The Untouchables (film)

The Untouchables
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Brian De Palma
Produced by	Art Linson Executive: Raymond Hartwick
Written by	David Mamet
Based on	The Untouchables by Oscar Fraley and Eliot Ness
Starring	Kevin Costner Charles Martin Smith Andy García Robert De Niro Sean Connery
Music by	Ennio Morricone
Cinematography	Stephen H. Burum
Editing by	Gerald B. Greenberg Bill Pankow
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	June 3, 1987 (1987-06-03)
Running time	119 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$20 million
Box office	$76,270,454

The Untouchables is a 1987 American crime-drama film directed by Brian De Palma and written by David Mamet. Based on the book The Untouchables, the film stars Kevin Costner as government agent Eliot Ness. It also stars Robert De Niro as gang leader Al Capone and Sean Connery as Irish-American officer Jimmy Malone. The film follows Ness's autobiographical account of his efforts to bring Capone to justice during the Prohibition era.

The Untouchables was released on June 3, 1987, and was critically acclaimed. Observers praised the film for its approach, as well as its direction. The film was also a financial success, grossing $76 million domestically. The Untouchables was nominated for four Academy Awards, of which Connery received one for Best Supporting Actor.

Plot

In Chicago, gang leader Al Capone (Robert De Niro) has nearly the whole city - including the Mayor of Chicago - under his control and supplies low-quality liquor at high prices during the Prohibition era. Bureau of Prohibition agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is summoned to stop Capone's corruption. Ness conducts raids using a large squad of uniformed officers. After Ness's efforts fail due to corrupt policemen tipping Capone's men off, he meets incorruptible Irish American officer Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) and is told to pick men who have never come under Capone's influence by enlisting them from the police academy. Italian American trainee George Stone, formerly Giuseppe Petri (Andy García), is enlisted due to his superior marksmanship and intelligence. Joined by accountant Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith; character based on Frank J. Wilson), assigned to Ness from Washington, D.C., he has organized a team able to stop Capone.

The team raids a post office where illegal liquor is stored, but Malone and most of the police know where the alcohol is. As the four gain notoriety, Wallace informs Ness that Capone has not filed an income tax return in four years; therefore, they can try Capone for tax evasion. Ness is visited by an alderman who tries to bribe him into dropping the investigation, but he refuses to cooperate and throws him out. When Capone's chief assassin Frank Nitti (Billy Drago) threatens Ness's family, Ness has them moved to a safer place, then takes the team to the Canadian-U.S. border for a raid on an incoming liquor shipment. Ness chases one of the gangsters into an empty house and kills him in self-defense. Malone captures George (Brad Sullivan), a Capone bookkeeper, and brings him back to the house for interrogation. George proves uncooperative to Ness and his other two teammates, so Malone grabs the dead man and shoots him to coerce George into cooperating, much to the dismay of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police who have assisted in the raid.

At the police station, Nitti kills Wallace and George. Ness angrily confronts Capone and his men, but Malone intervenes. Malone persuades Ness to stall the district attorney (Clifton James) from dropping the case, then corners police chief Mike Dorsett, who sold out Wallace and George to Capone. Malone learns about another Capone accountant, Walter Payne, and calls Ness with the news. A knife-wielding thug breaks into Malone’s home; Malone forces him out the front door with a shotgun, but steps into an ambush set up by Nitti, who uses his Thompson submachine gun to shoot him. He lives long enough for Ness and Stone to find him, and shows them which train Payne will take out of town before he dies.

Ness and Stone arrive at Union Station and find Payne guarded by several gangsters. After a fierce shootout (a homage to the famous Odessa Steps scene from the 1926 Russian film The Battleship Potemkin), the two succeed in killing the gangsters and taking Payne alive. Payne testifies in court about the cash flows throughout the Capone organization. Ness, however, notices that Capone seems unperturbed despite the probability of serving a long prison sentence, and also sees Nitti carrying a gun inside his jacket. He escorts Nitti out of the courtroom with the bailiff and discovers that Nitti has the mayor’s permission to carry the weapon. Ness identifies Nitti as Malone’s assassin after seeing Malone's address in Nitti's matchbook.

Nitti shoots the bailiff in a panic and flees to the roof of the building, exchanging gunfire with Ness along the way. Eventually, Ness corners Nitti. Ness says Nitti will pay for killing Malone, but when Nitti says that he will never go to prison, Ness throws him off the roof to his death. In the courthouse, Stone shows Ness a document from Nitti’s jacket that reveals that the jury was bribed, explaining Capone's relaxed mood. The judge has no intention of using it as evidence until Ness bluffs that the judge's name is in Payne’s ledger of official payoffs. To avoid being labeled as corrupt, the judge decides to switch juries with a neighboring courtroom and restart the trial. Before the trial can restart, however, Capone's lawyer withdraws the plea of "not guilty" for a plea of "guilty" without Capone's consent. Capone is later sentenced to 11 years in prison.

