The Untouchables (1987 film)

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The Untouchables
Directed by	Brian De Palma
Produced by	Art Linson Executive Producer: Raymond Hartwick
Written by	Original Novel: Oscar Fraley Eliot Ness Screenplay: David Mamet
Starring	Kevin Costner Sean Connery Andy Garcia Charles Martin Smith Robert De Niro Patricia Clarkson Billy Drago
Music by	Ennio Morricone
Cinematography	Stephen H. Burum
Editing by	Jerry Greenberg (as Gerald B. Greenberg) Bill Pankow
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release date(s)	June 2, 1987
Running time	119 min.
Country	USA
Language	English
Budget	USD $25,000,000
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

The Untouchables is a 1987 film, directed by Brian De Palma, based on the 1959 ABC television series, which, in turn, was based on Eliot Ness's autobiographical account of his efforts to bring Al Capone to justice. It was adapted by David Mamet, and stars Kevin Costner as Ness, Sean Connery as Irish-American beat cop James Malone, and Robert De Niro as Capone. Connery received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film. The film became a solid hit, grossing over $76 million dollars domestically.

The film, like the television series, exaggerates the role Ness and his men played in the capture of Al Capone (most notably his involvement in Capone's trial and eventual conviction on tax evasion charges).

[edit] Plot

At the beginning of the movie, Capone tries to portray himself as a nice man who is simply giving the thirsty people of Chicago what they want. He even says to a reporter "There is violence in Chicago, but not by me and not by anybody I employ. You know why? Because it's not good business." But Capone actually supplied poor quality liquor at high prices, and backed up his business with hired guns. As Capone is being interviewed, a ten-year-old girl in another part of the city is killed by a bomb, planted in a cafe that had refused to buy Capone's alcohol.

Treasury Department agent Eliot Ness is put in charge of leading the crusade against Capone and his empire. His first lead is a warehouse suspected of carrying crates of Canadian whisky; however when Ness raids the warehouse, he finds that the crates are full of Japanese umbrellas. A photographer snaps a picture of the embarrassing moment, turning Ness into a laughing stock in the newspaper.

Frustrated by his failure caused by the treachery of members of the police force he is assigned to lead, Ness encounters a veteran beat cop named Jim Malone (Sean Connery), untouched by Capone's pay-offs. Malone reluctantly joins Ness and becomes his mentor, teaching him never to trust anyone in the corrupt police department. He tells Ness that he knows where to find the honest men who are just as determined to see Capone put out of business. That is, the recruits at the academy (Malone gave the analogy of avoiding rotten apples in the barrel by picking them off the tree). After being assigned an accountant officer named Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith) and hiring an Italian sharpshooter named George Stone, né Giuseppe Petri (Andy Garcia), straight from the academy, Ness has a team he believes can combat Capone without fear of betrayal.

Their first raid takes place at nearest U.S. Post Office, the storeroom of which is being used to store crates of illegal liquor. Ness is initially doubtful and alarmed that liquor would be in a building administered by a public office, but Malone simply storms in and takes the place by force. They raid the post office and nab all the workers without a single man injured (except for the overseer that Malone scuffed up).

Ness soon becomes a formidable opponent to Capone's empire, arousing the mob boss's concern. At first, Capone attempts to bribe Ness through a local alderman, but Ness quickly establishes that he and his men will not be touched by cozy offers. After receiving a death threat from Capone's hitman Frank Nitti (Billy Drago) outside his home, Ness sends his wife and two children into hiding while he and the Untouchables continue the battle against Capone.

The Untouchables: George Stone (Garcia), Jim Malone (Connery), Eliot Ness (Costner), Oscar Wallace (Martin Smith).

The team's greatest success comes when they intercept a shipment of liquor being smuggled across the U.S.-Canadian border. They also capture Capone's bagman George, who can testify against Capone and have him put away for 28 years thanks to Oscar's detection of Capone's failure to pay any taxes to the government for years. If George will verify in court that the coded ledgers provide evidence that Capone maintains an income without paying any taxes, then the infamous Mafia kingpin could be put away for a much simpler charge.

