Film Reviewed: The Untouchables
Director: Brian De Palma
Date Watched: 27 October 2021
jamesintexas rating: ***1/2
All Hail Sean Connery! Ever since his death last Halloween, I have wanted to revisit his films and his film persona. I was able to see most of his James Bond films last May, and others on my list for sure are Time Bandits, The Rock (!), and Marnie, a film he made with Hitchcock. But The Untouchables is cemented in my brain because, first, I am from Chicago, and Connery's brogue utterances of "That's THE Chicago WAY!" are a sort of cultural birthright and touchstone. Second, I remember watching that Academy Awards ceremony with my mom and dad, and I think it was the very first one that I ever saw. I cut out the picture from front page of the Sun-Times the next day of a bald Connery, aka James Bond, clutching the gold statue...possibly with Michael Douglas from Wall Street and Cher from Moonstruck also winning that night. I did not watch all of the Oscars, but wow, did I love seeing clips from movies that were above my pay grade that night: A Room With A View, The Last Emperor, and The Untouchables for sure. When you grow up in Chicagoland, you inherit the legacy of the Prohibition Era, the Capone worship, and the idea of corruption being endemic to the way of life in the Midwest. Not all good things. But as a great grandson of someone who supposedly ran a speakeasy on Madison Street in the city, De Palma's The Untouchables, with all of its style, grand almost operatic moments, seems like a heightened visit to this era and its complexity and gray.
This world is grounded in a brutal, vicious bombing of a pub early on; a child is killed, and in the wake of such horror, inflicted by a smarmy, ruthless Al Capone (Robert De Niro) during Prohibition, righteous crusader Elliott Ness arrives from the Feds to work with the Chicago PD on putting Capone out of business, a thankless task considering the corruption of that force (and the pervasiveness of alcohol in Chicago). Costner is wide-eyed and idealistic and needs the countering force of Sean Connery's Irish-American beat cop Jim Malone to challenge his ethics. "How far are you willing to go?" he asks Ness. A good question for all of us to consider.
Rounding out the cast is the great Andy Garcia as an Italian-American cop Stone who is an expert marksman and Charles Martin Smith as the nebbish but fully capable accountant turned fed. Their crackdown on Capone takes them to Canada for a glorious sequence involving stopping bootleggers on the international bridge with Mounties no less. Besides a loving look at the cars and clothes of the era, De Palma frequently constructs elaborate overhead crane shots to show an entire table of gangsters sitting together, the white tablecloth gleaming and waiting for the eventual contrast of spreading deep red blood. De Niro hams it up, I suppose, making Capone a blustery capitalist, a fearless crook capable of reaching deep into the police department and his own ranks to attack witnesses and cops at their homes. Things turn dark, and then darker, as De Palma examines what the violence and the threats do to straight arrow Ness. If things seem to just conveniently end up in the hands of Jim Malone (When Capone's bookkeeper will be at the train station? Where are the best places to do a raid?), it is easily overlooked when there are such sequences as the train station shootout, an homage to Potemkin with racheting tension and dizzying movements. Ennio Morricone's score is a standout here as well, infusing the film with heroic moments, brassy and brash but also sad and evocative of the cost of this kind of escalation. The villains are expertly played: scary, lethal, and bold. I am still wrestling with the final moments of the film. Ness seems prepared to go way beyond where he was at the beginning of the film. Does he cross a line to get Capone? Is it worth it? And the film seems content to paint Ness not as an ideologue at the end when he muses the end of Prohibition. "Maybe, I'll get a drink," he smiles, suggesting that that the fight against Capone is not purely about the law or that maybe the law is malleable, so he must be too?
In a supporting turn, Connery backs up Costner fully, letting him shine, but he gets his moments. His is the character that I wanted more time with. Why is he a beat cop at his age? How does he have so many relationships with the underworld? Where is his family? Why does he sign on to work with Ness despite knowing, probably, what it will entail? Connery shines here, and, yes, maybe the Best Supporting Actor statue was a lifetime achievement award for James Bond. But spitting out "that's the Chicago WAY!" to Costner, seated in a church, shot from a low-angle with the intricate ceiling behind them...that's movie magic. All credit to playwright and director David Mamet for these moments in the script.
