"If Capone Puts One Of Your's In The Hospital, You Put One Of His In The Morgue"

Rating: 7/10 (22 January 2009)

Not that I'm complaining mind you because The Untouchables is a quality motion picture that got Sean Connery an Oscar for a lifetime of work, but one fine day we just might get the real story of Eliot Ness and his Untouchable squad of Treasury agents. For those who are fans of Brian DePalma's film it's no more accurate than the famous Untouchable series in the Fifties or its counterpart in the Nineties.
The plain truth is that Eliot Ness's operations against Al Capone's liquor supply did hurt him economically somewhat, but hardly slowed down his operation in Chicago. As for the income tax conviction that eventually did land Capone in Alcatraz, it was accomplished by the hard working accountants in US Attorney George W. Johnson's office. In the film that is the Clifton James character and Ness and his squad did work for him, but Charles Martin Smith's character would not have been an Untouchable.
Whatever else Ness was, he was a master of generating good publicity for his work, the same way J. Edgar Hoover was, or Thomas E. Dewey, right down to Rudolph Giuliani in our time. That is in fact, part of a good crime fighter's job, the more people know of your successful good work, the more cooperation you get from the public. When Ness who went on to become the Chief of Police in Cleveland and then unsuccessful Republican candidate for Mayor of same, his career and finances took a nose dive. Just before he died he worked with writer Oscar Fraley on a memoir of his work and this became the cornerstone of The Untouchables franchise. Very much like what Wyatt Earp did just before he died, giving interviews for an authorized biography by Stuart Lake which became the basis for all the Wyatt Earp films done since the Thirties.
Unlike the original TV series The Untouchables, Eliot Ness's Scandinavian background as versus the Italian Al Capone is made much of in this film. Kevin Costner is your basic good guy and Robert DeNiro joins a great list of actors like Rod Steiger, Neville Brand, and Jason Robards, Jr. in interpreting the volatile crime boss of Chicago who has come down in legend himself.
Costner's a Boy Scout in this business and as Sean Connery says to him, those kind of rules are out the window in dealing with people like Al Capone. His bit of philosophy given to Costner when Costner recruits him for The Untouchables is the title of the review. Connery plays an honest patrolman of Irish descent who hates dishonesty, but also don't think a little prejudice against the Italian Capone isn't involved in his thinking as well. Jimmy Malone is a broad and expansive part that Sean Connery can work wonders with.
To be honest I don't think The Untouchables is Connery's best work, one friend has told me The Name of The Rose is his favorite, another has said Woman Of Straw is his favorite. My personal favorite among Sean Connery's performances is the incredibly neglected The Molly Maguires. But like John Wayne's True Grit, Sean Connery's Oscar is for the work of a lifetime for a man who may be the most well known international film star we've ever had.
Now Billy Drago's Frank Nitti is a performance that will leave you chilled for days and susceptible to pneumonia. That it's far from the real Frank Nitti and that Nitti did not end the way Drago does in the film is irrelevant. But that's just another inaccuracy of the film.
Brian DePalma wasn't trying for accuracy, he was trying to make an entertaining film. In that he succeeded.