Brian De Palma (1987)
The long-running television series metamorphosed into a remarkably pared-down and well-paced two hours of cinema. The writer, David Mamet, has squeezed the life out of sensational material before (The Postman Always Rings Twice): perhaps he means to demonstrate here that Prohibition-era Chicago is no longer so much an historical time and place as a part of American film-going experience – that Al Capone and Eliot Ness have become pop culture artefacts rather than real people. Reinterpretation of this kind isn’t much help to a film aimed at a mass audience but – after a tentative start in which the scenes lack momentum and don’t build cumulatively – Brian De Palma’s crowd-pleasing direction galvanises the screenplay; and the character types which Mamet has written are played with zest enough to individualise them. Throughout the picture, De Palma shows more skill (and interest) in the bits of the story that present opportunities for bravura; happily for him and the audience, the second half of The Untouchables seems to consist almost entirely of these (the ‘Odessa steps’ sequence at the railway station is particularly exciting).
The teamwork of the actors – most of them playing members of a team – gives the film heart. Sean Connery memorably brings the aging, honourable Irish-American cop Jim Malone to life (and death). Although the script presents Malone as just-an-ordinary-cop, Connery’s physical authority and broad, juicy characterisation turn him into an emotionally powerful figure. The actor’s evident relish for the role and affection for Malone are infectious. As the young Italian-American sharpshooter Joe Stone (real name Giuseppe Petri), Andy Garcia is well cast physically and has star magnetism. (This is the film through which both Garcia and Kevin Costner broke into the big time.) Garcia’s face and compact body are primed for action. His dark eyes flash; he draws his gun equally quickly. Garcia also suggests Stone’s private feelings behind his professional persona – he’s nervelessly efficient fighting crime but caught off guard by his growing attachment to the rest of Eliot Ness’s team and Malone especially. (Even when the dialogue makes this explicit, Garcia is still touching.)
At first, Costner’s Ness is a bit drab and too unsure of himself: concentrating on making the hero a believable ordinary man, Costner makes him less than credible as a leader of other men. He’s also unlucky in the domestic scenes in that Patricia Clarkson, as Ness’s perfectly supportive wife, is hardly a helpful acting partner. Treating her husband with (bizarre) patient condescension, she’s one artificially gracious smile after another. Once Ness has got Malone and Stone on his side, though, Costner’s less exciting presence provides a good balance to Connery’s and Garcia’s. Costner is particularly effective in reacting quietly to the murder of the fourth member of the team, the timid, pasty-faced Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), an accountant who suddenly finds a gun instead of a ledger in his hand. Robert De Niro’s Al Capone is a highly entertaining, expertly judged mixture of flamboyant hypocrite and psychopathic spoiled child. This Capone knows everyone knows what he’s capable of and he keeps reminding them: you sense this in the Chicago pressmen’s nervous laughter when Capone cracks a joke, in the anxiously acquiescent noises of a gathering of fellow hoods listening to his cant. (Capone illustrates his moral philosophy here by clubbing the head of one of the hoods at the dinner table.)
Ennio Morricone’s score is a beguiling if somewhat crazy mixture of themes. When De Palma has familiar, inspirational, virtue-triumphant music playing during a gory gun battle, the purpose seems to be to reassure – as if subconsciously feeling that you’ve heard a scene before will make the violent visuals less troubling. Perhaps De Palma deploys Mamet’s script in an analogous way – that is, he uses this anodyne as a sedative then administers his own dynamic medicine to wake you up and, in the end, get you high. The cast also includes the excellent Jack Kehoe.
[1990s]
