Charlie Ruggles Movies

The felicitous screen team of Mary Boland and Charles Ruggles once more collaborated with director Norman Z. McLeod for the delightful Mama Loves Papa. Middle-class Wilbur Todd (Ruggles) is content with his lot in life, but his wife Jessie (Boland) is an inveterate social climber. Convinced that clothes make the man, Jessie dresses up her spouse in garish new suits, which elicit shouts of derision rather than murmurs of admiration. Frustrated by his wife's nagging, Wilbur goes off on a toot and becomes innocently involved with village vamp Mrs. McIntosh (Lilyan Tashman). It's all very basic material, but in the hands of its stars, its director, and ace screenwriter Nunnally Johnson, Mama Loves Papa emerges as something truly special. The National Board of Review selected the film as one of the best of its year, quite an honor for what was officially a "B" picture. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

In this romance, an impoverished Viennese aristocrat becomes a gigolo. While on the job, he encounters a Yankee widow who is terribly impressed by titled men. They get involved and she helps him start afresh. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

A musical remake of The Marriage Circle (1924), One Hour with You stars Maurice Chevalier as a Parisian doctor and Jeanette MacDonald as his loving wife. Chevalier is scrupulously faithful, much to the chagrin of his lovely female patients. But when MacDonald's best friend Genevieve Tobin insists upon being treated by Dr. Chevalier, it looks to many of those concerned that Tobin may succeed where the other willing ladies failed. The misunderstandings and reconciliations of the plotline are playfully staged with deliberate artificiality by director Ernst Lubitsch: Characters speak in rhymed couplets, Parisian gendarmes issue orders to their minions to the beat of a ticking clock, and Chevalier regularly talks directly to the audience. One Hour With You is a tuneful confection which is just as refreshing today as it was sixty years ago. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

An early comedy about the generation gap, this 1932 movie was written by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who went on to write and direct films such as Guys and Dolls and Cleopatra. Director Frank Tuttle co-wrote the script, based on a successful play called The Goose Hangs High by Lewis Beach. Donald Ingals (Richard Bennett) and his wife Eunice (Frances Starr) are conventional and loving parents who are shocked when their son Bradley (Buddy Rogers) comes home from college with ideas that they consider to be outrageous. His parents would like him to get involved with Mary Burke (Peggy Shannon), a prim and proper young lady. More complications ensue because Bradley's sister Lois (Frances Dee) is attracted to the flapper lifestyle, but she isn't sure whether she can handle its emotional demands. ~ Michael Betzold, Rovi

Joan Blondell, borrowed for the occasion from Warner Bros., earned top-billing in this delightful Hollywood parable, but the real star is of course Stuart Erwin as the irrepressible grocery clerk Merton Gill. Paramount screenwriters Saul Mintz, Walter De Leon and Arthur Kober based their witty scenario on Henry Leon Wilson's 1922 novel Merton of the Movies, the 1923 Broadway play by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, and the 1924 Famous Players silent version starring Glenn Hunter. By 1932, the story was indeed well-known: Aspiring to become a famous screen cowboy, small-town delivery boy Merton Gill arrives in Hollywood, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and complete with a diploma from the National Correspondence Academy of Acting. Crashing the gates of Majestic Pictures (read: Paramount), Merton manages to fumble his one line bit in the latest Buck Benson (Dink Templeton) western and is fired on the spot. Unwilling to leave the studio, the hapless thespian survives on leftover scraps from the extra's lunch boxes until discovered by comedy starlet "Flip" Montague (Blondell), who takes pity on him and arranges a meeting with Jeff Baird (Sam Hardy), head of the slapstick comedy unit. Bestowed a new name, Whoop Ryder, Merton is starred in what he assumes to be a serious western melodrama but what in reality is yet another burlesque featuring cross-eyed low comic Ben Turpin. Although a big hit with preview audiences, a humiliated Merton is ready to return to the grocery business when "Flip" persuades him to stay by telling him that he is "darn near perfect." ~ Hans J. Wollstein, Rovi

Ernst Lubitsch used Laszlo Aladar's play The Honest Finder as a springboard for one of his most delightful early-'30s Paramount confections. Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins play Gaston and Lily, a pair of Parisian thieves, both disguised as nobility, who decide to rob lovely perfume company executive Mariette Colet (Kay Francis); Gaston gets a job as Mariette's confidential secretary, while Lily installs herself as the woman's typist. Love rears its head, forcing Gaston to choose between marriage to Mariette and a fast getaway with Lily. Filled with marvelous throwaway gags and sophisticated innuendo, Trouble in Paradise was described by one critic as "as close to perfection as anything I have ever seen in the movies." ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

