The Untouchables is one of those happy accidents where two interesting talents, looking for a paycheck, actually did pretty damn great work. The idea of the picture, an update of who-knows-how-many-books and the popular TV show, is simple: Treasury Officer Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) wants to destroy Al Capone’s (Robert DeNiro) murderous criminal empire, and Al Capone wants to kill Ness and his crew of “untouchables” for wanting to destroy his criminal empire. It’s an easy bullet-riddled good guys versus bad guys story, and the talents in question – screenwriter David Mamet and director Brian De Palma – were already very well established, and had proven themselves more than capable of such an assignment; they could clock in, clock out, deposit the check, and begin work on the next Sexual Perversity in Chicago or Blow Out in relative comfort.
And, unless I’m dramatically misunderstanding or misreading something, that’s about how The Untouchables was received (even Pauline Kael, one of De Palma’s most fevered admirers, more or less called it a well-executed doodle). And, let’s be clear – that’s obviously how the picture was intended – as well-orchestrated formula. But intention and execution, as we know, can, and usually are, different, particularly in major personalities or talents, which Mamet and De Palma certainly are.
The constraints of the assignment – must be big, macho, exciting – inspires Mamet especially to do some of his best work. Playing to people who couldn’t give a whit about his theatrical rep, Mamet is forced to write real dialogue – as he did in The Verdict – in place of that clipped, mannered profane rat-tat for which he is so known; and that frees Mamet’s invention – this picture still plays to his ideas of the world being a battleground for the most debased and powerful, but it also forces him, in the bond of the untouchables and in Ness’ earnest anguish over breaking the law – to play broad and conventional – to write audience pleasing beats. One of the best moments in Mamet’s career is a violent, disturbingly funny exchange in a hideout after a gunfight where Ness’ right-hand, the gruff, basically disgraced Irish flat-foot Malone (Sean Connery) blows the head off a corpse to intimidate a hood (who doesn’t know the victim is already dead) into giving up pertinent knowledge; this moment has Mamet’s aggression, but it forces him to wear his ambitions a little lighter on his sleeve. And it’s scarier (and more truthful) than anything in Perversity.
De Palma is a greater artist than Mamet, so he’s risking greater handicap with The Untouchables, and, yes, the picture lacks the sophisticated parody/satire dimensions of his Carrie, Dressed to Kill and Blow Out; but this also frees De Palma, as it did in The Fury, to create a world that reflects visually what is sometimes awkwardly spelled out in the scripts he writes for himself. The Untouchables has a sinister night-time tone that keeps you off-balance, preventing the picture from being another gung-ho revenge fantasy: we sense our heroes – as we do in certain Lang, and as Christopher Nolan was desperate to make you sense in The Dark Knight – dipping into another world, one that’s chaotic, violent and morally corrosive. This is spelled out literally early on, when Malone stops Ness before they break down a door into their first successful liquor raid: there’s no turning back.
Playing on just the surface, De Palma goes almost as far as he does in some of his more free-associative dream horror pictures. The Untouchables plays as a horror picture itself – elegant action beats (the famous Odessa Steps quotation basically upstages John Woo’s entire subsequent career) are jarringly interrupted with garish, extreme violence that forces the viewer to take the picture as more than rah-rah. Ennio Morricone’s score, overbearing in a way that ultimately works for the picture, teases you with a conventional “up” theme only to twist it for the frequent murders.
The surface allows De Palma blunt, cruel jokes: the juxtaposition of Capone’s proclamation that murder is bad business with the obligatory murder of a child to justify vengeance; the later juxtaposition of Malone’s prolonged murder (which is established with virtuoso peeper tracking shots borrowed from basically every movie De Palma made beforehand) with Capone’s weeping at an opera. Over and over again, whether purposeful or not, De Palma and Mamet drive home a point that’s mature for most gangster pictures: that the law of the time is just the law of the time, and that violent irreversible acts are committed to serve mere burps in legal procedure and popular taste.
As an action picture, The Untouchables is brutally efficient, occasionally brilliant: Malone’s death, with a bloody, ragged Connery crawling across his glass splinted floor, has a marvelously tactile physicality – you feel each of Malone’s tortured drags. The murder of another Untouchable (Charles Martin Smith, the nerd in American Graffiti, and a nerd in Starman) in an elevator is clipped and matter of fact, with an emotionally overwhelming final close up of Martin’s face before facing oblivion.
The best scene in the movie belongs in the classic De Palma meta-scratch-book: a sophisticated reprise and thematic reversal of the opening chase in Vertigo. Ness, pursuing Capone’s right-hand Nitti (Billy Drago), resists a murderous urge to plug him as he dangles from the side of building (the images are near, as I remember them, quotes of the Hitchcock shots), pulling him up to safety so he can arrest him and follow all of the procedure that everyone on both sides of the law has mocked throughout the entire film. At this point, through another Hitchcock device (a matchbook), Ness already knows that Nitti killed Malone, but is swallowing it. Nitti’s sneering parody of Ness’ virtues (“he died like a stuck Irish pig”) brings Ness to what the picture (indicative of Mamet) associates as “truth”: that Nitti won’t be punished unless he’s killed outside of a rigged standard of law (this is verbally reaffirmed in most everything Malone says, including his oft-quoted recitation of “the Chicago Way”). That theory is reductive and morally debatable at best, but De Palma’s obsessive need to push it to the breaking point is electrifying, and it brings out new dimensions in Costner who, until this point, has been doing an endearing, somewhat thankless, Gary Cooper routine. Ness, broken, throws the animal (Drago is a tantalizing object in this picture, an even thinner, more reptilian Henry Silva) off the roof, leading to two chillingly mercenary punch-lines (“did he sound like that?”, “he’s in the car”).
The Untouchables has its off moments (you miss De Palma’s parody in the Ness family scenes) and the ending, in order to be “happy”, intentionally misinterprets a great final Mamet joke: a reporter asks Ness if he’s heard the rumor that prohibition might be repealed, and what he were to do if it would be. Ness’s reply, that he’d have a drink, is played as the final grace note of a movie in which all the bad guys are where they should be – but it contradicts the darker, subterranean truths of the picture – that these people, like countless in history, ultimately died for nothing. The Untouchables anticipates the more literal expressionism (I know) that would fully emerge in De Palma’s Casualties of War; flaws aside, it’s a nearly classic gangster picture. (Far superior to De Palma’s overbearing, retrospectively overrated Scarface.)
