Ruthless People
A couple, cheated by a vile businessman, kidnap his wife in retalitation, without knowing that their enemy is delighted they did.
- Director:Jim Abrahams / David Zucker
- Genre:Comedy / Crime
- Runtime:94 minutes
Cast
Danny DeVito : Sam Stone
Bette Midler : Barbara Stone
Judge Reinhold : Ken Kessler
Helen Slater : Sandy Kessler
Anita Morris : Carol Dodsworth
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. In frustration he tosses away the bottle of chloroform he intended to use to put Barbara to sleep before killing her. 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 cops or the media. Before the house is swarming with police 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. Read more
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