The Untouchables (1987)

One of Brian De Palma’s biggest commercial hits and perhaps his sleekest, slickest fusion of style with function, The Untouchables also feels like one of the more conflicted works of his career. A radical reinvention of the 1960s TV series, which in turn was based on the memoirs of former federal lawman Eliot Ness recalling his battles with Chicago mobsters in the Prohibition era, The Untouchables invokes at least two levels of nostalgia. The original series emerged at a time of revived interest for the Prohibition zeitgeist, then gaining a new gloss of seedy glamour and retro charm. De Palma’s take on the same material invoked a similar awareness of lost time, but where the series was rooted in the slightly bemused fascination of post-war America for its fading but still easily recalled wild adolescence, De Palma evokes a wider, more anxious panorama, fascinated by the gruelling disparity between the dreams of general middle-class virtuousness, offered in the context of the film’s drama in its depictions of Ness’s home life, and the blazing heat thrown out of its melting pot cities, cradles for both modern America but also for “the time of the Ganglords” as the introductory scrawl describes it. 

De Palma offers up Al Capone (Robert De Niro) as one of his familiar, cruel potentates, a la Phantom of the Paradise’s (1974) Swan and The Fury’s (1978) Childress, ensconced in his seat of power, in this case a ritzy Chicago hotel, broadcasting airy statements to rapt journalists from the four corners of the world fascinated with his smarmy charisma and coldly blatant humour. De Palma cuts with characteristic ferocity to a depiction of the immediate consequences of his reign as a young girl unwittingly takes up a bomb in a suitcase left in a speakeasy, trying to return it to its owner, only to be blown to smithereens. She's collateral victim of the Capone mob’s attempt to take over every facet of the city’s hooch business. 

Ness (Kevin Costner) is the Treasury agent sent in to take them on, and quickly finds he’s in over his head, the local police too mired in the city’s multifarious tribal schisms as well as basic corruption, and outmanoeuvred by an enemy that’s too cashed-up and clever to take down by standard routes. After a chance encounter with the canny street patrolman Malone (Sean Connery), Ness realises he’s the perfect man to aid in his clean-up crusade as he’s utterly streetwise and itching for a chance to butt heads with the entrenched forces of self-interest about him. Malone soon guides Ness to open-secret booze warehouses and in choosing reliable aid, plucking sharpshooting George Stone (Andy Garcia) from the ranks of cadets, an Italian-American lad wearing an Anglicised pseudonym, and also rope in bespectacled expert in accounting fraud Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), forming a swashbuckling foursome who soon find themselves in a brutal war to the death with their kingpin foe.

Of all the filmmaking talents loosely labelled the Movie Brats to emerge in the 1970s, De Palma was the most consistently sceptical and radical in pitch, his early works like Greetings (1968) deeply engaged with the counterculture era. His move into the mainstream saw him maintain an acidic perspective on official mythologies of modern American life, brought to a head in his aesthetically mighty but nearly career-ending twofer of Blow Out (1981) and Scarface (1983). The Untouchables feels uncharacteristic for De Palma in many ways, obliging him to explore a narrative that obeys the contours of Reaganite action movie principles, via David Mamet’s haute-macho screenplay, which grazes De Palma’s more familiar moral universe obliquely, exalting in the process that nudges Ness away from priggish company man to engaged vigilante. De Palma responds mostly by treating the film as an exercise in bravura showmanship, offering such spurts of pop pizzazz as making his camera crane up dramatically whilst watching a puddle of blood spread from the head of a henchman Capone’s just done in with a baseball bat. 

Nonetheless The Untouchables diagrams De Palma’s favoured protagonist types. Ness is initially presented as a prissy do-gooder, lecturing his men about off-duty drinking, one of De Palma’s naïve heroes whose success or failure depends on the speed they learn to really fight. Wallace inhabits a similar zone as Winslow Leach in Phantom of the Paradise as the nerd anxious to play with the big boys but not quite counting on the hideous price tag. Stone – real name Giuseppe Petri – is the reverse coin to Scarface’s Tony Montana, just as magnetic and talented as a severer of mortal coils, but on the side of good, with Garcia preserved here at his dashing height. Malone is the hardy old-timer a la Peter Sandza in The Fury, particularly incensed not merely by knowing evil couches close by but dares to think him as timorous as the rest of the world in facing it down. De Palma further twists a mainstream commercial assignment towards his own interests as he pits Pollyannish innocence against a social survey that’s just about as corrupt and universally conspiratorial as anything in Fritz Lang’s classic works of paranoid struggle. 

Ness has a preternaturally calm wife (Patricia Clarkson, in perhaps the most conspicuously conventional role of her career) and a cute-as-a-bug’s-ear daughter (Kaitlin Montgomery) to embody a popular dream of old time order, glimpsed occasionally chuckling at Amos ‘n’ Andy on the radio and praying before sleepy time, but soon driven out of town as Capone’s malignant lieutenant Frank Nitti (Billy Drago) hovers around outside dropping loaded compliments. The Untouchables are given their name by a snide alderman who tries to bribe them, and then the title is lampooned in the most brutal way possible as the word “Touchable” is written in blood behind the dangling corpse of one of their own, man used as a prop in a piece of gory counter-propaganda, anticipating De Palma's interest in warring militant messaging in Redacted (2007). The four men’s first venture out to battle as a team sees them marching in line, De Palma’s camera capturing them against the backdrop of downtown Chicago, ‘20s motor cars and art deco architecture all aglow with imperial promise with Ennio Morricone’s music surging in high-riding strains, only for the men to move into the building directly across from their own headquarters and find a basement full of booze ready to rot the guts of the populace and swell the pockets of everyone with a piece of the action.

