Untouchables, The (DVD)

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My colleague John Puccio has kindly given me permission to reproduce his excellent review of "The Untouchables" from the first DVD release. For this new Special Collector´s Edition, I will comment on the video, audio and extras sections. John will then return to share his parting thoughts about the movie and I will let you know if this new DVD edition from Paramount is worth your money.

The cast roster for "The Untouchables" lists Kevin Costner as star, with Charles Martin Smith, Andy Garcia, Robert De Niro, and Sean Connery as costars. It should have listed Connery first, because he's the real star of the show, and that's saying a lot given the caliber of talent he's running with. As always, Connery dwarfs his fellow actors, making us forget even De Niro. The other star is director Brian De Palma, who creates as enjoyable a piece of entertainment as anything he's ever done. "The Untouchables," from 1987, may not have the edge or explosiveness of some of De Palma's other films like "Carrie," "Blow Out," or "Scarface," but it's both smooth and tense; plus, it abounds in the director's typical stylistic touches.

The story is based in part on the old "Untouchables" TV show and in part on the real-life exploits of Treasury agent Eliot Ness and his campaign to nail mobster Al Capone. The time is 1930, and everyone in Chicago is on the take. The mayor, the judges, the juries, the Chief of Police, and most of the police force are in Capone's pocket. T-man Ness (Costner) arrives on the scene to clean up the place and soon learns he can't trust anybody. So he recruits a small team of incorruptible agents to help him. Garcia plays a crack young shot, Oscar Stone, just out of the police academy; Smith plays a Treasury Department accountant, Oscar Wallace; and Connery is a seasoned old beat cop, Jimmy Malone, as honest and practical as the day is long. Together, they go after the Big Man, Capone, played by De Niro, and eventually nab him for tax evasion.

Those who remember "The Untouchables" television series will appreciate Kevin Costner's role. He's a straight-arrow goody-two-shoes, to be sure, and that's much the way we probably all remember Robert Stack in the part; although, to be fair, I liked Stack's tougher demeanor. Costner is not only a knight in shining armor, though, he's a vulnerable knight. His low-key, all-too-human portrayal is not the bigger-than-life character many of us remember from TV, but it's probably closer to the real-life Ness, who faded into obscurity after his prominent encounter with Capone. Garcia's performance is more energetic than Costner's, his rookie's attitude at once cocky and unsure. Smith's accountant is the voice of reason. At first, no one pays any attention to him when he tells them he can convict Capone on tax charges. What an absurd notion, to go after a big-time mobster for overdue taxes. But it works. And you haven't seen a genuine superhero until you've seen a kick-ass Charles Martin Smith in action! Never get an accountant mad.

Then there's De Niro, existing in a kind of world of his own. Capone and Ness only confront one another, briefly, a couple of times in the film. Mostly, De Niro's Capone is seen chomping on a big cigar, talking and acting tough. The film makes no attempt to get behind Capone's words and into his personality. He is merely a cardboard heavy, an antithesis of Ness, and clearly nothing more than a target for the T-man to pick off. It seems a waste of De Niro's talents, but he gives it his best shot, in a manner of speaking.

That leaves Connery. As I said, he towers over the other actors. His Jimmy Malone is reluctant at first to get involved with Ness, because in Chicago in 1930 you didn't trust anyone, not even a crusading government policeman. When Connery is on the screen, he lights it up like few others. He's a throwback to those old-time movie stars like Bogart and Gable who could make an audience forget that anybody else was in a film. When you finish this one, it's Connery you'll remember. And you'll probably remember him in a couple of key scenes, too, like one where he scares a reluctant witness half to death by "killing" a corpse in front of him. I'll leave it to you to figure out if you haven't already seen the film. Connery won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his performance and well deserved it.

The script was written by David Mamet, who at the time was better known as a playwright than as a film writer or director. He is generally known for his development of character, but here he does almost nothing with character backgrounds or motivations. Ness, for instance, is simply a man dedicated to his job, his wife, and his young daughter. Malone is an honorable and cagey patrolman, living by himself and walking a beat. About the only thing we learn about why he was never promoted is that he says he is too honest in a corrupt city. As a single fellow, did he ever consider leaving? Capone's splashy appearances in white fedora, cape, and cigar tell us nothing about his personal life, and so on. But, again, when a script is based on a TV series and folklore, one shouldn't expect too much character development to enter the picture. Instead, we get dialogue from Mamet that's terse and to the point, like Malone's line to Ness: "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." That's this movie's very direct approach, too.

So, the story is largely action based, and it's here that De Palma excels. Granted, some of the goings-on border on the preposterous, like watching the four stalwart heroes--a Treasury agent, two big-city cops, and an accountant--ride horseback into battle with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, but most of it is so well staged, we just go along with it. For De Palma it's style rooted in purpose, as he uses things like extended tracking shots, overhead angles, movement from room to room seen from outside a building, and first-person points of view to build suspense and create excitement.

Although the film has a few slow moments getting started, it is otherwise filled with one tense situation after another, culminating in a train station scene that pays homage not only to De Palma's inspiration, Alfred Hitchcock, but to the Russian director, Sergei Eisenstein, and his famous "Odessa Steps" sequence from 1925's "Battleship Potemkin." De Palma leaves no doubt whose film this is. Few other directors would have even considered beginning their film by blowing up an innocent child or showing Capone beating a man to death with a baseball bat at a fancy-dress dinner. The combination of De Palma's direction and Connery's acting are enough to sell the movie.