spirit American pal (James Burke), Ruggles loses his inhibitions.  Egbert’s socially ambitious wife, Effie (Mary Boland), is dismayed, but Ruggles, through his hangover, is courteously contrite.  Soon after, the couple and their acquisition cross the Atlantic en route to the small town of Red Gap, Washington, where the Flouds reside and Ruggles is a fish out of water.

    Leo McCarey’s Ruggles of Red Gap is a just about perfect social comedy, and a highly impressive balancing act.  The screenplay, by Walter DeLeon and Harlan Thompson (Humphrey Pearson gets the story credit), is adapted from Harry Leon Wilson’s 1915 novel of the same name.  (Ruggles of Red Gap had already been a silent movie twice, in 1918 and 1923, and would also inspire the 1950 romcom Western Fancy Pants.)  During the film’s first half, you’re increasingly amazed that a seemingly limited set-up has so much comic mileage.  In the second half, Ruggles acculturates in his new surroundings, cultivates a friendship with widowed cook Mrs Judson (ZaSu Pitts), and eventually is self-employed, running his own restaurant.  The film expands affectingly yet it never goes soft or stops making you laugh.

    McCarey’s harmonisation of moods is epitomised by Ruggles of Red Gap’s most famous scene.  In the town saloon, Ruggles gives Egbert Floud, who’s drinking there, notice that he wants to live independently.  Egbert takes the news well, comparing it to ‘what Lincoln said at Gettsyburg’, but, when one of his companions asks to be reminded what that was exactly, Egbert can’t say.  The camera tours the saloon, in vain search of a Red Gap citizen who can.  Ruggles, who has been reading up on American history, then recites the Gettysburg Address, calmly word perfect.  Faces that were blank or bewildered are now rapt and mightily impressed.  The saloon customers’ change of expression isn’t a contradiction of the comical cameos of a few minutes earlier.  These are still the same amusing people, yet their respectful hush is touching, too.

    After The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933), Charles Laughton hardly needed to prove that he had comedic flair as well as dramatic genius.  If proof had been needed, though, here it is.  Particularly at the start, Laughton’s movement and gestures are borderline camp.  They’re also scene-stealing; as the film goes on, the thefts continue, yet Laughton often achieves them – most notably with the Gettysburg monologue – by underplaying.  He also makes the most of Ruggles’ more extrovert moments – drunk in Paris or, in the film’s climactic scene, when he ejects Effie Froud’s obnoxiously snobby relation Charles Belknap-Jackson (Lucien Littlefield) from his restaurant on its opening night.  This is also a wonderfully detailed vocal performance:  Laughton’s Ruggles seems beautifully spoken until you start picking up occasional dropped aitches and vowels that are just a bit off.

    The supporting players aren’t Charles Laughton class, but they’re expertly cast and terrific in their roles, or routines.  Charlie Ruggles is brimful of real warmth, as well as humour, as a newbie millionaire whose taste in suits favours checks that aren’t so much loud as deafening, and who has an even greater liking for joshing terms of endearment that begin with ‘you old …’ (‘tarantula’, ‘sourdough’, ‘horned toad’, etc).  Ruggles’ Egbert is splendidly complemented by Mary Boland’s Effie, with her mangled French and strung-tight social anxiety.  You’d expect a role like the Earl of Burnstead in a Hollywood film of this era to be no more than an entertaining caricature:  Roland Young is entertaining but so extraordinarily natural that his character is also almost believable.  After he falls out with Mrs Judson, Marmaduke Ruggles is absent from the action for a while.  That puts the story in suspense, but Roland Young is one half of an excellent interval diversion.  Lord Burnstead has shown up in Red Gap hoping to re-engage Ruggles.  That plan doesn’t come to fruition; instead, Burnstead finds love with beautiful young local dancer and songstress Nell Kenner (Leila Hyams).  The romance is heralded in their meeting at a party, where Nell sings ‘Pretty Baby’, and the Earl of Burnstead, with increasing gusto, accompanies her on drums.