An enraged Capone realizes he has no choice but to have his bagman, George, killed, a task he leaves to Nitti. Disguised as an elevator operator at the police station, Nitti kills both George and Oscar Wallace, scrawling 'Touchable' on the wall in blood. With George dead, Ness thinks the case against Capone is lost, because the district attorney will not prosecute Capone without a witness. Malone convinces Ness to stall the D.A. from dropping the case and thinks that the corrupt police chief, an old friend of Malone's, knows where the next best witness is.

The other witness is Capone's bookkeeper Walter Payne. Capone plans on keeping Payne out of Ness's hands, and assigns his sideman Bowtie the task of escorting Payne out of Chicago. After a violent fistfight, the corrupt police chief tells Malone that he knows where Payne is. Capone is determined to silence the Untouchables once and for all, and orders Malone killed. Nitti and another henchman go to do the job. Nitti waits in the alley while the other hitman enters Malone's home with a switchblade. Malone notices and begins to crank a gramophone, but as the hitman approaches he pulls out a sawed-off shotgun and exclaims, "Heh, isn't that just like a Wop? Brings a knife to a gunfight. Get outta here you Dego bastard! Go on, get your ass out of here!" He notices Nitti, but a hail of Thompson bullets rip into Malone's torso. Ness and Stone arrive in time to find Malone mortally wounded and near death. Malone manages to give Ness the piece of paper that gives the time and train on which Payne is travelling to Florida. He demands of Ness "What are you prepared to do?" before he dies.

Ness and Stone find Payne at Chicago's Union Station, and also encounter several armed Capone hoods. A shootout occurs in which several innocent bystanders are injured, and all the Capone hoods are killed. This was one of the most dramatic scenes, where a mother loses her pram with her baby and it tumbles down stairs; Stone manages to throw himself in front of the pram just in time, as well as getting into position to shoot the hood who is holding Payne hostage. Much of this sequence, including the pram, was inspired by the "Odessa Steps sequence" of the Soviet movie Battleship Potemkin. In the end, Capone is arrested by the IRS and Secret Service, much to Ness' relief.

Capone is finally brought to trial. During the trial, Ness recognizes Nitti and notices that he is carrying a gun in court. He orders the bailiff to take him outside. Nitti empties the contents of his pockets onto a table, which include a note from the Mayor of Chicago stating that Nitti is allowed to have the gun and to show him all due respect. Ness angrily complies with the order to give him back the gun, but states that Nitti will not be entering the courtroom again. Ness takes Nitti's matchbook when he wants to light a cigarette, but when he lights the match he sees Malone's address written on the inside of the matchbook, Ness realizes that he is confronting his mentor's murderer.

Nitti pulls his gun, shooting and wounding the bailiff, who tells Ness to take his Smith & Wesson revolver. Ness pursues Nitti to the roof of the court building. Foolishly, Nitti attempts to escape by using a rope and tackle to climb down the side of the court building. The rope isn't long enough to get him to the street, and Nitti winds up taunting Ness to save him. Ness originally considers shooting Nitti to avenge Malone's murder, but common sense prevails and he pulls the hitman up.

Once safe again, the oversure Nitti makes a smirking remark that Malone "died screaming like a stuck Irish pig," confident that he will "beat the rap" on the murder charges thanks to his affiliation with Capone. An enraged Ness seizes Nitti and throws him off the court building roof where he smacks into a street car, killing him. He makes the remark as Nitti falls, "Did he sound anything like that?!"

