The New Pictures

Ruggles of Red Gap (Paramount) contains a quality almost unique in U. S. cinema, a quality which can perhaps be suggested by the fact that its climax is reached when the hero, the apotheosis of all fictitious butlers, recites Lincoln's Gettysburg Address in the back room of the principal saloon of Red Gap, Washington. Ruggles (Charles Laughton) is sitting at a table with his erratic master, Egbert Froud, and he is facing the crisis of his life. Six months before, he was valet to a British peer who lost him, in a game of draw poker, to the first family of Red Gap. In Red Gap, a combination of unhappy circumstances has caused Ruggles to be regarded not as a servant but as an aristocratic British colonel. "When people think you are a personage, you become a personage" is the alarming thought that has consequently dawned on Ruggles. He is trying to summon up the courage to deny the habit of a lifetime to the extent of leaving service and opening a restaurant of his own. When he recites the Gettysburg Address, he does so from his heart and the full solemnity of its 266 words is in the bashful quaver of his voice. That this fable of a transplanted menial who becomes hero of a town which he describes as "a remote settlement" is as tender and as softly humorous now as it was when Harry Leon Wilson wrote it 20 years ago, is not due entirely to Charles Laughton's superbly skillful performance as the hero. It is not due entirely to the intonations supplied in minor parts by Charles Ruggles, Mary Boland, ZaSu Pitts, Roland Young. The truth is that Ruggles of Red Gap is a U. S. classic which tempts its actors to perfection as inevitably as it tempts audiences to approval. The best that can be said of this picture, the third cinema version of Ruggles, is that, like David Copperfield, it does justice to its original; the least is that no future cinema treatment of the valet who becomes a hero to his master is likely to improve upon its warm perceptive gaiety.

Roberta (RKO). Dressed up with Jerome Kern songs, Alice Duer Miller's little anecdote about the U. S. football hero who, on a visit to Paris, inherits his aunt's dressmaking establishment and marries a Russian princess, was one of the hit shows of the 1933-34 theatrical season in Manhattan. Now, further decorated and enlarged to suit the tastes of cinemaddicts, it has become a thoroughly enjoyable musicomedy of the smart rather than the spectacular type, which can be recommended to students of singing, dancing and next season's female fashions.

The screen version of Roberta contains two new Kern songs--"I Won't Dance" and "Lovely to Look At"--in addition to "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" and three others held over from the stage version. Roberta, a kindly, domineering, elderly cosmopolite, is Helen Westley. Her assistant, the Russian princess whose chief function is to put her to sleep with sentimental lullabies every afternoon, is Irene Dunne. Her unsophisticated nephew is Randolph Scott. These items, in addition to a series of handsome modernistic interiors and a fashion show which is likely to have a helpful influence on this summer's trends in dressmaking, can be listed among the advantages of the picture. But the most pleasant moments in Roberta arrive when Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers turn the story upside down and dance on it. On the three occasions when they allow their feet to speak for them, their sleek and nimble scufflings lift Roberta out of the class of ordinary entertainment, make it an intermittent masterpiece. The picture establishes Fred Astaire more firmly than ever as the No. 1 hoofer of the cinema and proves what The Gay Divorcee suggested: that Ginger Rogers is a wholly acceptable partner.

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