THE UNTOUCHABLES
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Copyright 1987 Mark R. Leeper
Capsule review: Big mythic cops-and-robbers film is
long on excitement, short on accuracy, brash and colorful.
It is solid entertainment with a lot of fun in the first half
and a second half nearly as good. One of the big films of
the summer.
There are lots of ways to make a gangster film. You can make it as realistic as THE GODFATHER or as romanticized as A POCKET FULL OF MIRACLES. You can do a BONNIE AND CLYDE where the crooks are giants and the cops are midgets, or you can make the crooks vermin and the cops squeaky-clean personifications of purity and virtue as was done in THE FBI STORY and the TV show THE UNTOUCHABLES. Brian DePalma did one gangster already with tiny cops and giant hoods, his violent but engrossing remake of SCARFACE. He has returned to the gangster film with a movie based on the UNTOUCHABLES TV series and the book by Elliot Ness and Oscar Fraley that the TV series was based on. His approach is romanticized to the point of being mythic. The hoods are big and the cops are giants. Even a mousy accountant for the Treasury Department who is impressed into service turns out to be a giant. And a film adaptation of a TV show surprisingly turns out to be giant too.
The story should come as no surprise to anyone. An ambitious Treasury agent,Elliot Ness (played by Kevin Costner), comes to Chicago to bring down an oily Al Capone (played by Robert DeNiro). When he realizes he is still wet behind the ears, he calls for the assistance of one good Irish cop (played by Sean Connery) and, with the help of a few friends, they set about hewing down the biggest tree in the underworld jungle. When the film works best, mostly in the first half of the film, it is a positive joy. Toward the second half, I started to realize what I was enjoying is a story about the groovy side of the Secret Police and that Connery's honest and pure philosophy of law enforcement was actually a pretty scary thing.
But David Mamet's screenplay captures the fun of the TV series. When Ness drives a huge snowplow through warehouse doors to smash up shipments of illegal booze, you know you're watching the real thing eight times bigger than life. Though, admittedly, the film's most exciting sequence harks back more to Westerns than to gangster films. And the whole package is done to a score by Ennio Morricone, sometimes tense, sometimes flamboyant, sometimes arrogant.
Now, as for the film's accuracy, yes, there really was an Elliot Ness and he was a Treasury agent. There really was an Al Capone and a Frank Nitti and they were crooks. And Al Capone really was indicted for income tax evasion. Of course, most people knew all that already, and Mamet and DePalma are counting on most people knowing no more than that, because just about everything else is wrong. Ness's accomplishments were exaggerated by newspaper accounts of the day and much more so by his autobiography and by the TV show. Nobody has ever portrayed Frank Nitti accurately in anything. Nitti was one of Capone's lieutenants whom the newspapers thought ran Capone's gang when Capone went to jail. That squares with neither the TV nor the film version. Capone's representation is neither accurate nor inaccurate. We just don't see much of his strategy in the film.
But with all its faults, THE UNTOUCHABLES is a big film, an exciting film, and it will likely be the big film of the summer. Rate it a +2 on the -4 to +4 scale.
Mark R. Leeper
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mtgzz!leeper@rutgers.rutgers.edu
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