Word: palmas
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...cute beasties, no bikinis. It is a period film in the wrong period. Kids want to go back to the '50s, not to Chicago during 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...
Dawn Steel, president of production at Paramount, recalls that Mamet's first draft was an "outline, very sparse." How sparse? Capone was hardly in it. To flesh out Mamet's bare-bones script, Steel and her boss Ned Tanen wanted De Palma. "In the past," she says, "Brian hasn't chosen the material that was worthy of him and that he was worthy of. He was making homages to Alfred Hitchcock. This one is a homage to Brian De Palma -- he felt it instead of directing it. With this picture he became a mensch." It surely marked a ! change from...
There are the familiar De Palma touches: lots of photogenic blood, a gorgeous tracking shot that leads our heroes from euphoria to horror, an endlessly elaborate set piece reminiscent of the Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin. But the director's chief contribution is to the film's handsome physical design. "I wanted corruption to look very sleek," he says. "Some people in positions of power with ill-gotten money insulate themselves with over-the-top magnificence. They buy paintings and expensive clothes. And deep inside they know they're cheats and killers...
Visual Consultant Patrizia Von Brandenstein (Amadeus) accompanied De Palma to Chicago to devise the film's production design. "I thought about these four unlikely little guys going up against the mythic monolith of Capone," she says. "So I used architecture that showed mass and power: the Chicago Theater for the opera house, Louis 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...
...show. The Untouchables, a brilliant film by Brian De Palma, reimagines the era of Eliot Ness and Al Capone...