Word: nessness
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Like the TV show that spawned it, The Untouchables dramatizes the holy war that Federal Agent Eliot Ness (Costner) proclaimed against Chicago's racketeers in the waning years of the Volstead Act. Al Capone (De Niro), with the police and politicians in his silk pocket, runs the city, abetted by gun- crazy Frank Nitti (Billy Drago). Ness's "untouchable" aides are an Italian- American sharpshooter (Andy Garcia), a bespectacled accountant (Charles Martin Smith) and an aging cop, Jimmy Malone (Connery). Malone is a father figure, an Obi-Wan Kenobi to Ness's Luke Skywalker, alerting him to the ways...
...Pulitzer for Glengarry Glen Ross, don't you think the right career move would be to do a remake of a TV series?" Mamet was faced with correcting a familiar flaw of biographical drama: "That something is true does not make it interesting. There wasn't any real story. Ness and Capone never met. Capone went to jail for income tax evasion, which is not a very dramatic climax. So I made up a story about two of the good guys: Ness and Jimmy Malone, the idealist and the pragmatist...
...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...
...perhaps, the implicit lesson of almost all action films. But most of them have permitted their heroes to reclaim their honor at the end. The good guys are allowed to think their fall from purity and motive was a temporary aberration. There is no such escape for Eliot Ness. Despite its driving pace, style and wit, this film's pervasive mood is a strange and haunting sadness. The Untouchables is, of all things, touching...
...show. The Untouchables, a brilliant film by Brian De Palma, reimagines the era of Eliot Ness and Al Capone...