Word: niro
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...Prohibition. They weren't even born when this movie was a TV series. The producer, Art Linson, makes little pictures, and Brian De Palma directs naughty ones that rarely go gold. David Mamet writes Pulitzer-prizewinning plays, not boffo movies. O.K., so who's in the cast? Robert De Niro: his last hit was 1978's The Deer Hunter. Sean Connery: splendid actor, but the only time he's struck it rich lately was when he played 007 one more time. As for the leading man, Kevin Costner, his most memorable movie turn was as the corpse...
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...
Casting Capone was potentially explosive as well. De Niro, the first choice, deferred accepting the role for so long that English Actor Bob Hoskins (Mona Lisa) was hired. Then De Niro said yes, and the studio fired Hoskins and ate his $200,000 salary. De Niro's scenes were to be filmed at the end of the twelve-week shoot. "I met him when we were in the final stages of rehearsals," Linson says. "He was thin. He looked about 15, 20 years too young to play Capone. He had a ponytail. I panicked. We'd fired Bob Hoskins...
...like a John Ford western. A good guy is on a mission and gets help. At the end he walks off into the sunset. It's a simple story told in a classical way." That might seem a bit too simple for De Palma, Mamet, De Niro and the other smart lads who have made careers breaking popular icons instead of retooling them. But like Ness's, and Capone's, theirs is a story of hard-earned success. And what's so bad about making good...
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...