The 1986 movie Ruthless People is a black comedy starring Danny DeVito, Bette Midler, Judge Reinhold and Helen Slater.
It was directed by David Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and Jerry Zucker, best known for the Airplane! and Naked Gun comedies. This film, by contrast, is a straight comedy bordering on farce, with very few of the innumerable sight gags and puns and jokes of the other movies.
It was loosely based on the O. Henry short story "The Ransom of Red Chief". A British comedy, Too Many Crooks had been made in 1959 and starred Terry-Thomas, George Cole and Sid James. It also tells of a woman who joins forces with her kidnappers against her unfaithful husband and may also have been an inspiration.
Plot
Over lunch with his mistress, Carol (Anita Morris), millionaire Sam Stone (DeVito) explains in loving detail his plan to murder his wife, Barbara (Midler). Sam is greedy and grasping. He only married his wife for her money but her father (also his boss) took a long time dying. Sam thus built up a small fortune of his own but Barbara is the heiress to a much larger one. Furthermore he hates her choice in clothes and "modern" furniture.
However, when Sam arrives home he finds the house empty. He then receives a phone call from an anonymous man, saying they have kidnapped Barbara, and Sam must pay a large ransom, or else she will be killed. She will also be killed if he informs the police or the media. Before long the cops are all over the house looking for clues to the kidnapping which is now headline news.
The kidnappers are Ken (Reinhold) and Sandy Kessler (Slater), a married couple who are both desperately poor and eager for revenge against Sam. It turns out that Sam "made his fortune" by stealing a fashion idea from Sandy, along with the Kesslers' life savings to market it. Barbara, Sam's overweight, loud-mouthed wife, gets locked in the Kessler's basement, where she proves a handful to the amateur kidnappers.
Things go astray, however, when it becomes obvious that Sam doesn't want his wife back, and is in fact doing everything possible to goad the kidnappers into killing her. Unfortunately for him, the Kesslers, while desperate, are not about to murder anyone. Instead, Ken offers to drop the ransom — first from $500,000 to $50,000, then $10,000. Sam still refuses.
Complications arise from a plot by Carol and her handsome but moronic boyfriend, Earl (Bill Pullman, in his film debut). Believing that Sam plans to toss his wife's body from the Hollywood Hills at night, she has Earl lie in wait with a video camera. What he actually ends up filming is a rendezvous in a car between a prostitute and her john, who asks her to "make a lot of sound." Earl, hearing the woman's screams, mistakenly thinks the murder is happening right in front of him.
Without watching the tape, Carol sends an anonymous copy to Sam, who sees the sex act captured and immediately hits on Carol as the one who sent it and announces that he is looking forward to repeating the scene with her. Terrified, she hides at Earl's trailer and sends another anonymous copy to police chief Henry Benton (William G. Schilling) — who happens to be the john in the video. Thinking he is being blackmailed, he asks Carol what she wants, and she says the answer should be obvious: arrest Sam Stone.
Chief Benton orders a search of Sam's house, planning to plant evidence in it, but is surprised when real evidence turns up — a bottle of chloroform and pictures of Sam with Carol. The kidnapping investigation is immediately called off, and Sam is arrested. Sam was going to use the bottle of chloroform to put Barbara to sleep before killing her, but threw it away when she was kidnapped. He now faces the dilemma of having to get his wife back in order to prove his innocence.
A third complication arises when Barbara reluctantly decides to take up exercise to relieve her boredom in her cell. To her own astonishment, she loses twenty pounds. She and Sandy bond unexpectedly over this, and Sandy shares several of her fashion designs with Barbara, who loves them and offers to take them worldwide. In their euphoria, Sandy decides to let Barbara go. Barbara leaves, but comes back as soon as she finds out from the newspaper about Sam's mistress, which leads her to realize that he wanted her dead. Just as she comes back, a serial killer who has been stalking the neighborhood enters and attacks, but falls down the basement steps, breaking his neck and dying in the process.
Barbara, Ken, and Sandy now hatch a plan for revenge on Sam. Now desperate to prove his wife is alive, Sam offers to pay the ransom the moment Ken calls him again. But now, armed with Barbara's inside knowledge, they have increased the ransom to precisely equal Sam's own net worth: over $2 million. Sam is outraged, but has no choice. He withdraws the cash, but begs the police to watch the drop site. They refuse, still thinking he murdered Barbara.
Carol, baffled as to why Sam hasn't been convicted already, goes to a video store and plays the tape in the display model. But the scene of the whore and the client is played on every TV in the shop and Chief Benton's wife, who happens to be there, recognizes her husband. When Sam goes to the bank to obtain as much of the money as possible, Benton can be seen withdrawing his own cash and with a passport, presumably in order to flee abroad.
Carol realizes Earl's mistake, and that Barbara really was kidnapped. She calls Sam and learns the time and place of the ransom drop.
At the ransom drop, Sam waits with the cash. Ken arrives in disguise, but then so do scores of hidden police, and Earl with a gun. In the ensuing confusion, Earl is captured and Ken drives his car off the end of a pier with the ransom cash inside. The police search the water, and bring up the car, with the body of the serial killer inside, dressed in Ken's clothes.
Sam fakes grief, but is ecstatic inside, believing that Barbara will now definitely be killed and her money is his at last. Instead, Barbara appears, telling the police that her kidnapper (the serial killer) was insane, believing himself to have accomplices, and so she was able to escape as soon as he left. The police walk away in satisfaction. Sam meanwhile is taken aback by how beautiful Barbara has suddenly become but then she gives him a sound thrashing telling him that she wants a divorce and pushes him into the water.
On a beach not far away, Ken emerges from the water in scuba gear, carrying the briefcase with the ransom cash. Sandy and Barbara run to meet him, and they all dance for joy.
Cast
Box Office
The movie was a smash hit grossing $71,600,000 in box office receipts and $31,500,000 in video rentals with a total American gross of $103,000,000. With inflation the movies gross was slightly under $200,000,000[1]
Influence
The film's theme song was co-written by Mick Jagger, Daryl Hall and Eurythmics co-member Dave Stewart and performed by Jagger. Assuming the song would be a hit, "Weird Al" Yankovic requested (and received) permission from Jagger to record a parody version, "Toothless People", for his upcoming Polka Party! album. When Jagger's song failed to crack the Top 40, Yankovic considered not recording his version; because Jagger had "authorized" the parody, however, he decided failing to produce it would be an insult to the artist and recorded it.
This movie contains one of Roger Ebert's favorite lines in movies in 1986. When Midler's character discovers that the kidnappers keep having to drop the ransom amount to the bargain basement amount of $10,000, Midler says while crying, "I've been kidnapped by Kmart!"
The film was later loosely remade in India twice: as the Telugu film Money (1993)[2], as the Hindi films Mujhe Meri Biwi Se Bachaao in 2001.[3][4] It was also remade in Hong Kong as Mo deng pu ni ti in 1996.
References
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