"Never stop fighting till the fight is done."
- Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner)
by Hunter Isham
One of the clearest memories of my first encounter with Brian De Palma's 1987 crime drama The Untouchables is not actually from the film itself, but rather from the back of the movie's DVD case. Big letters next to a picture of Kevin Costner proclaimed this to be, "The hottest mob movie since The Godfather," a quote attributed to Newsweek. The message was crystal clear: This is a good movie. As it turns out, I misinterpreted the quote. The Untouchables is not just a good movie, it's a great one.
Based on the true story of treasury agent Elliot Ness, the film chronicles his work to uphold prohibition in 1920s Chicago, specifically targeting Al Capone. The film's titular group, though in reality consisting of eleven agents, is the four man team assembled by Ness to fight the criminals flooding the streets of Chicago with liquor. Al Capone's Achilles heel, income tax evasion, is well known to many, and to have this story play out with that at the center might undercut the film's suspense and importance. The boat sinks at the end of Titanic. Gasp! What De Palma and screenwriter David Mamet do is tell the story of a war between the U.S. government and ruthless mobsters fighting at ground zero. This is not the story of how they got Capone for tax evasion, but rather the story of how a small group of individuals pushed the enemy forces back, holding them at bay as they gathered the necessary evidence to send the so-called "Mayor of Chicago" up the river.
The team assembled to accomplish this gargantuan task is aging policeman Jim Malone (Sean Connery), federal accountant Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), and rookie officer George Stone (Andy Garcia), all led by Kevin Costner's fearless, idealistic Ness. Malone, a streetwise cop cautious of both gangsters and crooked policemen, quickly becomes the strategic leader as he teaches the serious yet ingenuous Ness how Chicago mobs operate, even leading their first successful raid, in the most unlikely of places. Connery imbues Malone with a weary and wise demeanor of a cop skeptical of Ness' abilities, but dedicated to the cause for which his young leader so valiantly fights, earning every ounce of that Oscar he was awarded for the role. The only bad thing about Connery's performance is his Irish accent, which like all characters played by Sean Connery, sounds downright Scottish. To quibble about this would be to complain that Tommy Lee Jones too often sounds as though he grew up in Texas, because some actors' talent and screen presence affords them the right to use their natural speaking voice in many of their roles. The Irish accent is there, but never distracting. The last, but hardly the least (in presence and physical weight), member of the principal cast is the effortlessly intimidating Robert De Niro as public enemy Alphonse Capone. De Niro is perfectly suited to this role, as not only did he match his frame to that of the somewhat round Capone, but he also leaves the quiet portrayal of a young Vito Corleone (in The Godfather Part II) behind for a flamboyant, psychotic turn as a man who will beat one of his own to death with a baseball bat as a warning to the deadman's peers. De Niro gives Capone the necessary weight (no pun intended), so when he barks to his men that he wants Ness and his family dead, we believe him and fear for their lives.
As fantastic as the cast is, they would have nothing to work with were it not for the fiery, profane script by Glengarry Glen Ross scribe David Mamet. The infamous "Always Be Closing" speech by Mamet is in the film monologue hall of fame, and with The Untouchables he gives himself a run for his money. Everything from Malone's lessons on police work ("When your shift is over, you go home alive.") and gangland violence in Chicago ("He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue.") to Ness' quixotic proclamations of justice, this film is filled with great dialogue. Matching the level of mastery on the page, director Brian De Palma fills the frame with iconic images. A bustling 1920s city street, crossed by Ness and his men with shotguns in hand. The untouchables moving swiftly on horseback toward a convoy of illegal, imported liquor on the Canadian border. A shoot out on the marble steps of Chicago's Union Station with innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. These sequences, wonderfully staged by De Palma, are burned into my mind as quintessential moments in film, also due in no small part to composer Ennio Morricone's (The Good, the Bad and The Ugly) sensational, soaring score.
The Untouchables is perhaps one of few films that can promote unflinching goodness in the face of corruption without even a hint of irony. Costner's Elliot Ness is a square, but one worth rooting for as he and his team take on alcohol and the gangsters who sell it, never once stopping till the fight is done. Other films have provided us with moralistic heroes who fight evil, not all of them in blue tights and a cape, but The Untouchables reminds us that sometimes doing good means bending the rules by which we live, making it a movie that few others can indeed touch. Ness and his team aren't corruptible, or even scarcely bad, but their cause is true, and the vigor and heart with which they pursue it is the driving force of the film. Stories told in ethical shades of black and white are not hard to find, but those told well are few and far between. Sit back, have a drink, and let The Untouchables take you for a ride you won't soon forget. Newsweek called it, "The hottest mob movie since The Godfather," but that film is a shakespearean meditation on the crime families of New York, and the seductive qualities of power. This is prohibition, Capone, and the badge-carrying, gun-toting agents out to get him. Welcome to Chicago. 9.5/10
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