The Untouchables

Treasury agent Eliot Ness (Costner) enlists Irish beat cop Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery) to school him in “the Chicago Way” so he can catch Capone, and enlists the help of two more “untouchables” (incorruptibles): George Stone (Andy Garcia), a hotheaded police cadet hoping to give Italian Americans a good name, and Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), the geeky-chic accountant who cracks the case, by nailing Capone for income tax evasion.

With a screenplay by David Mamet and a magnificent cast De Palma enjoyed one of his biggest hits with this oppulent, larger than life rendering of the Capone story. Ennio Morricone’s score certainly doesn’t hurt either (track titles include “Machine Gun Lullaby” and “The Strength of the Righteous”. De Palma brought inflections from Westerns to the film’s white hat/black hat morality, and borrowed from Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence to beef up a shoot out set piece.

It goes to that place that all films aspiring to greatness must attain: the country of myth, where all the figures must be larger and more vivid than life.

Richard Schickel, Time

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