THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987 FILM)

'''The Untouchables''' is a 1987 film, directed by Brian De Palma, based on the 1959 ABC television series, which, in turn, was based on Eliot Ness's autobiographical account of his efforts to bring Al Capone to justice. It was adapted by David Mamet, and stars Kevin Costner as Ness, Sean Connery as Irish-American beat cop James Malone, and Robert De Niro as Capone. Connery received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in the film. The film became a solid hit, grossing over $76 million dollars domestically.
The film, like the television series, exaggerates the role Ness and his men played in the capture of Al Capone (most notably his involvement in Capone's trial and eventual conviction on tax evasion charges).

Contents

Plot

Cast

Production

Dramatic license

Reception

Box office

Critical response

Academy awards

Further reading

External links

Plot

Prohibition in the United States led to an organized crime wave in the 1920s and early 1930s. Various gangs bootleg vast amounts of alcohol and enforce their business with violence and extortion. The problem is most serious in Chicago, where gang leader Al Capone (Robert De Niro) supplies low-quality liquor at high prices. Treasury Department agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is put in charge of leading the crusade against Capone and his empire. Early warehouse raids fail due to corrupt officers in the Police Department.
Ness solicits help from Jim Malone (Sean Connery), an incorruptible Irish-American police officer. Malone advises Ness to find more members to their new team from the police academy to ensure that no one betrays them to Capone. An Italian-American trainee George Stone, formerly Giuseppe Petri (Andy Garcia) is then enlisted due to his superior marksmanship. Along with an accountant Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith) assigned to Ness from Washington, Ness has formed a new team to deal with Capone.

Their first raid takes place in a local post office, where its storeroom is used to house illegal liquor. Apparently, the place is overlooked because no one wants to provoke Capone and his gang. The raid succeeds without anyone killed. As the four are picking up steam, Wallace informs Ness that Capone has not filed an income tax return since 1926. Therefore a feasible method of prosecuting him would be through a tax evasion charge.
During a raid on the Canadian border, Ness captures one of Capone’s bookkeepers, George (Brad Sullivan). They manage to persuade him to provide evidence against Capone. However, when Wallace is escorting him to a police car, Capone’s henchman Frank Nitti (Billy Drago) kills the two. This leaves Ness with insufficient evidence to press charges. Malone tells Ness to stall the prosecutor from dropping the case while he searches for information regarding Capone’s other bookkeepers. He learns about Payne, another bookkeeper from the corrupt police chief.
That night, Malone is ambushed by Nitti at his home and shot countless times. Ness and Stone arrive to find him mortally wounded. With his dying breath, he informs the two about Payne’s upcoming departure from Chicago by train. He asks Ness, “What are you… prepared… to do!” before dying. Ness and Stone arrive at the Union Station (Chicago) and find Payne guarded by many gangsters. After a fierce shootout, the two succeed in killing all gangsters and taking Payne alive.
Payne testifies in court against Capone, admitting he has disbursed over $1.3 million for him over five years. Ness notices Nitti carrying a gun in court. He takes him out of the courtroom with the bailiff and discovers that Nitti was permitted to do so. However, Nitti is revealed to be Malone’s murderer when Ness sees a matchbox with his address on it. Nitti runs up to the roof of the building and another gun battle occurs. Eventually Nitti gives himself up to Ness. In an act of vengeance after Nitti provokes him, Ness throws Nitti off the building and into a car below. Back inside the courthouse, Stone shows Ness a document from Nitti’s jacket, proving that the jury has been bribed by Capone. Ness convinces the corrupt judge (on Capone's payroll) to do the right thing, saying that his name was among those in the bookkeeper's ledger. As a result, the judge switches the jury with the one sitting on a divorce case next door. As a result, Capone is found guilty and sentenced to 11 years in prison.
Ness packs up his Chicago office. He sees the Saint Jude pendant that Malone had carried with him for many years. Ness offers Stone the pendant having shaken hands with him. "He would have wanted a cop to have it," Ness insists, because Jude is the patron saint of the Chicago Police Department. Out on the street, a reporter wishes to have a word from the man who put Capone away, but Ness merely remarks he was just there "when the wheel went 'round." When the reporter mentions that Prohibition is due to be repealed, he asks what Ness might do then? Ness says, "I think I'll have a drink."

Cast

★ Kevin Costner as Agent Eliot Ness

★ Sean Connery as Agent Jim Malone

★ Charles Martin Smith as Agent Oscar Wallace

★ Andy Garcia as Agent George Stone/Guiseppe Petri

★ Robert De Niro as Al Capone

★ Richard Bradford as Police Chief Mike Dorsett

★ Jack Kehoe as Walter Payne

★ Billy Drago as Frank Nitti

★ Brad Sullivan as George

★ Patricia Clarkson as Catherine Ness

Production

''The Untouchables'' was filmed in Chicago, Illinois; Hardin, Montana; and the surrounding areas of Great Falls, Montana.

Dramatic license

★ In the film, there are only four "Untouchables": Ness, Jim Malone, Oscar Wallace, and George Stone. However, according to Ness' biography, there were actually ten of them, including himself. Malone, Wallace and Stone are fictional characters. Malone's real-life counterpart may have been Martin Lahart, an Irish-American from a family of cops who served as Ness's second-in-command. However, Ness and Lahart were both in their 20's at the time of the Capone investigation, and Lahart was born in the U.S., not Ireland. According to Charles Martin Smith in the Special Collector's Edition DVD feature ''The Script, The Cast'', Wallace, the bespectacled agent with the accounting background, was loosely modeled on Frank Wilson, the Treasury Agent who commanded the team of IRS investigators who put together the tax evasion case against Capone.