One of the most technically accomplished and sophisticated movie musicals of the 1930's, Rouben Mamoulian's Love Me Tonight (1932) had a profound effect on the shape of the musical genre (especially the films of Vincente Minnelli), and remains a candidate for best movie musical ever made, some seven decades after its release. And that distinction is based entirely on its style and structure -- it doesn't even take into account a hit-laden score by Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart, or a raft of delightful performances, several of them totally unexpected in their range and wit. The movie opens with an amazing double audio/visual montage sequence, in which the sleeping city of Paris awakens to a slowly rising chorus of sounds, street by street, house by house -- forming what the script describes as a "symphony" of sound -- which coalesces into a song. It is through the latter that we meet Maurice Courtelin (Maurice Chevalier), a young Parisian tailor who has just completed his first big job, an order of 15 suits for the Viscount de Varese (Charlie Ruggles), who has promised to pay him on delivery. He then discovers that the Viscount is little more than an upper-class ne'er-do-well who, among his other faults, has no money of his own -- being completely dependent on his crusty old uncle the Duke (Sir C. Aubrey Smith) -- and never pays his bills. In one of a half-dozen remarkable musical scenes, as Maurice's friend Emile (Bert Roach) ponders the matter of love in the new suit he has made for him, Maurice begins singing "Isn't It Romantic?", causing Emile to hum the tune as he strolls onto the street; the song is picked up by a taxi driver (Rolfe Sedan), and passed to his passenger (Tyler Brooke), a composer, who carries it aboard a train, humming it, where a group of soldiers hear it and end up singing it as they march across a field, where a young gypsy hears it and carries it to his camp on his violin, where the whole clan is soon singing. And the song is finally wafted across the surrounding fields to the estate of the Duke and the Viscount de Varese, where it is heard and sung by the Duke' niece, Princess Jeanette (Jeanette MacDonald). The two characters, Maurice and Jeanette, are linked for us in this way even before they meet, and the stage is set for the rest of the plot. For the Princess, living under her family's tradition-bound hand, romance is a source of unhappiness; there's no one at the chateau to interest her, and even if there were, she couldn't dare to be interested; already a widow from an arranged marriage at age 22 (her first husband was 75), she must marry someone of equal royal rank, and the only two known candidates in all of Europe are ages 85 and 12, respectively. Maurice journeys to the chateau with the clothes the Viscount ordered, hoping to confront him for payment, and is mistaken for one of the guests -- and he crosses paths with the Princess, and falls in love with her. Identified as the Count de Courtelin, he delights the rest of the guests with his joie de vivre and his way with a song, especially "Mimi" (which somehow managed to make it past the censors, despite some amazingly risque lyrics), getting the entire coterie of nobles singing it in his wake. But the Princess is resistant to his free and easy charm and flirtations, her staid upbringing and sense of station fighting her natural inclinations, while her other would-be suitor, the Count de Savignac (Charles Butterworth), is suspicious of this new-found rival. Also present at the estate is the Duke's other niece, Countess Valentine (Myrna Loy), who has a nymphomaniac interest in men under the age of 40, of whom Maurice is the only one at the chateau not related to her -- thus, he must fend off her advances while trying to woo a woman who wants nothing to do with him. Rumor soon spreads that Maurice is, in fact, a full-blooded royal prince traveling in disguise. And if he is a prince of the rank they think he is, then suddenly the Princess's marital and romantic prospects seem a lot more encouraging, especially as she begins to melt to his charm. Maurice wants to tell her the truth, but will she feel the same way about him, knowing that he is a commoner, a tradesman ... a tailor? Director Rouben Mamoulian had already jump-started the musical genre with the backstage drama Applause (1929), to great critical and financial success. In contrast to that movie's deceptively naturalistic approach to its subject, Love Me Tonight was highly stylized -- Applause had no actual musical numbers in complete form, while Love Me Tonight was filled with incredibly elaborate and subtle musical set-pieces that grow naturally out of the plot (adapted from a play by Paul Armont and Leopold Marchand) and advanced the narrative. Some of the scenes here helped set the stage for works such as An American In Paris and Gigi (one scene near the end, when Maurice's identity is revealed, seems to have been the model for "The Gossips At Maxim's" from the latter film) and Funny Face. Such is Love Me Tonight's reputation, that in the summer of 2007, 75 years after its release and more than five years after it showed up on DVD, the movie chalked up sell-out audiences when it opened the Mamoulian retrospective at New York's Film Forum. ~ Bruce Eder, Rovi

