"The Untouchables" — Remembering Sean Connery — "The Blade Itself"
The name's Bond...James Bond.
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Now Showing: The Untouchables (1987)
Ennio Morricone, the legendary composer best known for his themes to westerns such as The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly and Once Upon a Time in the West, paints a sonic portrait of gangland Chicago that is simultaneously alluring and disturbing during the opening moments of director Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables. The film opens as Al Capone (a swaggering, aggressive Robert De Niro) is talking to the press while getting a straight razor shave in his gilded hotel quarters. The razor nicks his cheek and for a moment, violence seems inevitable. But Capone is calculating. He understands his image. But he’ll punch back hard if he feels like he’s been wronged.
Enter Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), a young Treasury officer out to bring down Chicago’s top bootlegger. He’s quickly made the fool and then recruits Jim Malone (Sean Connery), a grizzled beat cop and a greenhorn cadet, George Stone (Andy Garcia). From that point forward, the lines are drawn in a war for the soul of the city. While Costner is competently straight-edged in his performance, Connery, De Niro and Garcia steal the show, and Connery, who seems to conceal great fathoms within the aging cop, earned an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. This sense that there’s more beneath the surface—that the walls have ears and anyone could be a rat—pervades the film and gives even simple scenes a frisson and dramatic energy far beyond the action playing out before the audience.
Capone is a towering figure in history and in The Untouchables, and to the modern viewer he seems practically Trumpian, except, perhaps, that he has a little more class. While “the untouchables” is a phrase coined to refer to Ness and his soldiers, in the beginning, it seems that in actual fact it is the gangster who is untouchable. The question at the core of the film is whether men are prepared to pay the price to win. It’s clear that Capone and Malone are, but Ness comes across with more ambiguity, partly due to Costner’s propensity to be clean-cut and partly due to the writing itself. De Palma clearly loves this ambiguity. Even the core criminal activity of the era, bootlegging liquor, is looked upon by the law as barely a crime. Everyone by the end of this story could use a drink. Indeed, the marginal quality of the characters, the sense that danger lurks without clear provenance, is a common thread in De Palma’s work, and many elements in The Untouchables recall one of his earlier films, 1981’s Blow Out.
In particular, the shared DNA of the two movies is apparent in their final set-pieces. Blow Out, a noir about the assassination of a politician, sets one of its final chases in Philadelphia’s 30th Street Train station with potential killers lurking behind every pillar. Likewise, The Untouchables delivers its highest drama during a stakeout in Chicago’s Union Station. Yet where the earlier movie was brooding and almost anti-climactic, The Untouchables reaches into an operatic register, going so far as to intercut the killing with a scene of Capone watching Pagliacci and crying. A stroller careens down the steps, calling back to Eisenstein’s classic scene in the Battleship Potempkin, as the tommy guns fire and Ness looks on at first in horror and then in fury.
While it’s not The Godfather, the urtext of Hollywood gangster flicks, The Untouchables does something special. It succeeds in making the people fighting the gangsters just as interesting as the criminals themselves. As it draws to a close, there’s no sense that Capone has unplumbed depths, no sense of mystery to his brutal greed. However, there is a lingering sense of the unknown to Malone and even to Ness. What motivated them and why it mattered to them remains tantalizingly out of reach. It seems that St. Jude, the patron saint of lost causes and of cops, may hold an answer, but De Palma wisely refuses to tell us. It’s up to the audience to work out why Malone chose to fight after decades as a beat cop, just as it it’s up to us, almost a century later, to work out whether Prohibition, or the fight against bootlegging, actually added up anything. In one way it didn’t—it was a short-lived and misguided period of history—but on another, the effort to uphold the law has a certain valor to it. Weighing the letter against the logic is its own perilous and timeless struggle.
The Untouchables is available on Starz or to rent on platforms including YouTube and Amazon Prime Video.
Sean Connery Will Be Missed
In the chaos of previous few weeks, we lost one of cinema’s all time greats, the actor Sean Connery. He first entered the collective consciousness with his cold blooded portrayal of the British spy James Bond, but whereas the iconic role could have been the beginning and end of a lesser actor’s career, Connery kept growing even after he left Bond behind. Part of Connery’s appeal, no doubt, had to do with his unabashedly huge accent, sly smile and plastic facial expressions. He was also strikingly handsome as a young man, growing distinguished with age. Yet I would argue that Connery’s enduring appeal had to do with the fact that he never lost sight of the fun in his roles.
Whether he was Bond, a grizzled Chicago beat-cop in The Untouchables, or King Richard in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Connery played every role to the hilt. While he won his Oscar for The Untouchables, the performances that stand out to me are his turn as a megalomaniac colonizer in The Man Who Would Be King and as Indiana Jones’ jovial academician father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. He displays a stroke of nonchalant brilliance in the latter film when, after chasing a flock of seagulls with an umbrella so as to defeat a German Messerschmidt, he strolls down the beach quoting Charlemagne. This ability to wed the humorous with the serious, arch drama with goofy bedlam, made Connery truly distinct and an enduring star. He will be missed.
Reading List:
The ur-fantasy is J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, and those books have been so profoundly influential in the decades since their publication that it’s virtually impossible to find a fantasy—or any tale of good versus evil—that does not own them a debt. It is highly unusual, in other words, that Joe Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself is an utterly distinct, gripping fantasy—set in a world of violence and power politics—that owes almost nothing to Tolkien. Pick up a copy from The Strand today.
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