The Untouchables (1987)

I have been happily viewing my way though the box set of the first season of The Untouchables television series, including the original two-part Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse pilot, directed by the great Phil Karlson and theatrically released as The Scarface Mob. (I wrote that up as a "Noir of the Week" at The Blackboard and will post it here as soon as I can unearth it; that board's online archives don't go back very far, and I can't seem to find it on my own computer.)

I thought I should take a look at Brian De Palma's 1987 film version of The Untouchables, which I had never seen. It is reasonably entertaining but nothing great; Leonard Maltin gives it four stars and I'd maybe give it two (largely on the basis of Sean Connery's fine supporting performance). The aesthetic of late Fifties television serves this material so much better than the aesthetic of late Eighties blockbuster film-making! The celebrated noir look of The Untouchables series lends it an atmosphere and intimacy that the movie can't touch. You are drawn into that world.

With his moral rectitude and his sharp way of wearing a three-piece suit, Kevin Costner is spot-on casting for Eliot Ness, a worthy successor to Robert Stack. But Robert De Niro's Al Capone is strictly a cartoon-style villain. By having Ness confront Capone early on, the movie loses the great moment at the end of The Scarface Mob when Neville Stack's Capone doesn't even recognize the man who brought him down. But then, the movie trades subtlety for broad effects with consistency. The television series had its own tommy-gun garishness, to be sure, but nothing like as stupid as the confrontation between Ness and Frank Nitti in the film, which is played strictly for crowd-pleasing and is an insult to the historical Ness, who didn't push foes off buildings. (I'm a big admirer of the real Ness; I use a photograph of him as my avatar at several web bulletin boards.)

This has to be the most anonymous film by Brian De Palma that I have ever seen. The riff on the famous baby carriage scene from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin is a fun, stylish bit, but most of the rest of the film could have been helmed by any competent Hollywood traffic manager. The films of DePalma's that he gets knocked around for by critics, the supposed "Hitchcock rip-offs" -- those are actually personal, obsessive film-making, the movies that De Palma will be remembered for. The Untouchables was a paycheck for him.