Ruthless, a vitriolic picture of capitalist America, is certainly one of Ulmer's best films, his Citizen Kane in chiaroscuro. Zachary Scott portrays an inexorable climber who propels his way to the top on the Wall Street of the twenties. Blessed with a business sense of avarice and unencumbered by feelings of guilt, Scott is the American dream turned incubus. Success is pathology, not sport, with him: anything someone else has, he wants, and takes. Sydney Greenstreet is fabulous as a Southern utilities magnate who turns to Bible and bottle after Scott makes a hostile takeover of his business and his wife, a Bette Davis knockoff. Ulmer recalled, “It was a dangerous script that had to be cut because McCarthy came in. It was written by Alvah Bessie (one of the Hollywood Ten). They fought me every step because it was (an) indictment against one-hundred-percent Americanism, as Upton Sinclair saw it.”