    Leland Poague, a scholar of Hollywood Golden Age comedy, has written of Ruggles of Red Gap that Leo McCarey ‘explores the relationship between personality and society and does so in an idealistic literary context which asserts the essential (and necessary) identity of personal and social imperatives’.  You wouldn’t guess from that earnest summary how funny the film is, yet Poague is right enough.  It’s also quite funny that Ruggles, ninety years on, strikes contemporary chords.  As well as enjoyably skewering class distinctions and social pretension, McCarey celebrates the American Dream.  That dream is available to an immigrant protagonist.  That protagonist discovers who he really wants to be and becomes it.

    In Paris, when he’s first transferred to the Flouds, Ruggles is stubbornly deferential.  While Egbert couldn’t care less, Ruggles keeps insisting that his master go first – through a doorway or into a horsedrawn carriage (there’s some fine comic business involving the latter).  A lovely echo of these after-you contests comes in the final scene.  ‘The Anglo-American Grill’ has opened to a full house, but Ruggles fears that, in chucking Belknap-Jackson out, he has blotted his social copybook in Red Gap society.  As he takes refuge in the kitchen with Mrs Judson (they’re now reconciled), he hears ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ sung in the dining room.  Egbert appears, and yanks Ruggles out of the kitchen – ‘Why, you old plate of soup, they’re singing it for you!’  After thanking the diners, Ruggles tries to get Mrs Judson to share the acclaim, but she modestly resists.  Never one to stand on ceremony, Egbert Floud pushes Ruggles back, through the kitchen’s swing doors, to share his triumph in private with his chef and soulmate.

    10 November 2025

     

     

  • Breaking the Waves

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Lars von Trier (1996)

    The climax of the Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Ordet (1955) sees a dead woman restored to life.  Her resurrection, thanks to Dreyer’s artistry, isn’t in the least ridiculous.  In Breaking the Waves, Dreyer’s countryman Lars von Trier contrives a death-defying ending for his young heroine, Bess, who has been buried at sea.  When the crew of the boat from which she’s thrown overboard consults the sonar, it shows no sign of Bess’s body.  In a God’s-eye view shot that closes the film, the bells of Heaven ring in celebration.  This ending is ridiculous, but somehow unsurprising, given the way Breaking the Waves has developed over the course of the 150-plus minutes that it takes von Trier to tell Bess’s story.  At an early stage, one character tells another that Bess isn’t right in the head.  Whatever her mental condition may be (this is never made clear), it’s fair to say Bess is less crazy than the film she’s in.

    The time is the 1970s, the place a small coastal town in the Scottish Highlands.  Raised there within a Calvinist community, Bess McNeill (Emily Watson) is devout, a regular churchgoer.  According to their interpretation of scripture, the harshly moralistic church elders forbid women even to speak in services or discussions within the chapel, yet the opening scene takes place there, the elders grilling Bess about the marriage she’s set on making.  Her intended is Jan, who is Danish and works on a North Sea oil rig.  The elders remind Bess that ‘we do not favour matrimony with outsiders’, but she gives plucky, positive responses to their questions.  ‘Can you even tell us what matrimony is?’  ‘It’s when two people are joined in God.’  ‘Do you really believe you’re capable of bearing the responsibility not only for your own marriage in God, but also another’s?’  ‘I know I am.’

    It’s not long before Bess marries Jan (Stellan Skarsgård); not long either before a viewer is asking their own questions, about the set-up.  At the wedding reception, the juxtaposition of, on the one hand, the stony elders and, on the other, the free-spirited groom and his pals from the oil rig, is amusing.  There’s a startling moment when Jan’s best man, Terry (Jean-Marc Barr), downs a can of beer then crushes the can in his hand; sitting opposite Terry, the chief elder (Robert Robertson), finishes a soft drink, and does the same to his empty glass, so that his hand bleeds.  (Never mind this is basically a pinch from Jaws, where Richard Dreyfuss responds to Robert Shaw’s macho beer-can challenge by crumpling a Styrofoam cup.)  The local version of Calvinism is so strict that – as Jan, Terry and their mate Pits (Mikkel Gaup) notice with disappointment at the wedding – the chapel has no bells.  Yet von Trier does little to illustrate the church authorities’ supposed iron rule in the community.  All the other wedding guests appear to be enjoying themselves conventionally enough at the reception, and not to give a second thought to doing so.  Here and subsequently, the only parishioner who takes her puritanism seriously is Bess’s mother (Sandra Voe).  With this domestic background, you wonder how Bess had the social opportunity to meet Jan in the first place, let alone decide to be his wife.

