The Truth About The Untouchables – The Real Ones and The Movie Ones
As told by Chicago Police Officer Jim Malone, played by Sir Sean Connery in an Academy Award winning performance
Aye, you’ve got microbreweries and people brewin’ beer at home all over the country now. They’re fancy, with their books and chemicals and such, but we didn’t have such things. The way everyone is so open about it now, the temperance people would’ve passed out from fear.
Back when I was poundin’ a beat on cold Chicago streets, those people would be hoo-haahing all day long on street corners, jabbering about there bein’ a saloon for every 200 people in this country. Do you think they might have thought themselves that maybe that’s because people like to have a wee drink every so often?
But mind you, there will also be those who think they know better than everyone else. When they start talkin’, check your wallet and make sure no one’s at your back with a knife. Now these rabble rousers didn’t mind tellin’ you why they thought drinkin’ was so bad. They had a lot of reasons, they did, but it mostly boiled down to crime.
Crime!
Can you imagine that? With me, Jim Malone on the beat?
Oh, to be sure, there are always crooked cops, but Prohibition just made ‘em worse. And then the crime syndicates, they moved in, see, and all of a sudden, there were a whole lot more crooked cops, crooked judges, crooked everything here in Chicago.
Yeah, Capone was the worst of the lot. He was real, not some made up character like you might see at the picture show. And Eliot Ness – he was real too. Me? I’m a made up guy, what one you smart college fellas would call a composite character.
Listen – let me tell you something, I’ve seen this picture, this Untouchables. None of it happened that way. Yeah, Ness and Capone had it out on the streets and almost tore the whole of Chicago apart, but Frank Nitti, Capone’s right hand? Ness never killed him. Nobody did. He kept right on running Capone’s dirty work when the big guy was put in prison.
Know what else? Ness took what you smart people call “poetic license” when he wrote his reports up. He even made them into a book. He was going to write more of his so-called true stories, but he died of a heart attack. A shame, really, him being only in his fifties then. A man’s still got his whole life ahead of him then. Just look at that other movie fella, Sean Connery. Handsome, and not too old yet, eh?
Officer Malone Speaks About The Movie
Well, with Ness writin’ all sorts of fairy tales like he was St. Patrick himself, it’s no wonder that the Mayor of Chicago didn’t just give him the keys to the city. I’ve seen all the picture shows, and the ones on that newfangled television unit too, and I’ve got to say that Kevin Costner pegged Ness queasiness just right. It wasn’t that Ness was a bad sort, or a coward, but battlin’ against the crooks at City Hall and runnin’ for his life made him the man he was, not some made up beat cop speakin’ in a Scot rather than Irish brogue. Call it payback for Costner trying to do any kind of British accent at all in Robin Hood.
Now, where was I? Oh yes, Costner. He is scared of Capone, but more scared of letting people know that. So, in the end, he wins, because he’s just a little more scared of being scared. Costner got that part down right, but I think that David Mamet wrote the role right too. There was too much of that fancy gun work and the like for a simple man like me, but Mamet had people talking to each other, what you call dialogue, down pat. There were so many funny lines in his show. Someone once told me it’s one of the most quoted movies of the whole decade. Imagine that, the whole decade.
The actors that helped Costner did a good job too, but just like Ness kept his boys in the background, Costner and that director fella, Brian DePalma, kept these boys hidden. What a shame, a real Godforsaken shame. You know that Andy Garcia fella who played George Stone is a Cuban pretending to be an Italian? He was intense – much more intense than Ness, more like Capone, I think. He was like me, one of those composite characters, and this was one of the first times he had such a big spot, but even here, he didn’t get as much attention as he should have.
For Capone, of course, they got a real Italian fella named DeNiro. He was good and scary, just like the real Capone, who could make your underwear bunch up just by lookin’ at you. Capone had style, sure, but it was mob style, not class. Remember that, there’s a difference between class and style. This DeNiro fella, he saw that right away and made sure that while Capone did things with style; he was still a low-life bum at heart. Not even good fertilizer for daisies, if you ask me, which you did.
This DePalma fella didn’t really do a good job capturin’ what makes Chicago so special. He seemed to care more about making Ness out to be some avenging hero from a mountaintop or something. A lot of what made Chicago special to us is gone from here. You could have even made this picture in Detroit, except everyone knows that Capone was in Chicago so that’s where DePalma made his show. At least they used Union Station. Hard to miss that in any event. What DePalma did do right was show that the good guys didn’t always win. They mostly didn’t back then, you know?
Officer Malone On The Untouchables' Staying Power
People like to see this movie, I think, because it makes them laugh at all the wrong times. A noble beat cop is about to get gunned down and they laugh because he calls that greasy punk a name? Pah. I would just as soon take a walk along the lake then have to hide my incivility by laughing at someone else. Besides, that cop looked like a smart man.
People also want to cheer a comic book character. That’s why Superman is so big with the kiddies. And if you don’t want to think for a little while, just pretend to be Superman and take care of the bad guys, well, then I guess this picture isn’t quite so bad.
But if you decide to take a walk along the lake yourself instead and happen to pass by a beat cop stamping his feet to keep warm as the wind cuts through his uniform, do me a favor and tip your hat to him, eh? What do you mean don’t wear a hat anymore? That’s the problem with this country – always a new fad. Put on a hat, will you, and have one for me.
Here endeth the lesson.
This conversation with Officer Malone was brought to you as part of The Chicago Movie Writeoff. Hosted by LEVDA, the other participants are flowrchild, martytdx, wivabef, hava, kristinafh, ChrisJarmick, Debbie26, AmberM, Obiwanjabroni, OdellBurgess and RoadieM. Please visit their contributions – they’ve written some tremendous reviews about movies set in or about the Windy City.
Kevin Costner is idealistic federal agent Eliot Ness whose assignment to clean up Prohibition-era Chicago leads to violence and manly questions about ...More at Family Video
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