It was based on the best-selling 1915 novel by Harry Leon Wilson, adapted by Humphrey Pearson, with a screenplay by Walter DeLeon and Harlan Thompson.

[4][5][6] Ruggles of Red Gap was “an immense commercial hit” and confirmed Leo McCarey's stature as Paramount's outstanding comedy filmmaker of his day.

Earl tells Ruggles that he has gambled him away in a drunken game of poker, and he is to report to his new masters – nouveau riche American millionaires Egbert and Effie Floud – immediately.

Egbert laughs off Belknap-Jackson's actions, but Ruggles explains that he wants to live as a free and independent person and, because of that, he won't return to work for the Flouds.

As he is preparing the restaurant space with Mrs. Judson, Effie arrives with troubling news: the Earl of Burnstead is visiting Red Gap to buy Ruggles back from the Flouds.

[8][9][10] Based on the best-selling 1915 novel by Harry Leon Wilson, Ruggles of Red Gap was adapted to screen by Humphery Pearson, with a screenplay by Walter DeLeon and Harlan Thompson.

[13] Regarded as the most outstanding comedy director with Paramount at the time, studio executives provided Leo McCarey with top quality talent for the picture.

Indeed, the "A" film or high production period of McCarey's career can be dated from Ruggles of Red Gap.”[14] According to film historian Wes D. Gehring, McCarey cast Charles Laughton in the lead role when he detected a “comedic flourish” in the actor's Academy Award-winning performance as the English king, in 'The Private Life of Henry VIII' (1933).

[16] Both director Leo McCarey and actor Charles Laughton received overwhelming critical accolades for their work in Ruggles of Red Gap.

[24] McCarey locates the film's central thematic element in the natural discord between “personal and social imperatives” and the struggle to bring these into balance.

“In Ruggles, 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.”[25] Film historian Wes D. Gehring describes Ruggles of Red Gap as “the story of a proper British butler, lost in a poker game to a nouveau riche American, evolves into a free man.”[26] The origins of the film sequence arose from an event in McCarey's own life.

[27] The film fully takes shape as a “populist classic” with the sequence in which Laughton, the former body servant to a wealthy English gentleman, recites the Gettysburg Address, a speech delivered by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, announcing a “new birth of freedom” for the people of the American republic.

[28] Ruggles, an immigrant to the United States, delivers the speech in the Silver Dollar saloon occupied entirely by “All-American Western types.” The moving content of the address comes as a revelation and a liberation to most of the denizens of Red Gap.