Watching the Detectives: Kevin Costner is Eliot Ness in The Untouchables
Sometimes when a group of incredibly talented individuals join forces the end result can be less than the sum of its parts, but once in a while you get a film where everyone is performing at the top of their game. The Untouchables is just such a film.
Brian De Palma’s career had stalled after Scarface, with neither the Hitchcock-with-added-sex thriller Body Double nor mob comedy Wise Guys delivering the goods. With The Untouchables though he was back on form, his show stopping visual flourishes married to David Mamet’s intelligent script and compose- supreme Ennio Morricone’s score.
That he’s got a damn fine cast doesn’t do any harm either. Kevin Costner is a model of restraint as Ness, perhaps a little too much restraint, as he often seems coldly unemotional, but this was the film that propelled him onto the A list. Ness is a bit dull though, which invites those around him to steal the limelight.
Charles Martin Smith connects far better with the audience, with his accountant-to-shotgun-toting-treasury-agent transformation adding a touch of humour. Caught here between jobbing TV actor and stardom, Andy Garcia shows how he made the leap – the camera loves him and he loves the camera. He only gets two big moments, his characters introduction and his timely intervention at train station, but he makes the most of them, holding his own opposite an old pro like Sean Connery. He also gets a well written intro, which never hurts if you’re trying to make a name for yourself.
The real star performers though are Connery as veteran cop Jim Malone and Robert De Niro as Al Capone. Connery won an Oscar for his performance but he’s no more convincing as an Irishman than he was a Russian, a Spaniard or an Arab. He is convincing as the last honest cop in Chicago and that’s more important than putting on an accent. Connery’s a star who commands the screen, you just except him regardless of what he sounds like, any Irishness in his performance coming from the rhythm of Mamet’s dialogue not the actor.
De Niro is the opposite of Connery, he becomes the part. As Capone he’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing, the fancy clothes and witty repartee with the press hiding a vicious thug who’ll club you to death with a baseball bat without a second thought. Capone is evil, an evil born of greed and power, and De Niro’s performance is the dark heart of the film. It’s also arguably his best of the ‘80s.
But it’s the films set pieces that linger longest in the memory - the Untouchables, ahorse, intercepting Capone’s men at the Canadian border makes you wonder what a De Palma western might be like, while Malone’s death scene is a feast of inventive camera work that effectively wrong foots the viewer. It’s the train station shootout that towers above the rest though, with a build up as tense as any Leone standoff, and Leone favourite Morricone adding his touch to the nail biting sense of disquiet. It also features one of the best slow-motion action sequences ever put on film, drawing the scene out to an almost unbearable extent. I’ve seen the film several times now but it still has me gripping the arm of my chair!
Brian De Palma’s career has been up and down since The Untouchables in 1987, only reaching similar heights with Carlito’s Way in 1993 and hitting an all-time low in 2000 with Mission to Mars. IMDb has The Untouchables: Capone Rising down as in pre-production. Bad idea? Probably but I can’t help being a little excited at the prospect of De Palma revisiting Chicago, particularly with Morricone attached. Strangely the only casting mentioned is Gerard Butler as a young Malone, another Scot playing an Irishman.
[...] sex symbol, he’s always seemed far more suited to roles like the arrow straight Eliot Ness in The Untouchables (made the same year) than this or Bull Durham. Yet both films did very well for him at the box [...]
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