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**** “Ruggles of Red Gap.” MCA. $29.95. NR.

In this great 1935 comedy, the unlikely combination of mercurial British actor Charles Laughton and laid-back comic master Leo McCarey performs wonders on the material. Originally a Saturday Evening Post tale by Harry Leon Wilson, it’s about Ruggles, a proper but pixilated British butler, lost in a poker game by his dissolute owner (Roland Young) and transported to the American Wild West by a culture-vulture wife and her rowdy husband (Mary Boland and Charlie Ruggles). Everyone is wonderful in this fish-out-of-water prototype, but McCarey’s semi-improvisatory style releases one of Laughton’s most charming performances: fey sparkle detonating beneath a blimpish, frightened reserve.