Sean Burns
Sam Stone is on his way home to kill his wife when he finds out she’s been kidnapped. He decides not to play the ransom, so she teams up with the kidnappers to take him for all he’s worth. Now this is a great premise for a movie — one of those ideas that’s so good, as soon as you hear it you wonder why nobody thought of it before. You might imagine it as the setup for a twisty 1940s noir, but it’s actually the hook for Ruthless People, a raunchy modern screwball comedy that improbably became the Walt Disney Company’s highest-grossing movie of 1986.
Things were a little different at the Mouse House back then. After the cripplingly expensive, nap-inducing animated epic The Black Cauldron very nearly bankrupted the house that Walt built, Disney boss Ron Miller decided to break with tradition and start also producing movies for adults. 1984’s Splash! was the first film released under the studio’s Touchstone banner, the new name a necessity so that the family-friendly Disney brand wouldn’t be tarnished by a shot of Daryl Hannah’s bare bum. 1986’s Down and Out in Beverly Hills was their first R-rated release, and the first in a multi-picture deal with Bette Midler that would make the Divine Miss M a bona fide movie star.
Ruthless People hit theaters a few months later, with Midler co-starring as the abducted spouse of Danny DeVito’s Sam Stone. Directed by the Airplane! and Top Secret! trio of David Zucker, Jim Abrahams and Jerry Zucker, it was the ZAZ team’s first stab at a non-parody movie and their only co-directorial effort without an exclamation point in the title. Dale Launer’s debut screenplay is the stuff careers are made of. He’d go on to write hits like Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and My Cousin Vinny, but never topped this interlocking farce of broadly drawn characters and unexpected reversals.
The key to the movie’s appeal is its ebullience. Ruthless People is dirty but not smutty, naughty yet never nasty. From the bright, pop-art production design to the shadow-free lighting by future legend Jan de Bont, it looks and feels like a film where you know nobody is ever really going to get hurt. DeVito’s exuberance is an important part of this equation. He’s so small, unthreatening and naturally funny, even his most vindictive rants are absurdly hilarious. (“I hate the way she licks stamps” is a line only Danny DeVito could deliver. And with such relish!)
The kidnappers are played by the instantly endearing Judge Reinhold and former Supergirl Helen Slater, two doe-eyed, childlike naifs in so far over their heads that they let themselves be talked down on the ransom from $500,000 to ten grand, and Sam still doesn’t want to pay it. You get the idea these two might not be cut out for the whole kidnapping deal when we find out they’re vegetarians. The Huey and Dewey Duck masks also don’t scream “hardened criminals.”
Without being able to indulge in their trademark surreal sight gags, the ZAZ Team nonetheless comes up with some wonderful business for their actors. My favorite is when Reinhold – who between this, Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Beverly Hills Cop was the ‘80s movie go-to galoot – delivers a long monologue about how cut-throat and ruthless he is while using a People magazine to gently remove a spider from their kitchen floor and deposit it outside. There’s a perfectly timed cut to an exterior shot after he realizes what he’s done and goes back outside to stomp on it.
Bill Pullman made his film debut as the amazingly idiotic, bleached blonde boy-toy of DeVito’s mistress. She’s played by Anita Morris, the Broadway bombshell from The Rolling Stones’ ridiculous “She Was Hot” video, which was temporarily banned by MTV for racy content that’s actually just the band members embarrassingly “AH-HOOGA”-ing the actress as she makes the buttons pop off their expanding trousers. Forty years after sneaking into Ruthless People during its original theatrical run, I have yet to determine what she and Pullman are doing with a DustBuster under the covers, but the prop is indicative of a movie that would much rather be silly than sexy. (Tying it all together, Morris would go on to play Milder’s role in the short-lived Fox sitcom spinoff of Down and Out in Beverly Hills.)
Starting with Sally Cruikshank cartoon credits set to the title track by Mick Jagger in his lamentable She’s the Boss solo period, sometimes it looks like Ruthless People is deliberately trying to be the most ‘80s movie ever made. (Check out the scenes at the stereo store!) The postmodern Memphis Group furnishings match Midler’s super-sized wigs — not to mention her larger than life line readings — and I suppose here is where it’s my job as a critic to point out something about how all the outrageous greed and avarice on display say something about the era. But the movie is too fun and frivolous to burden with such readings. Seeing it at eleven years old sent me rushing home to wait by the phone, hoping someone would call the wrong number.
“Ruthless People” is streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
