Screen
O'Brien, Tom
SCREEN OH, SO MUCH VIOLENCE 'THE UNTOUCHABLES' An evil film, The Untouchables. A red car pet of earnest advance hoopla has been rolled out for it by the hip devotees who still...
...Gangster films also define the weakness of The Untouchables . In The Godfather Francis Coppola performed the miracle of providing understanding, and even weird respect, for some of the Mafia...
...In this respect, it parallels the fatherson relation of Connery and Costner...
...The problem is not basing the film on the old TV series, but the open plagiarism of other films, with a knowing wink from the knowledgeable director at his also in-the-know fans...
...The mayhem that follows is distinguished not by its moral implications (as in Platoon), or by drollery (as with Hitchcock), but by visual pyrotechnics alone...
...The overeducated will term it homage to Eisenstein...
...De Palma's father, a doctor, used to take him to his surgery to watch operations...
...Bloody schlock...
...he used his visual resources, even his bloody action sequences, to get inside the characters...
...De Palma also got large financial backing from Paramount, which sees this movie as a neo- Godfather and as the studio's "quality" film entry for the summer market...
...A red carpet of earnest advance hoopla has been rolled out for it by the hip devotees who still regard its director, Brian De Palma, as a Great Rebel...
...It has all of Eisenstein's letter, and none of his spirit...
...Connery is good in some early scenes, the only ones in which De Palma allows some character to show...
...Indeed, the whole sanguinary tone of The Untouchables is a xerox of Scarface, De Palma's 1982 atrocity about Miamibased Cuban mobsters...
...This moral flatness also marks the cloying, saccharine presentation of good in the film, especially in Costner and his family...
...To make The Untouchables, De Palma has employed dramatist David Mamet (The Verdict) for the screenplay...
...De Palma, however, never establishes him clearly as Capone's main enforcer...
...composer Ennio Morricone (The Mission) for the score...
...Such a scene is good because it works dramatically and suspensefully in its own context (which this one doesn't), not because it evokes another movie or declares what a filmmaker knows...
...And after that, another...
...The line is either a sick joke or one of the more galling cases of crocodile tears in film history...
...Fewer gods were assembled at Olympus...
...De Niro adds his own extended plagiarism, with campily amusing imitations of Rod Steiger from the film Al Capone (1959...
...We want Costner (and Connery, especially Connery) to win and De Niro to lose...
...Like De Mille's delight in pagan sexuality in his biblical epics, De Palma's style seems to say, "Look how terrible this violence is...
...One of the hardest artistic challenges is to make good interesting, but De Palma doesn't even try...
...Of course, it's filled with visual pyrotechnics, complete with the requisite baby carriage prop, wild shooting on stairs, laborious slow motion, blood everywhere, and a soupcon of brains on a wall 355 for dessert...
...But then De Palma has little interest in studying evil...
...No wonder he finds domesticity boring—so much so that he even drops the plot thread of Mafia threats to kill Costner's family...
...De Palma's allusiveness is based on the essential modernist substitution of wit for judgment, of ideas for intelligence, and of sophomoric showing-off for a genuine sense of tradition...
...In De Palma's film, those with queasy stomachs should beware of an after-dinner speech where De Niro uses a baseball bat to punctuate a management principle...
...To be sure, De Niro spills more blood than Steiger: in the old days, even film gangsters had clean hands...
...To what end...
...Perhaps this is rooted in autobiography...
...Stone's achievement stands in a line from Hawthorne to John Ford's classic Westerns, especially the terrifying opening of The Searchers...
...The'pairing at first shows promise, but both actors are hampered by a cops-and-robbers script that even has them riding around as cowboys stopping liquor imports at the Canadian border...
...Now—from Carrie (1976) to Dressed to Kill (1980) to Body Double (1985) —De Palma the son all too eagerly takes us...
...in fact, it's a retread of the famous "Odessa steps" sequence in Potemkin, no better for being obvious...
...Connery's talent (so much bigger than his James Bond roles) can't redeem De Palma's penchant for reductive carnage...
...Robert De Niro plays Al Capone and Sean Connery plays one of the few "good cops" willing to take him on...
