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Excellent, a Must See

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

Your blood may run cold, but you now find yourself pinioned to the story.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I am sure that Zachary Scott was cast in the lead role in Ruthless after the folks at Eagle-Lion remembered his debut in The Mask Of Dimitrios. As proof of that I'm sure that every effort was also made to acquire the services of Sydney Greenstreet who was also part of the cast of that film.Under Edgar Ulmer's direction, Scott paints a careful and calculated portrait of a driven and Ruthless man going back to his childhood. Some elements of Citizen Kane are present here as in several flashback sequences we see what has made Scott what he is today.What he's trying to do now is cover up what he's been in much the same manner as the robber barons of old by donating his vast sums of money. Like Andrew Carnegie when we meet Scott he's having a huge banquet where he's pledging the mansion and lots of money to a world peace foundation. Scott's invited a whole lot of people from his past including his oldest friend Louis Hayward who really knows him from way back when.And it's back in his childhood just as we were introduced to Charles Foster Kane and the events that shaped we are likewise meeting Zachary Scott, Louis Hayward, and Diana Lynn as the characters they are before they are adults. All I can say is that Scott as a kid was really traumatized by the antics of his parents. He goes to live with Dennis Hoey and his rich and genteel family which includes the daughter who grows up to be Diana Lynn and they give him a Harvard education.But what makes this a real Zachary Scott role is that it's not just business he's in, it's business mixed with bedroom pleasure. He woos many a woman and discards them with equal abandon. He steals Sydney Greenstreet's trophy wife Lucille Bremer for the 48% of the stock she has in her husband's company. Ulmer who may have done more with less than any other director around, gets if not a box office cast, a really competent one who suit their roles admirably. The script for Ruthless was written by Alvah Bessie of The Hollywood Ten and I can see why the GOP and Southern Democratic mastodons of the House Un American Activities Committee got their underwear knotted. Zachary Scott is Gordon Gekko 40 year ahead of his time. Some of the observations made by Bessie's characters could hold true for Lillian Hellman's Little Foxes as well as in Citizen Kane.A real crackerjack film and a fascinating portrayal by Zachary Scott in the lead makes Ruthless a must see.

Ruthless (1948)A great, layered melodrama, with flashbacks and male and female rivalries and a really strong narrative thread. There are a bunch of interesting actors at work who never had huge careers, the main man being familiar to me from "Mildred Pierce" two years earlier, Zacharay Scott. The director, though, is a favorite noir director of mine, Edgar Ulmer, who had a string of great films in the late 1940s. So this is one of them, though not quite a noir.In fact, this is a kind of financiers movie, which isn't actually a genre thank God. But the weakest part of the film (at least for a non-Wall Street viewer) is a lot of talk about business deals. Luckily, you don't need to follow them to the letter, because it's the characters--their tricks, their greed, their games--who make it come alive. And of course there are women involved (compelling ones like Diana Lynn), and memories of a childhood girlfriend, so we feel something for the good friend of the leading capitalist male, and even for Sydney Greenstreet, who plays an aging businessman, even amusing.The whole enterprise gets fairly involved and makes you pay attention, which is good, and leads to a pretty spectacular last scene off the pier.

Zachary Scott plays Horace Vendig--a young man from a very troubled home. When he is taken into the home of a nice well-to-do family near his old home, he falls for his benefactors' daughter and they plan on marrying. However, over time it becomes obvious that Vendig is a very ambitious man--and women are there to be used. So, when he meets an even richer woman he dumps the sweet girl he grew up with--even though her family was wonderful to him and sent him to Harvard. This same pattern continued throughout the film--using others (especially women) to work his way towards greater and greater wealth. While the outside world sees him as a great and philanthropic man, he is a soul-less jerk--and this film shows the steps he took to become that man.In many ways, this film is a lot like the later film "Wallsteet" except that Vendig gets ahead not just through business acumen but by using women. The end result is a juicy portrait of a sociopathic jerk--and it makes for very intriguing viewing throughout.

Apparently a brief exchange between the adolescent boy (Bobby Anderson) and his father (Raymond Burr) in which the father tells him that opportunity only comes around once, is the reason why Anderson morphs into the social climbing and ruthless business tycoon played by Zachary Scott. It hardly seems like enough of an influence to change a nice kid into a prototypical (and stereotypical) greedy capitalist millionaire. Though it's difficult to establish a connection between the two, Scott makes a believable social climber, and the story has a pretty good trajectory from his adolescence through dark mansions and well furnished offices with New York skyline views, to a finale gala event where Scott is organizing a philanthropy to unload some of his millions and ease his conscience. Ulmer doles out the action in bits and pieces, but delivers a pretty memorable ending.