The Untouchables

Although this film was well-received at the time, earning Sean Connery a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as NYC cop, Jimmy Malone, it is a slick-looking but empty and heavily sentimentalized production. It has plenty of talent behind the camera, including David Mamet scripting, Ennio Morricone doing the score, De Palma's regular cinematographer Stephen H. Burrum  and, of course, De Palma directing but never rises above being a very expensive puppet show with Giorgio Armani wardrobing.

One of the reasons Coppola's The Godfather (1972) of which this film is clearly in awe, was so outstanding was that it it felt wholly real. The Untouchables fails for the opposite reason. There are distinctively edge-of-the-seat De Palma moments which are exciting, particularly the shoot-out at the Chicago train station with its notorious but amusing quotation of the Odessa Steps scene from Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Robert De Niro does a commendable job of being a very nasty Al Capone (including a memorable scene involving a baseball bat) as is Billy Drago as Capone hit-man, Frank Nitti, but for the most part its meticulous production values swamp dramatic conviction.

Kevin Costner, still a relative unknown at this time, does what he does best, play the All-American family man, but his Ness is an entirely one-dimensional character (he would manage much, much better in a similar role as Jim Garrison in Oliver Stone's JFK, 1991). So too for the other leads as written by Mamet and/or envisioned by De Palma - they are all stereotypical creations (a failed attempt to emulate the clearly demarcated characterisations of the four Corleones) - the veteran Irish cop (Connery with a Scottish accent), the tough Italian kid from the Bronx (Andy Garcia), the homely accountant (Charles Martin Smith). The four come together in the most effortless of ways and step out to fight Evil in what amounts to an overblown Boy's Own Adventure story steeped in Morricone's syrupy score which cuts in and out of the visuals with noticeable inconsistency.  And how a major studio production can have a continuity clanger of the order of Connery's now done up, now undone, now done up again collar button is beyond me.

Patricia Clarkson made her big screen debut as Ness's wife

 

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