Stone finds a piece of paper in Nitti's coat that lists the names of the jurors. As it turns out, they've all been bribed. At first, the judge refuses to do anything but behind closed doors, Ness tells the judge that the judge's name is also listed in the payroll - evidence from the border case. Ness' claim is untrue, but he has correctly guessed that the judge's refusal to act on the evidence of bribery is because the judge was in fact on Capone's payroll. Falling for Ness' bluff, the judge orders Capone's jury switched with another one that has been hearing a divorce trial. Capone furiously attacks his lawyer when he is unable to think of anything to perturb the switch, but is restrained. Capone's lawyer, realizing the loss of their advantage and partially inspired by Capone's attack, asks to change his client's plea to 'guilty'. Ness taunts Capone with a quote he originally had thrown in his face after trying to confront the mob boss in his hotel suite.

Later, as Ness packs up his Chicago office, he sees the Saint Jude pendant that Malone had carried with him for many years. Shaking hands with Stone, Ness disagrees when Stone says that Ness should be the one to keep it, that Malone would've wanted his pupil to have it. "He would have wanted a cop to have it," Ness insists, because Jude is the patron saint of cops. Out on the street, a reporter wishes to have a word from the man who put Capone away, but Ness merely remarks he was just there "when the wheel went 'round." When the reporter mentions that Prohibition is due to be repealed, he asks what Ness might do then? "I think I'll have a drink."

[edit] Box office

• Opening weekend U.S. gross: $10,023,094
• Total U.S. box office gross: $76,270,454

[edit] Behind-the-scenes

The Untouchables was filmed in Chicago, Illinois; Hardin, Montana; and the surrounding areas of Great Falls, Montana.

[edit] Differences between the film and real life

• In the film, there are only four "Untouchables": Ness, Jim Malone, Oscar Wallace, and George Stone. However, according to Ness' biography, there were actually ten of them, including himself. Malone, Wallace and Stone are fictional characters. Malone's real-life counterpart may have been Martin Lahart, an Irish-American from a family of cops who served as Ness's second-in-command. However, Ness and Lahart were both in their 20's at the time of the Capone investigation, and Lahart was born in the U.S., not Ireland. According to Charles Martin Smith in the Special Collector's Edition DVD feature The Script, The Cast, Wallace, the bespectacled agent with the accounting background, was loosely modeled on Frank Wilson, the Treasury Agent who commanded the team of IRS investigators who put together the tax evasion case against Capone.

Eliot Ness himself.

• While Ness and his real Untouchables did battle with Capone's organization, they had little to do with assembling the tax evasion case that would ultimately send Capone to prison. That case was put together by the criminal investigations unit of the Internal Revenue Service separately from Ness' efforts, though some of the evidence used to assemble that case included financial records seized by Ness during raids. Similarly the IRS unit would pass information on to Ness's squad about the location of breweries, stills, etc.

• Ness's main strategy in his war with the Capone mob was raiding breweries. Breweries represented a major investment of capital and putting one out of commission simultaneously constituted an immediate major loss of assets due to the confiscation of the equipment, and a future major loss of income due to the crippling effect the raids had on the Mob's ability to provide a saleable product. In the film, Ness and his squad make one raid on a liquor warehouse, and intercept an international shipment of liquor coming across the Canadian border, but do not raid one single brewery.

• Contrary to the meetings in the film, the real Capone and Ness never actually met face to face before the trial of Capone.

• The baseball scene in which Capone bludgeons a mobster was somewhat fictional, although there was a similar incident like this in 1929 where he bludgeoned three mobsters to death; John Scalise, Albert Anselmi, and Joseph "Hop Toad" Giunta.

• Two of the four Untouchables are killed in the movie. In real life, none of the actual Untouchables were killed, though some were injured during their battles against the mob. Frank Basile, an associate of Ness's prior to the formation of the squad, was killed, but he was not officially an agent. Of note, the two Untouchables who are killed drink or prepare to drink alcohol at some point in the film.

