This is my contribution to the DePalma Blog-a-Thon
"The Untouchables" was the first DePalma film I had ever seen. I was a very impressionable 11 or 12 year old with a love of films. I had seen most of everything Spielberg had done up to that point, however I had not seen my first Scorsese. I was kinda in the middle of popular cinema and more serious cinema. I had heard of "The Untouchables" because of my love of gangster films. In my world Al Capone and Eliot Ness were the iconic figures of good and evil. I wanted to see the film because at that time both Kevin Costner and Sean Connery were two of my favorite movie stars and to see them in a film together was a dream come true for a little kid. However I had also discovered the term of a director, and while I was still unsure as to what their job was, I had this notion that they were the guys in charge. I had heard of Brian DePalma before, but I wasn't sure what to expect from him. My parents probably thought I was too young for "The Untouchables" and maybe I was,but that didn't stop me from seeing it behind their backs.
The moment I saw "The Untouchables" with that great opening credit sequence and the memorable Ennio Morricone score which was exciting and heart pounding, I knew I was in for something great.
The film of course starts with the first scene of Al Capone (Robert De Niro) in a barber chair during a press conference. DePalma's camera is seen from high up and it cranes down to De Niro's face as the barber takes off his hot towel in a nice reveal. I remember De Niro's performance being rather brood, a nice choice for this kind of picture. His Capone is larger than life, sort of a comic villain that you love to hate. There's even a scene with Capone in his bed reading the newspaper about Ness being foiled, and you can sense his comic presence from his over the top chuckle and his giant cigar.
We soon get the Eliot Ness as played by Kevin Costner, who has taken some flack for his performance being bland, even as a kid I couldn't help notice this. However how else are we suppose to see this young by the book young man turn into the "What are you prepared to do" law enforcer he becomes? Costner was probably the only leading man at the time who could make this "too good to be true" lawman believable.
After one failure, Ness soon recruits his infamous band of "Untouchables". He starts with the most memorable character in the film Malone (Sean Connery), an aging beat cop who teaches Ness that it will take more than just being honest to beat Capone. This role of course became a crowning moment in Connery's acting career for which he won the Oscar. He commands each scene he's in, and of course after his death, you can really feel his presence sorely missed.
The other members of the small band are Any Garcia's rookie cop Stone, who is more or less there to represent the precision of an ace gunman, and Charles Martin Smith's accountant Oscar Wallace who doesn't exactly fit in with the rest of the tough guys, but can carry his own weight. In one of the film's many set pieces by the U.S./Canadian border, it is Wallace who really goes all gung ho when the cards are down.
The trick "The Untouchables" had to accomplish was doing a cops and gangster picture like it had never been done before. As a boy, I was familiar with James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart films thinking they were the be all and end all of the genre, but this was the first time I was in DePalma territory. I don't think DePalma accomplished anything new with this film, in the sense that he had done some of this before in his past films. However the difference here was the budget, DePalma got a little bit of breathing room, and this was a great way for him to show off to a wider audience.
The first sequence that got me rattled was the first big one which included a little girl who is killed while holding a briefcase containing a bomb. The sequence happens very early one in the film, and it's like DePalma is telling us, this will be the kind of blockbuster where no one is safe. It's unsettling, and indeed as the picture moves along we will see more innocent blood be shed, which is one way this film does separate itself from other mainstream movies.
However despite all the blood shed, DePalma is the kind of director who sympathizes with the audience, he knows when too much is too much, and that is no more prevalent than in the death of Wallace. DePalma does a quick cut away just before Wallace is shot, so we never see his murder. Though the murder scene itself is rather graphic, DePalma doesn't dwell on Wallace too much to make in unbearable, just enough for the audience to feel the loss of someone we've come to like.
Malone's death happens in a more poetic, and ironic way. We are set up with one of DePalma's great stalker sequences, where the camera becomes the view point of the man sent to kill Malone. We see Malone alone in his apartment. From our viewpoint, it doesn't look like he suspects anything, however by the time the sequence ends, Malone surprises us when he pulls out a gun and points it to the killer. We think he has the drop on the bad guys, but alas, his fate awaits him from a second gunman waiting in the ally.
Of course nothing can be said about this film without referencing the main set piece at the train station. After budget constraints forced DePalma and his crew to rethink the sequence, he pulls from his film knowledge the Odessa Steps sequence from "Potemkin". DePalma re imagines Eisenstein's vision for his famous shoot out, and the scene becomes the most memorable sequence in the film. As a kid not knowing who Eisenstein was, I was under the impression DePalma made the whole thing up himself. It certainly made an impression on me, I remember sweating with anticipation as to what was going to happen, and the sigh of relief when it was all over. Not many films made me feel that way when I was a kid.
When the film ended I was completely satisfied, I thought "The Untouchables" was a masterpiece, I remember watching it again as soon as it was over. Even though it was probably the most graphic and violent movie for my age, I didn't feel effected by it. The film was an old fashioned gangster story, and I felt sophisticated enough to understand what was real and what was fake. This was way before I was to see Scorsese films and "The Godfather" where violence was depicted more realistically. DePalma uses it in a way that's operatic and it services the outlandish and unrealistic world he created.
Now after returning to "The Untouchables" after so many years, I still enjoy it. It is probably DePalma's most accessible film. It doesn't try to redefine the genre the way the Coens did a few years later with "Miller's Crossing", but it does tell an old story in a new way. Today I don't consider it my favorite DePalma film or his best, but that's only because I've seen more of what he's done since, and what he did before. What I can say is "The Untouchables" was the right film to come along for me at that time. I was young and in love with the movies, DePalma found that primal thirst I had for something new and different, and even if I didn't know it then, it opened up a new cinematic world for me.
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