The Untouchables
A Movie Review by Timothy Costello
Paramount Pictures, 1987 Directed by Brian De Palma Screenplay by David Mamet Cinemetography by Stephen H. Burum Film Edited by Jerry Greenberg and Bill Pankow Music Composed by Ennio Morricone Production Designed by Patrizia Von Brandenstein Art Direction by William A. Elliott Costumes Designed by Marilyn Vance-Straker Produced by Art Linson
MPAA Rating: R (for graphic violence, profanity including racial slurs, and lots of Brian De Palma-style bloodletting)
Budget: Data not available
Tagline: Al Capone. He ruled Chicago with absolute power. No one could touch him. No one could stop him. Until Eliot Ness and a small force of men swore they'd bring him down.
The Cast
Eliot Ness.................................Kevin Costner Jimmy Malone..........................Sean Connery Al Capone................................Robert De Niro George Stone...........................Andy Garcia Oscar Wallace.........................Charles Martin Smith Mike........................................Richard Bradford Walter Payne............................Jack Kehoe George....................................Brad Sullivan Catherine Ness........................Patricia Clarkson Frank Nitti...............................Billy Drago
Ah, yes, The Untouchables. I do not believe that I am exaggerating when I say that Brian De Palma's grand 1987 cops-'n-robbers epic is one of the best films of the 1980s, as well as one of the best movies ever to be based on a TV show, and one of the best entries in this director's canon. Sure, it plays fast and loose with the historical record of its time and place like nobody's business, and sure, there's not exactly much in the way of plot, but boy oh boy, is this great entertainment.
Which is good, because considering the caliber of people involved in this project, I don't think it unreasonable to expect something a little better. Don't get me wrong. De Palma defied all my expectations with this picture, delivering something truly inspired. His able cast and superb technical crew have also outdone themselves. But I have to say that the performance by Robert DeNiro and the screenplay by David Mamet leave something to be desired. I don't know. Maybe they were saving themselves for their extraordinary collaboration in John Frankenheimer's masterful Ronin, ten years later. But The Untouchables packs such a punch that ultimately it's very easy to gloss over their -- I can't believe I'm writing this -- inadequacies.
We are in Chicago, in the year 1930. Al Capone (DeNiro), a punk from New York, has risen to a postion of undisputed power over the city's bootlegging trade. And he enforces his rule with an iron fist; no one is safe from his reign of terror, not even a pretty little girl who gets blown to shreds when Capone's top gun, Frank Nitti (Billy Drago) plants a bomb in a tavern whose owners won't play ball with Capone. The federal government, responding to a plea from Chicago's legitimate city government, sends in Treasury Department special agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) to oversee a program that will bring down Capone. Ness's initial efforts don't meet with much success; saddled with a legion of corrupt cops and the recipient of a bad tip, his first raid is an embarrasment that lands him on the front pages, for all the wrong reasons.
A chance meeting with a honest veteran street cop, Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) convinces Ness that he's going to have to change his tactics. Deciding to work from outside the thoroughly rotten Chicago police department, he recruits his own strike team; himself, Malone, mild-mannered accountant Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), who thinks that he might be able to nail Capone on tax evasion charges, and George Stone (Andy Garcia), a rookie policeman from Chicago's South Side who's the best shot in the Academy. Quickly dubbed `the Untouchables' by friends and enemies alike, they set about decimating the Capone empire any way they can. But Capone's not going to give up his absolute power without a fight...
I'm going to state right up front that this is not, repeat not, the way it happened in real life. For one thing, Capone's downfall didn't happen until 1931. There really was an Eliot Ness, and he really did have a squad of agents called the Untouchables, but their efforts were exaggerated by newspaper accounts of the day -- I think, to convince Capone that things were worse than they actually were and thereby cause him to make a mistake which Ness and his crew could use against him. And yes, Capone was brought down by a mild-mannered accountant, Elmer N. Irey, but he was not, to the best of my knowledge, on Ness's team. However, the version of this story presented to us in the classic Robert Stack TV series from the late 50's, the rather short-lived but enjoyable revival in the early 90's, and this picture, is infinitely more entertaining. It's like a classic 30's Warner Bros. gangster movie, only one in which the good guys not only win, but are the stars of the show.
Unfortunately, the film doesn't have a script quite as good as those epics of yesteryear. Mamet's screenplay here is not one of his best; it doesn't have the sort of plotting that have marked his best outings as screenwriter and director -- House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner -- and it depends on cliche and contrivance. Events necessary to give the Untouchables the opportunities they need to nail Capone just sort of happen, without any real rhyme or reason, and are explained by having Malone say something like `If you want to keep a secret, don't tell the boss.' It also doesn't have the staccato dialogue we've come to expect, and maybe even demand, from Mamet in peak form. Maybe he figured that his usual style would be off-putting to a mainstream audience that's not all that familiar with his work. But when you see `Written by David Mamet' in the opening credits, it's not unreasonable to have certain expectations, and the script doesn't fulfill them. There's another problem with the film, and Robert DeNiro is its name. It's bad enough that Mamet has drastically underwritten the role of Capone and that we never really get to know him (as if we really wanted to get to know somebody like Al Capone), but DeNiro, who in trying to look like Capone ends up looking in my mind like Robert Duvall, doesn't exactly apply himself, despite having done his usual let's-gamble-with-my-own-health-by-gaining -a-lot-of-weight-in-order-to-look-the-part bit. He's also too old for the role. One of the aspects of the Capone legacy that I find both fascinating and frightening is that Capone was born in 1899. The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, which occured when Capone was at the peak of his power, took place in 1929. That means that Capone had built a staggering empire of crime and corruption by the time he was thirty years old; the most powerful gangster of the Prohibition era was still a relatively young man when he rose to dominance. De Niro, who was about forty-three when the film was made, was, and looked, too old to play Capone. Don't get me wrong. I am not one to argue with De Niro's reputation as perhaps the greatest American film actor of his generation, because I agree with it. And if this had been made in, say, 1977 instead of 1987, De Niro's being too old for the role wouldn't have been an issue. But in casting De Niro for his presence, which happened a lot back in the mid- to late-80's, the filmmakers made something of a miscalculation.