Packing up his Chicago office, Ness ponders the Saint Jude pendant that Malone had carried with him for many years, and which Malone had given to him before dying. He gives the pendant to Stone, reasoning that Malone would have wanted a cop to have it. Ness turns down an offer to speak to a reporter wanting to speak to him. When the reporter mentions that Prohibition is due to be repealed and asks what Ness might do then, Ness responds, "I think I’ll have a drink."

Cast

Actor	Role	Based on
Kevin Costner	Eliot Ness
Sean Connery	Jim Malone	Martin J. Lahart
Charles Martin Smith	Oscar Wallace	Frank J. Wilson
Andy García	George Stone (Giuseppe Petri)	Frank Basile
Robert De Niro	Al Capone
Patricia Clarkson	Catherine Ness	Evaline Ness
Billy Drago	Frank Nitti	Frank Nitti/Phil D'Andrea
Richard Bradford	Chief Mike Dorsett
Jack Kehoe	Walter Payne
Brad Sullivan	George
Clifton James	District Attorney

Pre-production and production

De Niro wanted one extra scene written for his character, and time to finish his commitment to the Broadway production of Cuba and His Teddy Bear and to gain about 30 pounds (14 kg) to play Capone; according to De Palma, De Niro was "very concerned about the shape of his face for the part." The Untouchables began production in Chicago on August 18, 1986. Actual historical Chicago locations were featured in the movie.

A month after the film was released, De Palma downplayed his role on the film:

"Being a writer myself, I don't like to take credit for things I didn't do. I didn't develop this script. David [Mamet] used some of my ideas and he didn't use some of them. I looked upon it more clinically, as a piece of material that has to be shaped, with certain scenes here or there. But as for the moral dimension, that's more or less the conception of the script, and I just implemented it with my skills - which are well developed. It's good to walk in somebody else's shoes for a while. You get out of your own obsessions; you are in the service of somebody else's vision, and that's a great discipline for a director."

Although De Niro was De Palma's first choice to play Capone, the director met with Bob Hoskins to discuss the role. When De Niro took the part, De Palma mailed Hoskins a check for £20,000 with a "Thank You" note, which prompted Hoskins to call up De Palma and ask him if there were any more movies he didn't want him to be in.

Reception

The Untouchables opened on June 3, 1987 in 1,012 theatres where it grossed $10,023,094 on its opening weekend and ranked the sixth-highest opening weekend of 1987. It went on to make $76.2 million in North America. According to producer Art Linson, the polls conducted for the film showed that approximately 50% of the audience was women. "Ordinarily, a violent film attracts predominantly men, but this is also touching, about redemption and relationships and because of that the audience tends to forgive the excesses when it comes to violence".

The Untouchables was also a critical success. It received a mostly positive reception and has an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Vincent Canby, of The New York Times, gave the movie a glowing review, calling it "a smashing work" and saying it was "vulgar, violent, funny and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful". Roger Ebert, on the other hand, said, "The Untouchables has great costumes, great sets, great cars, great guns, great locations and a few shots that absolutely capture the Prohibition era. But it does not have a great script, great performances or great direction". Hal Hinson, in his review for the Washington Post, criticized De Palma's direction: "And somehow we're put off here by the spectacular stuff he throws up onto the screen. De Palma's storytelling instincts have given way completely to his interest in film as a visual medium. His only real concern is his own style". Time magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "Mamet's elegantly efficient script does not waste a word, and De Palma does not waste a shot. The result is a densely layered work moving with confident, compulsive energy".

Ebert singled out De Niro's scenes portraying Al Capone as the biggest disappointment of the film, while giving praise to Sean Connery's work. While he was voted first place in a Empire magazine historical poll for worst film accent, Connery was awarded the 1987 Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for his performance. Pauline Kael called it "a great audience movie—a wonderful potboiler." Time magazine ranked it as one of the best films of 1987.

Academy Awards

Award	Person
Won:
Best Actor in a Supporting Role	Sean Connery
Nominated:
Best Costume Design	Marilyn Vance
Best Score	Ennio Morricone
Best Art Direction - Set Decoration	Patrizia von Brandenstein William A. Elliott Hal Gausman

American Film Institute

• AFI's 100 Years...100 Movies - Nominated
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Thrills - Nominated
• AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains:
  • Al Capone - Nominated Villain
  • Eliot Ness - Nominated Hero
• AFI's 100 Years of Film Scores - Nominated
• AFI's 10 Top 10 - Nominated Gangster Film

Video game

A side-scrolling video game was released by Ocean Software in 1989 on ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64, MSX, Amiga, MS-DOS, and later on NES, and SNES.^{[citation needed]} Based loosely on the movie, the game plays out some of the more significant parts of the film. Set in Chicago, the primary goal of the game is to take down Al Capone's henchmen and eventually detain Capone.

See also

• The Untouchables (1957 book)
• The Untouchables (1959 TV series)
• The Untouchables (1993 TV series)

External links

• The Untouchables at the Internet Movie Database
• The Untouchables at AllRovi
• The Untouchables at Rotten Tomatoes
• The Untouchables at Box Office Mojo
• The Untouchables (Special Collector's Edition) Blu-ray Disc Review at HD-Report