• During the trial scene, Nitti is shown to have bribed the jury of Capone's trial into acquitting Capone of all charges. The judge then substitutes another jury for the tainted one. (This makes little sense, as, in the film, the trial is well underway at the time of the jury-switch, meaning the new jury would be asked to decide a trial in which they'd missed the bulk of the evidence and testimony.) In reality, Nitti was ruling Capone's crumbling empire, while enforcers attempted to tamper with the pool of potential jurors that had been assembled before the trial began. The judge then replaced the pool of potential jurors with another pool that had been assembled for a different trial.

• The judge in the trial is depicted as a grafter, who only switches juries after being threatened with public exposure of his corruption. In fact, the judge in the Capone trial, James Wilkerson, had a well-deserved reputation for probity and integrity, and the idea for switching the jury pools prior to the beginning of the trial was entirely his.

• In the film, Capone's lawyer pleads his client guilty over his client's vehement protests. In real life, Capone pled not guilty, and the trial went to verdict. A defense lawyer in a criminal trial would not be allowed to plead guilty on behalf of his client without the client's consent.

• The final confrontation between Ness and Nitti, in which the latter falls to his death, is entirely fiction. In fact, Nitti spent nearly six years running the empire after the fall of Capone, and he committed suicide in March 1943 upon learning of his possible jail sentence. The Capone minion who was discovered carrying a gun in court, and who was later found to have a list of the jury pool in his pocket, was Phil D'Andrea, not Nitti. And the discovery led to a quiet arrest, not a rooftop shootout.

• In the film, Ness and his squad are referred to as "Treasury Agents." In fact, at the time of the Capone investigation, the Bureau of Prohibition, the agency Ness worked for, was part of the Department of Justice, and had been since 1930.

• In the film Ness is depicted as a family man with a wife, a daughter, and a son on the way. In real life, the thrice-married Ness was a bachelor during most of the Capone investigation. He only had one child, a son he adopted with his third wife, long after his law enforcement career had ended.

[edit] Trivia

• Producer Art Linson loved the first draft of David Mamet's screenplay, but asked if they could have more Capone. Mamet responded by writing the infamous baseball bat scene, which is loosely based upon an actual Capone act.
• Robert DeNiro, whom director Brian de Palma had worked with in the film Greetings, was the first choice to play Al Capone. When DeNiro turned him down, de Palma cast a reasonable second-choice, British actor Bob Hoskins. However, de Palma and producer Art Linson were determined to get DeNiro, and when he agreed after all, Hoskins was released from his contract. Later, Hoskins received a check through the mail for $200,000. He rang de Palma up and asked if he had “any other films you don't want me to appear in.”
• The shoot-out at Union Station is heavily inspired by the "Odessa Steps sequence" from The Battleship Potemkin. It features all five forms of montage: Metric, Rhythmic, Tonal, Overtonal, and Intellectual
• Al Capone was known for wearing silk underwear, so Robert DeNiro did likewise to get the "feel" of the role and also gained 20 pounds, approximately 1/3 of what he gained for Raging Bull.
• The opera which is playing towards the end of the film is Leoncavallo's Pagliacci.
• During a special week of Late Night with Conan O'Brien filmed in Chicago, there was a segment that featured the show's announcer Joel Godard visiting the locations of famous films set in Chicago. It was in one of these episodes that he visited Chicago's Union Station to reenact the movie's baby carriage sequence at the station's famous steps. Godard was placed in a large baby carriage and was dropped from the top of the stairs (it was obvious a dummy used in the actual drop, as the carriage flipped over and appeared to crush Godard's waist, while being dragged down the stairs slowly).
• Sean Connery succeeded Michael Caine as the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor winner. Connery and Caine appeared together in the film The Man Who Would Be King (1975).

[edit] Academy awards

[edit] Further reading

• Tucker, Kenneth. Eliot Ness and the Untouchables: The Historical Reality and the Film and Television Depictions. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2000. ISBN 0-7864-0772-7

[edit] External links

• The Untouchables at the Internet Movie Database
• The "Untouchables" Rotten Tomatoes Page