- Ruggles of Red Gap
For the past few weeks, the Music Box has been running a special weekend matinee series dedicated to the Marx Brothers. This weekend it’s screening the great Duck Soup, which is not only their best film but also one of director Leo McCarey’s finest comedic displays. Duck Soup is just about the only Marx Brothers film I can really stomach, so I focused this top five on McCarey, a great director famous for his screwball comedies. Jean Renoir supposedly once said that McCarey “understands people better perhaps than anyone else in Hollywood,” but that doesn’t necessarily mean people readily understood McCarey, whose best films only just recently became readily available on home video. (It should be noted, though, that he’s been championed in the pages of the Reader for decades.) Below, you can find my five favorite Leo McCarey films.
- Ruggles of Red Gap (1935) A seminal moment for McCarey, the culmination of a decade’s worth of stylistic refinement and his first proper attempt at a more personal brand of filmmaking. The famous saloon scene, in which the titular Brit, surrounded by a cadre of drunken Americans, is the only person in the room who can recite the Gettysburg Address, is rightfully considered his most inspired comedic set piece, marked by the humanist underpinnings that would work their way into each of his films for the rest of his career.