★ While Ness and his real Untouchables did battle with Capone's organization, they had little to do with assembling the tax evasion case that would ultimately send Capone to prison. That case was put together by the criminal investigations unit of the Internal Revenue Service separately from Ness' efforts, though some of the evidence used to assemble that case included financial records seized by Ness during raids. Similarly the IRS unit would pass information on to Ness's squad about the location of breweries, stills, etc.

★ The symbol on the liquor cases from Canada, the Maple Leaf, was not adopted until the fifties.

★ Ness's main strategy in his war with the Capone mob was raiding breweries. Breweries represented a major investment of capital and putting one out of commission simultaneously constituted an immediate major loss of assets due to the confiscation of the equipment, and a future major loss of income due to the crippling effect the raids had on the Mob's ability to provide a saleable product. In the film, Ness and his squad make one raid on a liquor warehouse, and intercept an international shipment of liquor coming across the Canadian border, but do not raid one single brewery.

★ Contrary to the meetings in the film, the real Capone and Ness never actually met face to face before the trial of Capone.

★ The baseball bat scene in which Capone bludgeons a mobster is loosely based on an actual 1929 incident when Al bludgeoned ''three'' mobsters to death; John Scalise, Albert Anselmi, and Joseph "Hop Toad" Giunta.

★ Two of the four Untouchables are killed in the movie. In real life, none of the actual Untouchables were killed, though some were injured during their battles against the mob. Frank Basile, an associate of Ness's prior to the formation of the squad, was killed, but he was not officially an agent. Of note, the two Untouchables who are killed drink or prepare to drink alcohol at some point in the film.

★ During the trial scene, Nitti is shown to have bribed the jury of Capone's trial into acquitting Capone of all charges. The judge then substitutes another jury for the tainted one. (This makes little sense, as, in the film, the trial is well underway at the time of the jury-switch, meaning the new jury would be asked to decide a trial in which they'd ''missed'' the bulk of the evidence and testimony.) In reality, Nitti was ruling Capone's crumbling empire, while enforcers attempted to tamper with the pool of ''potential'' jurors that had been assembled before the trial began. The judge then replaced the pool of potential jurors with another pool that had been assembled for a different trial.

★ The judge in the trial is depicted as a grafter, who switches juries only after being threatened with public exposure of his corruption. In fact, the judge in the Capone trial, James Wilkerson, had a well-deserved reputation for probity and integrity, and the idea for switching the jury pools prior to the beginning of the trial was entirely his.

★ In the film, Capone's lawyer pleads his client guilty over his client's vehement protests. In real life, Capone pled not guilty, and the trial went to verdict. A defense lawyer in a criminal trial would not be allowed to plead guilty on behalf of his client without the client's consent.

★ The final confrontation between Ness and Nitti, in which the latter falls to his death, is entirely fiction. In fact, Nitti spent nearly six years running the empire after the fall of Capone, and he committed suicide in March 1943 upon learning of his possible jail sentence. The Capone minion who was discovered carrying a gun in court, and who was later found to have a list of the jury pool in his pocket, was Phil D'Andrea, not Nitti, and the discovery led to a quiet arrest, not a rooftop shootout.

★ In a similar vein, while Nitti was depicted as Capone's chief hitman in the film, in reality he was, by this point at least, in charge of the gang's financial dealings; Jack McGurn or Fred Burke would have been more accurately depicted in this role.

★ In the film, Ness and his squad are referred to as "Treasury Agents." In fact, at the time of the Capone investigation, the Bureau of Prohibition, the agency Ness worked for, was part of the Department of Justice, and had been since 1930.

★ In the film Ness is depicted as a family man with a wife, a daughter, and a son on the way. In real life, the thrice-married Ness was a bachelor during most of the Capone investigation. He had only one child, a son he adopted with his third wife, long after his law enforcement career had ended.

Reception

Box office

★ Opening weekend U.S. gross: $10,023,094

★ Total U.S. box office gross: $76,270,454
Background Notes
The media reported that the producers wanted Sean Connery for the movie but could not afford his salary, so he agreed to do the movie for $50,000 with a 10 percent share of the proceeds. The expectation was that the movie would not make much money, so the producers agreed to it. However, it exceeded all expectations and Sean Connery reaped a large amount of money. It was one of the most publicized times that an actor had benefited so greatly from having "bet" on the future of the movie and since then other actors have parlayed their acting skills into taking less up front for a part of the proceeds.

Critical response

The film has received a mostly positive reception from critics. Vincent Canby of The New York Times gave the movie a glowing review, calling it "a smashing work" and saying it was "vulgar, violent, funny and sometimes breathtakingly beautiful." [1]
Roger Ebert, on the other hand, said "'The Untouchables' has great costumes, great sets, great cars, great guns, great locations and a few shots that absolutely capture the Prohibition Era. But it does not have a great script, great performances or great direction." [2] Many reviewers, including Ebert, singled out DeNiro's scenes portraying Al Capone as the biggest disappointment of the film, while giving praise to Connery's performance. Connery, however, won first place in a BBC poll for worst film accent. [3] Leonard Maltin gives the film a four out of four star review.

Academy awards

'Award'	'Person'
'Won:'
Best Actor in a Supporting Role	Sean Connery
'Nominated:'
Best Costume Design	Marilyn Vance
Best Score	Ennio Morricone
Best Art Direction - Set Decoration	Patrizia von Brandenstein William A. Elliott Hal Gausman

Further reading

★ Tucker, Kenneth. ''Eliot Ness and the Untouchables: The Historical Reality and the Film and Television Depictions''. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2000. ISBN 0-7864-0772-7

External links

★

★ The "Untouchables" Rotten Tomatoes Page

★ Movie stills