    A virgin until her wedding day, Bess is sexually educated and thrilled by Jan in the early days of their marriage.  She can hardly bear for them to be parted when he returns to the oil platform, and prays he’ll return soon.  He does, after an industrial accident that leaves him paralysed from the neck down.  Bess bitterly reproaches herself, believing that God has punished her selfish pleas for Jan to come back to her.  In the months that follow, Jan is in and out of hospital.  Whether there or at the couple’s home, Bess’s widowed sister-in-law and loving friend Dodo (Katrin Cartlidge), a nurse at the hospital, helps with his care.  After a desperate, feeble attempt to commit suicide, Jan urges Bess to find a new man.  He also asks his wife to report back to him on lovemaking with A N Other:  Jan says this will make it seem as if he and Bess are once more having sex and will cheer him up.  Bess, who does as she’s told, comes to believe that Jan’s suggestions are an expression of God’s will.  She first tries to seduce Dodo’s hospital colleague, kindly Dr Richardson (Adrian Rawlins).  When this fails, Bess starts picking up strangers on the street, letting herself be abused and degraded in a series of increasingly grim sexual encounters.  While Dr Richardson judges Jan to be in terminal decline, Bess is seized by the conviction that her promiscuity will cure her husband’s quadriplegia.  She scandalises the local community and is expelled from the church.  To save her from further harm, Richardson, with Dodo’s help, arranges for Bess to be committed to a mental hospital in Glasgow.

    There’s still a way to go to Breaking the Waves’ finale, but the narrative is already moving beyond improbable into impossible – or, to take a more generous view of the plotting, supernatural.  On arrival at the Glasgow hospital, Bess escapes from the police officers who’ve driven her there; screen moments later, she’s back in her hometown, riding round again on her little motorbike.  No one comments on her reappearance or shows any interest in re-committing her – but how did she get home in the first place?  Upping the self-sacrificing ante, she persuades a ferryman to transport her some way out to sea, to a shabby-looking trawler whose crew’s reputation is such that local prostitutes keep well away.  Bess is duly, brutally assaulted by the two men on board (Udo Kier and Roef Ragas), but fights back, although the men pursue her round the ship.  Next thing, she’s back on dry land again.  Bess’s eventual victory over death is only to be expected since she must be able to walk on water.

    Bizarre as the storyline is, unusual as Breaking the Waves might seem in having an uncompromising believer as its main character, von Trier, and Peter Asmussen who shares the screenplay credit with him, cherry-pick Christianity and depend on religious cliché quite predictably.  Killjoys (and anything that happens inside a boring old church) are bad; the killjoys include not just the church elders but God himself – at any rate, the version of God conjured up by Bess in her regular voiced dialogues with the Almighty, where she speaks both parts: her interlocutor is a vindictive scold who merely reinforces Bess’s propensity for guilt.  A holy fool, however, is good, and Bess is a holy fool – a person not in her right mind but whose right-mindedness puts to shame the rational people who misunderstand her.  A prostitute is probably good, too – Mary Magdalene gets a mention – and Beth, dressing up as one (she borrows outfits from a sex-worker neighbour), is a pure soul in tart’s clothing.  Needless to say, ‘love’ – particularly ‘natural’ love in the form of sex – is also good:  facing excommunication, Bess asserts that ‘You cannot be in love with a word.  You can only love a human being.  That’s perfection’.  Her belief that, with God’s help, her love can make Jan well again, does pay off miraculously.  Near the end, her husband starts to regain some movement in his limbs; by the time that Terry and Pits help him to consign Beth’s body to the waves, Jan has progressed to a very manageable limp.  In the closing scene, even this non-believer smiles radiantly heavenward as he hears the bells that never rang on his wedding day.

