Charles Laughton Recites Lincoln's Gettsyburg Address

Back in 1935, Charles Laughton, one of the 3 or 4 most brilliant stage actors to also star on the Silver Screen, made a classic comedy called Ruggles of Red Gap, based on a best-selling novel by the now long-forgotten Harry Leon Wilson. Directed by Leo McCary and costarring Charles Ruggles, Mary Boland, Roland Young and Zasu Pitts, Laughton plays the impossibly proper English valet Ruggles who, having been won in a poker game by Egbert and Effie Floud of Red Gap, Washington, bring him back to their hometown where he, Ruggles the valet, is decidedly a fish out of water.

The highpoint of the film comes when Laughton, who is beginning to catch on to what it means to be an American, recites Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address from memory to a saloon full of cowboys and western tipplers. Director MCary wisely keeps the camera in motion, panning the faces of the hicks as they become increasingly captivated by the words effortlessly flowing from the valet’s mouth.

Laughton became so attached to Lincoln’s 10 sentences, that he would, over the next quarter century, recite it literally thousands of times . . . to WWII troops in military hospitals, at awards ceremonies and at gatherings of at least 4 presidents.

Last semester, I screened Ruggles of Red Gap in a film course at Florida Atlantic University. Laughton’s 2+minute rendition of the greatest, most moving presidential address in all American history, left not a dry eye in the theater. It is the masterful meeting of a stellar address and a brilliant actor.

Few people can hear these words - whether spoken by Orson Welles, Gregory Peck or Charles Laughton - and not feel their meaning, nor sense that Lincoln wasn’t merely speaking these 278 words to a gathering of fellow citizens in November 19, 1863, but for all Americans ever since. Their meaning is just as powerful, just as compelling today - and tomorrow - as it was nearly 157 years ago.

Please . . . listen as Charles Laughton speaks the words of Abraham Lincoln. And, as the French would say, it is perfectly understandable if you Préparez vos mouchoirs . . . “take out your handkerchiefs.”