They did not make a miscalculation in hiring Brian De Palma to direct this picture. In spite of his (undeserved) reputation as a Hitchcock ripoff artist, a cynic, a misanthrope, and a misogynist, and in spite of the drubbing that his new film Mission to Mars is about to take, De Palma remains my favorite director of all time, and I was reminded of why when watching this film. I haven't been able to find out what attracted De Palma to the project -- whether he saw it as an artistic challenge, or Paramount paid him a king's ransom, or he originated the project himself -- but it doesn't matter, because he has turned out one of his best films. It may not have the emotional resonance of previous pictures like Carrie or Blow Out and later pictures like Casualties of War and Carlito's Way, which together comprise his all-time greatest hits, but for sheer entertainment in the De Palma oeuvre, you can't do much better than The Untouchables (wait, didn't I say the same thing about De Palma's The Fury? Well, The Untouchables is even more entertaining). It may be that Mamet's script is actually an asset -- in paring it down to essentials, minimalist that he is, Mamet has given De Palma the ability to make a film that's consistently exciting, because without the excess fat of such niceties as character development and intricate plotting (which of course are always an asset, but sometimes, yes, you can do without them), De Palma can get down to business. Specifically, `sequences.' De Palma's films always have elaborate action and suspense sequences, long stretches of film, sometimes without dialogue, in which the emphasis is on pure filmmaking. The Untouchables has several such sequences -- the shootout at the Canadian border, the stalking of Jimmy Malone in his apartment by a Capone operative, and the legendary slow-motion gun battle in the LaSalle Street train station, with its ingenious homage to, or flagrant ripoff of, depending on your perspective (I'll go with the former), the famed Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein's The Battleship Potemkin. I haven't seen Potemkin, and so I won't do what every other critic in America by now has done, which is either extol or excoriate De Palma for this little stylistic touch. But I will say that it is one of the most exciting action sequences I've ever seen in a movie. The tension in this scene is so thick, you could cut it with a knife. And it leads to an incredibly suspenseful moment in which the entire outcome of the picture depends on whether or not Andy Garcia's character is as good a shot as he's supposed to be.
But all is not sequences in De Palma's films, and indeed, the entire film is a masterpiece of virtuoso filmmaking. There are nifty tracking shots, brilliantly composed matte shots that capture the essence of the Prohibition era, sumptuous period production design by Patrizia Von Brandenstein, and a dynamic, emotionally rich score by Ennio Morricone. And it has a number of striking performances. Even if Kevin Costner's career doesn't survive the unholy fiasco that was The Postman, he can always be proud of his performance in this film. Simple goodness, as one critic has pointed out, is one of the hardest traits for an actor to embody, and yet Costner is able to do so. And it's interesting how Ness's fundamental decency, as played by Costner, is what's standing in the way of his getting the job done. `Didn't you hear what I said?' he frustratedly thunders at the corpse of a mobster he's just blown away, after the man ignored his entreaties to surrender. `What is this, a game?' Even as he's violating the law he swore to uphold, there's still a part of him that wants to stay by the book -- and expects the bad guys to do the same. Sean Connery, in his Academy-Award-winning role, applies all of his charisma, gusto, energy, and wit to Jimmy Malone, and while I might have preferred to see him given such an award for performances like The Man Who Would Be King, The Offence or The Russia House, his work here is more than worthy of the honor. Rounding out the Untouchables themselves, Charles Martin Smith provides solid, appealing comic relief, and Andy Garcia is a likable presence as Stone, the voice of reason (within obvious limits) on Ness's squad (a precursor to his role in Ridley Scott's Black Rain, perhaps?). And DeNiro, for all my griping earlier about his being too old for the part, is dynamic and villainous as Al Capone. Too bad Mamet didn't give him a meatier role.
The Untouchables is a superb crowd-pleaser, a guilt-free shoot-'em-up that never fails to entertain. It's also an example of a great director at the height of his powers. Brian De Palma has made some fine films since The Untouchables, but none that provide as much sheer fun as this. After ten years, it still holds up amazingly well, and even if De Palma's career doesn't survive the debacle that I fear Mission to Mars is about to become (though I haven't lost hope yet), he can always count this film as one of his true masterpieces. E-mail to: costt8k0@elon.edu
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