8 / 10
Official trailer
The Untouchables is Brian De Palma’s 1987 American crime drama loosely depicting the 1930 Chicago campaign by Treasury Department agent Eliot Ness against Al Capone. The film follows Ness as he assembles a small team of incorruptible officers including beat cop Jim Malone, sharpshooter rookie George Stone, and accountant Oscar Wallace. Together they pursue Capone through escalating tactics until securing his conviction on tax evasion charges.
Kevin Costner plays Eliot Ness. Sean Connery plays Jim Malone. Andy Garcia plays George Stone. Charles Martin Smith plays Oscar Wallace.
Robert De Niro plays Al Capone. Billy Drago plays hitman Frank Nitti. Patricia Clarkson plays Ness’s wife Catherine. Richard Bradford plays Mike Dorsett. Jack Kehoe plays Walter Payne. David Mamet wrote the screenplay. Paramount Pictures produced the film on a budget of approximately 25 million dollars, and it grossed approximately 76 million dollars on initial release. Sean Connery won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.
Big, loud and gorgeous, this is gangster opera at full volume, and I enjoy almost every minute of it. Connery steals the film, De Niro’s Capone is a menacing peacock, and Morricone’s score does half the work. What holds it at an 8 for me is Costner, a little stiff at the center of his own movie, and a version of history bent so far that it can distract you if you know the real story.
Eliot Ness’s story plays as stylized gangster mythology in The Untouchables instead of as historical drama.
The actual Eliot Ness didn’t personally throw Frank Nitti off a building, didn’t enter Capone’s accountant’s hotel room with guns drawn, and didn’t engage in most of the particular events the film depicts. Brian De Palma directed the film as deliberate cinema-of-spectacle instead of as documentary. The David Mamet screenplay combines elaborate dialogue with structural mechanics that operatic gangster cinema typically employs. Ennio Morricone composed the score.
The Sean Connery performance as Jim Malone won the Academy Award and gave the actor career rehabilitation that had been declining through the 1970s and early 1980s. The result is a film whose specific cinematic achievements have aged into recognition while its historical inaccuracies have continued to generate criticism.
The Connery Comeback
Sean Connery was fifty-six during production. His career had been declining through the 1970s and 1980s after his Bond exit. The Untouchables showed he could still handle serious dramatic work, and the Best Supporting Actor win restored his standing and opened the door to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989), The Hunt for Red October (1990) and other major roles. I think he deserved every inch of that Oscar.
Connery plays Jim Malone with the controlled authority that the character requires. Malone is a veteran Chicago cop who has learned to survive within a corrupt system without becoming corrupted himself. The performance combines real moral seriousness with practical operational knowledge.
Connery’s Scottish accent works somewhat oddly for a depicted Chicago Irish-American character, but the performance succeeds despite the accent instead of because of it. Career rehabilitation can occur through single roles that show continuing capacity.
For Writers
Career rehabilitation can occur through single performances when the performer shows continuing capacity. Keep this one in mind for your own work. The contributor whose career has declined can sometimes restore standing through one strong return instead of gradual recovery.
The Train Station Sequence
The film’s most famous sequence depicts Ness and Stone waiting in Union Station to capture Capone’s accountant. The sequence intercuts the gunfight with the slow descent of a baby carriage down the station stairs, deliberately referencing the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). De Palma constructed the sequence as homage to the foundational Soviet cinema technique that gangster film typically doesn’t reference.
This homage reflects De Palma’s consistent attention to cinema history.
His other films have referenced Alfred Hitchcock, Michelangelo Antonioni, and other directors across his career. The Eisenstein reference gives The Untouchables sequence cinematic weight that pure action filmmaking wouldn’t have generated. Audiences with film history knowledge receive additional content through recognition. Audiences without film history knowledge receive the sequence as action set piece. The double layer shows how cinematic reference can work without requiring audience expertise.
The baby carriage is the moment I’d point to if anybody asked why this is an 8. It’s showy and shameless and thrilling, and De Palma stretches that slow descent until I’m squirming.
For Writers
Reference to foundational works in your tradition can give your work weight that pure invention can’t produce. Useful for creative work. Audiences who recognize the reference receive additional content. Audiences who don’t still receive the surface effect.
The Historical Departures
The actual Eliot Ness worked a Prohibition Bureau unit against Capone’s bootlegging operations but didn’t produce the case that convicted Capone on tax evasion.
The actual conviction came from Treasury Department investigators that the film fictionalizes as members of Ness’s team. The actual Frank Nitti wasn’t thrown from a building by Ness. The actual courthouse sequences depicted in the film bear limited resemblance to the actual trial proceedings. The film works as legend instead of as documentary.
Brian De Palma and David Mamet didn’t pretend to be making historical drama. The film opens with title cards that set the general historical context without claiming accuracy, and it treats the history as raw material for mythology. That decision has aged into mixed reception. I’m on the mythology side of the argument. I don’t want the real Eliot Ness from this film, and taken as legend it works beautifully.
For Writers
Historical sources can support legend or documentary depending on the work’s intent. The same applies to creative work. This of which approach to take requires clarity about what this film is attempting to achieve.
Craft Note
Brian De Palma directed The Untouchables between Body Double (1984) and Casualties of War (1989). His career consistently engaged with cinema history through reference and homage. Some of his work succeeded through this engagement. Other work failed when the references overwhelmed the surrounding material. The Untouchables works at the higher level of his work where reference adds to dramatic content instead of replacing it.
Is The Untouchables worth watching?
I think The Untouchables is terrific as stylized gangster mythology.
Connery’s comeback won him the Oscar and deserved to, the Union Station sequence borrows from Battleship Potemkin and still makes my pulse jump, and Mamet’s dialogue has real swagger. It gets an 8 because Costner’s Ness is the least interesting man in his own movie, and because a story this loose with the facts keeps the real history nagging at the back of my mind. Anybody who loves gangster cinema or De Palma should see it.