Maurice Chevalier plays a 19th century Viennese lieutenant, conducting an affair with sexy violinist Claudette Colbert. While publicly flirting with Colbert, Chevalier is spotted by a dowdy princess (Miriam Hopkins), who thinks that the lieutenant's wink was meant for her. Forced to marry the Princess, Chevalier despairs at her lack of charm. But good-hearted Colbert takes the princess aside, dolls her up, and instructs her how to bewitch--and keep--her man. Chevalier is enchanted by the "new" princess, while Colbert, who will have no trouble finding someone else to keep her warm and comfortable, cheerfully sashays out of his life. Long thought lost, The Smiling Lieutenant was rediscovered in an East European vault in the 1970s. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

Though he'd been given top billing at other studios, Charles Ruggles attained star status at his home lot of Paramount for the first time in 1931's The Girl Habit. Hoping to escape the murderous wrath of a gangster, wealthy middle-aged playboy Charlie Floyd (Ruggles) tries to get himself arrested. He finally succeeds, only to be thrown into the same cell as the gangster! Then there's the problem of getting out of jail, which comes about when Charlie uncovers evidence revealing the warden to be a crook. And all of this comes about simply because Charlie's sweetheart Sonya (Tamara Geva) tried to cure our hero of his flirtatiousness. Based on a play by A.E. Thomas and Clayton Hamilton, The Girl Habit was something of a enigma, garnering huge laughs in some theaters and stony silence in others. ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi

The patience of a long-suffering wife is finally rewarded in this drama. The devoted wife has known that her husband has been having an affair for years but she has passively allowed it to continue, believing that eventually her husband will come back to her. Her belief is unshakable and when he asks for a divorce, she refuses to grant it causing him to leave her and move in with the other woman. She does allow him to visit the children, but when he comes, she treats him as a guest. Eventually, the mistress kills herself and the errant husband does indeed return to his patient wife. ~ Sandra Brennan, Rovi

Clara Bow's career as one of Hollywood's liveliest leading ladies was drawing to a close when she made this early sound farce, one of her few talkies. Larry Charters (Ralph Forbes) is a highly successful songwriter who is growing weary of life in the public eye. Hoping for a break, Larry convinces his friend Bob (Richard "Skeets" Gallagher) to impersonate him as he takes a well deserved vacation in the French Riviera. While trying to get a room at a hotel, both Larry and an attractive young American tourist, Norma Martin (Bow), are flummoxed by the fact that they speak no French and that the desk clerk speaks no English. Things get much more complicated when they discover that the desk clerk isn't a desk clerk at all -- he is the local magistrate, and instead of renting them a pair of rooms, he has just married them. Three years after making this film, Clara Bow announced her retirement from the screen at the age of 28. ~ Mark Deming, Rovi

This first talkie version of the evergreen Brandon Thomas stage farce Charley's Aunt stars Charlie Ruggles, obviously having the time of his life in the leading role. Though updated to 1930, the film adheres to the familiar plot as set down by Thomas back in 1895. Two Oxford undergraduates, Charley Wickeham (Hugh Williams) and Jack Chesney (Rodney McLennon), anxiously await the visit of their respective girlfriends Amy Spettigue (June Collyer) and Kitty Verdun (Flora Sheffield). Trouble is, the ladies have no chaperone, and this will never do in the hallowed halls of Oxford. Anxiously, Charley and Jack persuade their twittish school chum Fancourt Babberly (Ruggles) to pose as Charley's aunt Donna Lucia D'Alvadorez (Doris Lloyd) -- "from Brazil, where the nuts come from." Poor Babbs is forced to remain in drag as both Jack's father Sir Francis Chesney (Phillips Smalley, repeating his role from the 1925 version of Charley's Aunt) and Amy's uncle Stephen Spettigue (Halliwell Hobbes) unexpectedly show up. The scenes in which Chesney and Spettigue ardently court the "Aunt" are hilarious, as is the inevitable moment when the disguised Babbs comes face to face with the real Donna Lucia (Doris Lloyd), whose ward Ella Delahay (Flora le Breton) had previously been our hero's shipboard sweetheart! A revised ending allows Charlie Ruggles to perform a farcical death scene that's every bit as funny as what has gone before. Charley's Aunt would be remade several times in the future, most memorably by Jack Benny in 1941 and by Ray Bolger in the 1952 musical adaptation Where's Charley? ~ Hal Erickson, Rovi