    Admirers of Breaking the Waves (there were many in 1996, when it won the Grand Prix at Cannes, among plenty of other prizes), were seemingly won over by von Trier’s combining censure of dogmatic patriarchy with celebration of feminine spirituality-cum-martyrdom.  (No surprise the same admirers tended to describe the supernaturalism as ‘magical realism’, though I’m not sure that’s right.)  The director’s reputation has gone downhill in the decades since, though, thanks to a penchant for provocative graphic violence and some ill-judged public statements.  (He hasn’t made a feature film since the badly-received The House That Jack Built (2018).)  Nowadays, von Trier seems, rather than a radical new filmmaking sensibility, the Donald Trump of auteurist cinema:  his unpredictability is a function of his showing off.  His notorious facetiousness doesn’t help Breaking the Waves in retrospect.  (I had seen the film once before, a few years after its original release.)  Conducting a burial in the church graveyard, the elders (funerals in the community are also men only), inform the dead man that ‘you are a sinner, and you deserve your place in hell’.  The sinner’s name is Anthony Dod Mantle – the same name as the Dogme 95 stalwart and pioneer of digital film, who worked as a location scout on Breaking the Waves.  Dod Mantle went on to be DP on von Trier’s films Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005) and Antichrist (2009), winning a cinematography Oscar for Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire (2008) for good measure.

    The elders’ same infernal judgment is pronounced on Bess as her coffin is lowered into the ground (little do the old men know that Jan’s friends have removed her body and replaced it with sandbags).  She dies from injuries incurred on an asking-for-more return visit to the trawler, her death occurring a good fifteen or twenty minutes before the end.  There’s no denying that Emily Watson’s disappearance from a film that she has dominated is felt as a major absence.  Before Breaking the Waves, Watson had done a fair amount of theatre, including with the Royal Shakespeare Company, but had appeared just once on television and never in cinema.  Her portrayal of Beth is therefore astonishing in more ways than one, and she has some truly brilliant moments, as when Beth, still in her wedding dress and with the camera on her face throughout, has sex with Jan for the first time.  Yet Watson’s distinctive presence sometimes also feels wrong and sharpens your awareness that Beth doesn’t add up as a character.  As already noted, we never find out much about her mental ill health, except that it first afflicted her following the death of her brother (Dodo’s late husband); more important, Emily Watson makes it hard to believe that Beth is, as she’s repeatedly said by others to be, simple-minded.  From the opening scene of Beth’s interrogation by the elders, Watson’s bright eyes give off a knowing look; the smile that plays across her face suggests suppressed amusement, even calculation, rather than half-witted incomprehension or innocence.

    There are three particularly good supporting performances, all from actors who richly compensate for the limited sympathy the story shows their character.  The compassion and rationality of both Dodo and Dr Richardson are quite eclipsed by the more nebulous but irresistible forces in play.  Katrin Cartlidge, in the larger role, gives Dodo an exasperated devotion that’s poignant – made inevitably more poignant by Cartlidge’s very premature death only six years after making Breaking the Waves.  Adrian Rawlins illuminates the sadly smiling doctor’s dilemma(s) beautifully:  it’s a pleasure, as always, to watch this actor, even if the pleasure’s tinged with regret that Rawlins’ talents haven’t been better used in cinema over the course of his now long career.  Bess’s mother is given little to say:  Sandra Voe does a fine job of holding in her face Mrs McNeill’s divided loyalties, to her church and her daughter.

    DP Robby Müller’s camerawork, although it features a surfeit of slithering panning movements that rarely amount to more than a von Trier flourish, creates a strongly expressive sense of place, not just in the landscape but in the confines of bedrooms and sick rooms, too.  The outstanding landscape pictures, though, come in images, created by the visual artist Per Kirkeby, that introduce each of the section headings with which von Trier punctuates the story.  There are seven ‘chapters’  – ‘Bess Gets Married’, ‘Life with Jan’, and so on.  As narrative signposts, these seem unnecessary, but Kirkeby’s panoramas more than compensate for that, along with von Trier’s choice of (roughly!) contemporary music tracks, to accompany each intro; these include ‘In a Broken Dream’, ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale‘, ‘Suzanna’ and ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’.  The song excerpts are usually, frustratingly, abbreviated; at least there’s a good amount of ‘Life on Mars’ for the climactic funeral episode.  The film is showing in BFI’s current melodrama season, wittily entitled ‘Too Much’ (with a trailer for the season to match).  Breaking the Waves is in several ways too much; the programmers were right to include it in the line-up.  In other ways that matter, though – integrity of filmmaking purpose, for one – Lars von Trier’s film isn’t enough.

    8 November 2025

     

     

     

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