Word: gangsters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Such were the odds The Untouchables stacked against itself before its June 3 opening. Now, after drawing enthusiastic reviews and a robust $15.9 million in its first week, Paramount's gangster epic is starting to look like Beverly Hills Cop II, Too. The Eddie Murphy action comedy has earned a phenomenal $89 million in its first three weeks. But The Untouchables may challenge Murphy with durability, what the industry calls "legs." A.D. Murphy, Variety's guru of grosses, credits The Untouchables with a "most auspicious beginning. It could run all summer." Privately, industry honchos now believe by year...
...Sullivan's Auditorium Building for Capone's hotel, a spiffed-up Union Station for the Odessa Steps sequence. Fortunately, Paramount let me really run wild." Steel also suggested the essential extravagance of signing Giorgio Armani, the Milanese couturier, to dress most of the characters. Working from photos of '30s gangster films, Armani reworked period shapes into a style that was less stiff, more drapable. Instead of dressing Ness blandly, Armani put him in darkly glamorous three-piece suits; rather than make Nitti gritty, he clothed him like a sepulchral angel, in gleaming white synthetics...
Begin with Al Capone, from whom all factual and fictional descendants have learned some of the elements of style. But skip all that gangster-as-tragic- hero stuff. In Robert De Niro's grandly scaled performance he is demonically expansive, our first thug celebrity. And a man who in his secret life, the life his romanticizing fans did not want to hear about, illustrates a lecture on teamwork by taking a Ruthian clout at a traitorous underling's skull with a baseball bat. What he evokes, finally, is pure horror (and maybe some black humor) but -- and the film...
...written before plots like this had been beaten to death by poor imitators of Chandler and Hammet, but today it reads more like a parody of snide tough-guy novels than a true milestone of the genre. Anybody who's read an old mystery novel or seen a few gangster movies will feel he's seen it all before...
...narrator, known only as Dick, speaks with he typical voice of a jaded, street-smart gangster from the 1930's. This is how the book begins: "When I came down off the midnight shift I saw there wasn't any light in the restaurant window, and that was how I knew Lois had left me. I knew it sure, just like I knew there'd be that note in the pillow...