Word: nitti
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...limo -- the window-steaming sex scene that earned Costner his first priapic appeal. And for an outdoorsman who was a fine athlete in school, there can be few tangier pleasures than playing baseball in Bull Durham and Field of Dreams or playing a cowboy in Silverado. Even in the Nitti-gritty Untouchables, where he earned his first star billing as Eliot Ness, Costner got to lead a posse to a varmint's hideout...
...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 of the wicked world. Perhaps...
...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...
Miami Vice is the most intensely serious cop show on TV. The drug smugglers, mob bosses, psychotic youth gangs and smut peddlers who emerge from the underworld each week are the most vividly portrayed evildoers on TV since Eliot Ness squared off against Frank Nitti on The Untouchables. Even more striking, however, is the show's depiction of the temptation that evil presents to basically good men. It is no accident that Crockett and Tubbs frequently go undercover, and seem to blend in perfectly when they do. Moreover, the show's most powerful episodes deal with law-enforcement officials...
...them interconnected in Von Hoffman's ruefully comic invention. The period is as rich and varied as the turn-of-the-century New York City of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and the range of real-life characters is even greater: Hoodlums Al Capone and Frank Nitti and Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Mayors Big Bill Thompson and Anton Cermak, Roman Catholic Cardinal George Mundelein, Utilities Tycoon Samuel Insull and Assassin Giuseppe Zangara, who struck down Cermak in Miami while trying to kill Franklin D. Roosevelt...