Hat-wearing
gangsters armed with Tommy guns have been gone for decades, but movies and TV
shows about them are as popular as ever. From The Godfather to Boardwalk
Empire, stories about bootleggers, hoodlums, mobsters and the cops doing
their best to bring them down still fascinate people. Some are based on fact
while some are based on legends. Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987), working off a script from David Mamet,
seems to lean more towards the legend in order to offer more of a spectacle.
Understandable, given the movie’s villain, Al Capone, is a legend of crime.
As it is a
crowd-favourite, I had seen bits and pieces of The Untouchables playing on TV every now and then. I eventually
rented the DVD to watch the whole thing with some nifty behind-the-scenes
nuggets, something you don’t get today with Netflix and iTunes. It was my
little ritual when I was finishing high school in Quebec City if I had nothing
to do that weekend. Head to the video store, get one of those three for one
deal, and discover a classic. Many gangster movies are classics so it was only
a matter of time before I got to De Palma’s take on the genre featuring one of
the genre's most-known villain.
A villain needs a
good hero for counter-balance, and that hero came in the shape of Prohibition
Agent Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner). Whether or not Ness was as idealistic as in
the movie, Costner portrays him as a righteous man on a crusade. During
Prohibition Al Capone (Robert De Niro) illegally supplied the city of Chicago
with alcohol at whatever price he wished. Ness naively believes he could walk
into town and take down Capone with the rule of law. As he raids a warehouse he
believes is filled with booze, he yells: “Lets do some good.” To his
disappointment the crates are filled with umbrellas. The press takes a picture
and Ness is the laughing stock of the police department, who warned Capone’s
men in the first place.
Feeling dejected
at the city’s corruption, Ness meets Irish American cop Jim Malone (Sean
Connery) who teaches him a thing or two about fighting fire with fire. It is
impossible to fight a man who will not play by the rules, so forget about the
rules. If Capone uses violence, the cops must respond ten-folds, or as Malone
puts it, “He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the
hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!” With that
philosophy in mind they recruit George Stone (Andy Garcia), a superior marksman
out of the police academy, and nerdy accountant Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin
Smith) from Washington D.C. The Untouchables are formed.
The four of them
take no bribes, do not back down if threatened, and bust down the doors the
Chicago police are afraid to knock. Of course as they up the ante, so does
Capone. Threats are made against Ness’ wife (Patricia Clarkson) and his
children. Capone’s top henchman Frank Nitti (Billy Drago) is tasked with taking
out the cops by whatever means necessary, while Capone’s plays the “legitimate
businessman” card to the press.
As the violence
escalates, the cops cross lines they never thought they would. Ness evolves
from a righteous officer to an angry man capable of killing an unarmed opponent
in a fit of anger. Even the seemingly harmless Oscar the accountant becomes a
force to be reckoned with during a raid at the Canadian border. Charging at the
bootleggers on horseback, he comes alive as he attacks them with his shotgun.
In one of the film’s lighter moment, he takes a sip of whiskey from a leaking
barrel while no one is watching.
As a director, De
Palma has always had great skills with intricate action sequences, and that is
clearly on display throughout the film. One of the best examples is his homage
to Battleship Potemkin when Ness and
Stone fight Capone’s men at a train station to get their hands on a key
witness. The sequence goes into slow motion as Ness fires a shotgun at
gangsters in the station’s staircase, while a baby’s carriage is rolling down
the stairs as the baby’s mom watches in horror. Cutting to Ness during the
shooting, we see he still has his eyes on the baby carriage even while the
gangster’s are shooting.
As to whether or
not it all really happened that way in 1930s Chicago, that’s for the history
books. I think there were actually six officers on The Untouchables task force,
and Oscar was probably not the only accountant to think of going after Capone
over his tax records. As for the characters onscreen, there is no doubt more
depth to Capone than De Niro managed to give him, and Connery never shakes off
his Scottish accent in favour of an Irish one. Still, The Untouchables is undeniably crowd-pleasing in its telling of an
old-school story of cops vs. gangsters.
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