Mamet’s delight in forms of confrontation and violence manifesting in both traditional and in verbal terms registers throughout, as Malone instructs Ness in the brute vicissitudes of “the Chicago way,” which involves down-and-dirty tactics like performing a gruesome play-act with a corpse to scare the hell out of a captured Capone hood. Mamet’s exacting sense of speech as character pits the gruff brogue of Chicagoan against Ness’s collegially diagrammed sentences (“Just what is it you would have me do?”), forcing Costner, in his first major starring role, into some tight corners of verbal facility he can’t quite negotiate. Connery occasionally inflects his familiar Edinburgh tones with occasional hints of an Oyrish lilt, but his Oscar win was more for the outsized presence and energy he brings to the film, perfectly in tune, like De Niro, with De Palma’s theatrical largesse. The film proves much less interested in dealing with the historical record of Ness’s duels with Capone than in charting the evolution of the American action movie, evoking the western film tradition in one sequence as the heroes charge into battle on horseback amidst nods to Howard Hawks and Don Siegel. 

De Palma’s eye delights in Chicago’s curlicues of transplanted baroque, the stain-glass domes, thrusting campaniles, colonnaded porticos, and marble-decked railway station steps. The perfect abode for a moon-faced gangster to weep rivers in sympathy for a bellowing Pagliacci whilst a victim of his rule crawls laboriously along his hallway carpet with a belly full of hot lead. Both the mainstream entertainment template and Mamet’s penchants leave little time for the enveloping sensualism so vital to the rest of De Palma, the urgency of colliding viewpoints, the hothouse eroticism, the ripe fetishism of cinematic potential. And yet De Palma manages to work it in,  particularly in one trademark moment as Wallace is distracted by a woman just long enough to miss a crucial, and fatal, detail, as Nitti poses as a cop to assassinate a witness and take out Wallace at the same time. De Palma stages this sequence with one of his most dynamic yet icily diagnostic displays of camera movement, tracking his actors through the tight hallways of the police headquarters, following characters major and minor and offering passing glimpses of vital details – a glimpse of Nitti’s face in cop garb; the lingering, charged look the prop female gives before moving out of the scene – before letting the hammer drop. 

One of De Palma’s signature first-person shots comes as Nitti arranges for a thug underling to invade Malone’s apartment and draw him out into the range of a Tommy gun’s blast: the point-of-view tracking shot ends with one surprise as Malone rears up with a shotgun, intruder rumbled. The following alternation of viewpoints, Malone and scared-looking goon, concludes with a greater shock, as Malone catches sight of Nitti with deadly weapon and realises his bullish machismo has been played like a piano. De Palma constantly uses split dioptre shots to present faces and landscape in the same unit of collapsed perspective, filling all corners of the widescreen frame and jostling for potency; each hero or villain is only a player in a great stage that might finally exalt them or seem melt into the setting. And melt they do, as the city’s grey and brown palate becomes decorated with smears and blood and brain tissue, and a river of blood down the carpet of Malone’s apartment signals to Ness what fate has befallen his friend. Drago’s Nitti is a heartless, white-clad angel strayed in from some rather more surreal film, one of Leone’s dreamy flashbacks or Fassbender’s coups-de-theatre, raining down death on Capone’s enemies and taunting heroes with relished reports of his handiwork. 

The highpoint of the film, inevitably, is the subsequent shoot-out De Palma stages in Union Station as Ness and Stone move quickly to avenge their friend and net Capone’s potentially incriminating bookkeeper, battling it out with his guardian gunsels on a staircase. De Palma works in a self-evident tribute to Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin (1924) by quoting the touch of a baby carriage bouncing down the steps in the midst of raging gunfire. What’s less noticed about the sequence however is that way De Palma goes all-out in demonstrating the intervening sixty years of film technique evolution, deploying liquid, dream-like time distortion to transform the straightforward piece of gunplay into a spectacle of choreographed actions and camera placement, offering flourishes of both high comedy – the baby grins at Ness all the way down – and lethal tragedy as bystanders are riddled with holes, before the ingenious climactic moment as Stone arrives just in time to toss Ness a gun. 

De Palma notably resolves the scene not offering triumph but a sense of grim commitment nudging outer precincts of nihilism as Ness and Stone both point their guns with arctic stares at the terrified and obeisant pencil-pusher. This sequence is justly hailed as a classic and stands as perhaps the greatest episode of legerdemain in De Palma’s set-piece-rich career. But it’s easy to forget that the film drags on a good distance after it, through some exceedingly clunky courtroom business, and setting up a foot chase sequence as Ness pursues Nitti through halls of justice with a flimsy dramatic pretext, mostly to give a chance for Ness to serve some very personal payback. This makes for a pretty ridiculous denouement, although it does again dovetail De Palma and Mamet’s diverse preoccupation with tales where abused saps find their killer instinct, in this case Ness completing his evolution from milquetoast to hard-ass; as goes Ness so goes the country, suggests the very ending. Morricone’s scoring, alternately a pulsating main suspense theme with plangently romantic strings and trumpet fanfares, sums up the film’s blend of pining hindsight and utterly present-tense kineticism. John Woo absorbed the results like scripture; Tarantino made a table-circling shot and other flourishes into career cornerstones.