Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #97 Ruthless People (1986)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, and I’m deep into a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie.

Alternately, you can be like a kind-hearted gent and member in good standing of my Facebook group Society for the Toleration of Nathan Rabin and commission me to write about a group of movies I did not get around to covering in a theme month he also commissioned, the one devoted to Danny DeVito. 

I am always happy to see and write about Danny DeVito movies, as opposed to movies that DeVito happened to have appeared in, and 1986’s Ruthless People has been floating around inside my head for months, if not years, for predictably “Weird Al” Yankovic-related reasons. 

As Al fans are all too aware, Ruthless People and its Mick Jagger-sung, Jagger, Dave Stewart and Daryl Hall-written theme song provided the inspiration for one of Al’s least loved and least successful parodies, “Toothless People”, one of the few out and out losers in Al’s discography. 

“Toothless People” failed even as an album cut because “Like a Surgery” satiated his fanbase’s need for painful surgery-based musical comedy but also because it marked perhaps the only time in his recording career that Al parodied a song that was not a hit. 

Jagger’s theme song peaked at 51 on the Top 100, never even threatening the top 40. Yet re-watching Ruthless People decades after I saw it in the theaters as a kid I found it easy to understand how knowledgable folks could peg “Ruthless People” as a sure-fire hit. Jagger’s song kicks off Ruthless People and its grimy central riff permeates the film’s score. Ruthless People pimps the hell out of its theme song, overly confident that a Mick Jagger joint can’t be anything other than a hit. 

Ruthless People is a fascinating anomaly in the careers of the Zucker Brothers, the makers of Top Secret, “Weird Al” Yankovic’s all-time favorite motion picture and parodists who absolutely RULED the 1980s with 1980’s Airplane!, the short-lived but beloved cult show Police Squad, 1984’s Top Secret!, 1986’s Ruthless People and finally 1988’s Naked Gun: From the Files of the Police Squad.  

It’s the only film brothers Jerry and David Zucker and compatriot Jim Abrahams directed but did not write and/or executive produce and it’s their only non-parody. 

Instead Ruthless People was written by Dale Launer, whose brief but impressive filmography also includes the hits Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and My Cousin Vinny as well as Love Potion #9 and Blind Date. 

The Zucker Brothers and Launer secured perfect leads in Danny DeVito and Bette Midler, who manage to have explosive comic chemistry despite spending maybe a minute and a half together onscreen. 

DeVito is typecast to perfection as disreputable businessman Sam Stone, yet another tiny king overflowing with unearned confidence and swagger. The film opens with Sam relaying to airhead mistress Carol (Anita Morris) how he married Barbara (Better Midler), the daughter of a boss hovering on the very edge of death solely for the sake of inheriting a fortune once the old bastard finally kicked the bucket. 

But the ornery buzzard held on for fifteen years, long enough for the diminutive misanthrope to develop a hatred of his loud, domineering wife that veers into murderous rage.

From a logic standpoint, the scene doesn’t make much sense since the scheming businessman would be telling his mistress information she already knows. But DeVito manages to sell the monologue as something more than a graceless info dump by making his lovable heavy a gleeful lout who luxuriates in his own malice. 

The look on DeVito’s face when the kidnappers first call with demands is one of pure, child-like joy. He’s smiling with his whole body, overcome with glee at this unexpected bit of good fortune conveniently masquerading as tragedy to the rest of the world.

Even before fate conspires in his favor, Sam has the shit-eating grin of someone who can’t believe everything he’s getting away with. 

The 1980s truly were a magical time.

Sam sets out to murder his wife for her money and is surprised as well as utterly overjoyed to discover that she’s been taking hostage by overwhelmed stereo salesman Ken Kessler (Judge Reinhold) and his even more adorably innocent wife Sandy (Supergirl’s Helen Slater) as retribution for Sam stealing Sandy’s ideas to become the spandex mini-skirt king. 

Carol, meanwhile, has sinister designs of her own involving bleached blonde boyfriend Earl (Bill Pullman), a small time criminal seemingly too stupid to live, let alone help her blackmail Sam for a murder he never gets around to committing. 

Being a bastard and fucking people over comes as easily to Sam as breathing but Ken has to psych himself into a felony mindset. When the amateur kidnappers bring Barbara home she seems capable of destroying her captors through anger, profanity and deafening volume alone. 

Like DeVito, Midler takes great glee in being bad, in making her hostage from hell as loud and abrasive as Sam Kinison in his prime, in sharp contrast to her milquetoast captors. Midler was confident enough in her volcanic, mercurial talent to know that she could have audiences hating her every bit as much as her husband does at the beginning of the film and loving her by the time the credits roll. 

Reinhold’s wonderfully expressive face grows increasingly despondent and frustrated when the delighted Sam goes out of his way to ensure his wife’s killing and the desperate kidnappers keep dropping the price for Barbara’s freedom, from 500,000 dollars initially to 10,000 dollars once it becomes apparent how Sam really feels abut his wife. 

Barbara begins Ruthless People slightly overweight by movie standards, which is to say not overweight at all, but she uses her time being held captive in the basement of a nondescript house to melt away the pounds via regular exercise.

The less Barbara weighs, the happier she is. But she doesn’t just get happier: she becomes a better person as well. She and Sandy bond over fashion and Sandy’s gifts as a designer. By the end of the film, Barbara has joined forces with her pure-hearted kidnappers to get revenge on her sonofabitch husband.

In movies and in contemporary life, weight loss is often linked with moral improvement, just as obesity is often inextricably associated with evil and/or mental illness. 

That’s one of the reasons Jared from Subway was trusted: surely someone capable of heroically resisting the urge to eat at fast food restaurants other than Subway would be able to keep any pedophiliac urges in check as well, right?

Cinematographer Jan DeBont, who would segue into direction with Speed and Twister in the following decade, gives the movie a pinkish gleam heavy on pastel colors. DeVito’s mansion in particular is gloriously 1980s; it’s a Nagel nightmare/dream of Reagan-era excess and MTV style. 

Ruthless People gets less bracingly nasty once the hostage and her captors become a team but it remains solidly funny throughout, a perfectly cast, lustily executed farce with unforgettable characters and some eminently quotable lines, like when a cop observes of Pullman’s staggeringly dim-witted crook, “This could very well be the stupidest person on the face of the earth.”

I enjoyed Ruthless People so much that I even found myself warming to its theme song. Sure, it’s a little dirge-like and not terribly catchy but within the context of the movie it works surprisingly well. It’s dirty and dark and nasty, like Ruthless People itself, albeit nowhere as successful, creatively or commercially. 

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