Jan-Christopher Horak is director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and professor of critical studies at UCLA. His publications include Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema, Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919–1945, and The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood's Golden Age.

In Edgar G. Ulmer's remarkable body of work, the complex psycho-melodrama Ruthless is particularly worthy of rediscovery. A flashback-structured tale of a sociopath's remorseless drive for station and wealth, with a relentless undercurrent of emotional violence, the film is often referred to as Ulmer's Citizen Kane. The chilling tone is personified in a starkly muted, nearly expressionless performance by lead actor (and frequent screen cad) Zachary Scott. In an interview with Peter Bogdanovich, Ulmer said he envisioned his feature as “a Jesuitic morality play . . . a very bad indictment against 100 percent Americanism-as Upton Sinclair saw it.” He called the screenplay, written by blacklisted Alvah Bessie, “a dangerous script, which had to be cut (because of McCarthyism).” A contemporary review in the Los Angeles Times praised Ulmer's “all-out direction”-an entirely apt descriptor for such uncompromising work.