...The issue just disappears...
...One of his staff is played by an Al Pacino look-alike (Andy Garcia), presumably for both light irony (remember The Godfather, folks, as well as De Palma's own remake of Scarface with Pacino) and dark atmosphere...
...That film takes us inside the minds of his soldiershelping us empathize even with the insane among them— because it recreates the feel, the texture, the experience of being alone in an unknown wilderness, among enemies of another race, and of being frightened almost out of one's soul...
...He is too shadowy a figure in his early bits in the film to acquire real power...
...For his second scene, De Palma steals a child and a bomb straight from Hitchcock's Sabotage (1936...
...we are hooked, albeit on a comic-book level, into moral involvement...
...Now, let's take another look...
...The first scene, for example, promises much: De Niro, about to be shaved, lounges in the chair of a gorgeous private barbershop...
...he may not even have thought of it...
...The scene is fascist pornography: flashy violence for its own sake...
...the two spar, eventually become friends, and form a team, with Connery in the fatherly role of tough-guy adviser...
...In a key scene, "father" figure Connery tells "son" Costner that they are in "blood brotherhood" against Capone, a relationship that ends only in Connery's slaughter...
...projects slick, menacing evil, all the better because of his sparkly white suits...
...We are also being had...
...He may not even suspect...
...fashion eminence Georgio Armani for costume...
...At some moments, visceral emotional reactions govern one's response to The Untouchables...
...TOM O'BRIEN 356...
...The scene isn't about promoting justice or protecting children...
...Stone doesn't underline the parallel...
...The one actor equal to his part is Billy Drago as Capone's punk hit man, Frank Nitti, only because he finds a way of acting low enough for the film's one-dimensional level...
...they are stock, comic-book figures, with the actors themselves either chosen for or infected with De Palma's penchant for open plagiarism...
...Compare, for example, De Palma's abuse of tradition with Oliver Stone's evocation of American Gothic in the jungles of Platoon...
...Schlock...
...Technically the camera angle is termed a God's-eye view, but De Palma will have none of its moral implications...
...De Palma defines his father-son teams by blood, literally saturating his script with it...
...But would ' 'father'' Eisenstein bless such a childish corruption of inheritance...
...He almost sounds sad to see it go—or is it De Palma whom I heard speaking...
...Much is not original...
...Near the end, Costner clears his desk and sighs, "So much violence...
...It's about directing, specifically about being a director worthy of comparison to a great director in the past, a cinematic father figure...
...De Palma shoots from above, looking down on the lavishly 354: parqueted floor, the barber, some reporters, and De Niro holding court...
...To show us style, to demonstrate flair, and, to hide behind the sentimentality of the baby carriage, De Palma's actual divorce of art and content, technique and moral concern...
...An elderly Irish cop still walking the beat, Connery first meets Costner on a downtown Chicago bridge at night...
...He seems to think a happy home is all angelic sweetness and light, blond children and adoring womenfolk (such as Patricia Clarkson as Costner's wife...
...He's more interested in the predictable razor cut the barber accidentally inflicts, raising the first of many dire DeNiro"don't-mess-with-me" looks.Thebarberonlymak.es a little cut, but the scene sets a sanguinary tone...
...Drago (chosen for his name...
...And what does De Palma get from it...
...What he felt and translated to film was the emotional reality of actual life that alone gives the conventions and traditions of art their merit...
...The scene also provides a key to understanding the pathetic psychopathology of the father-son theme in this and other De Palma films...
...At times, to be sure, it's exquisite-looking schlock, with the production team's talents in ample evidence...
...The main "untouchable," federal agent Eliot Ness, is played by Kevin Costner, chosen for his clean-cut, straightjawed likeness to Robert Stack of the television series...
...De Palma grants his characters little or no interiority...
...De Palma is the Cecil B. De Mille of cinematic violence...
...and Oscar-winner Patrizia von Brandenstein (Amadeus) for visual design...
...All De Palma's faults come together in the worst scene in the movie, perhaps the most disgustingly manipulative scene in any recent film...
Vol. 114 • June 1987 • No. 11
