THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)
The Writer
David Mamet
Why It's Here
I first saw The Untouchables shortly after its initial release on videocassette. I was ten years old at the time, and for reasons I cannot readily recall, it was the first film I ever saw about which I remember being aware that the screenwriter was someone who was considered a big deal. That writer was David Mamet, a native Chicagoan who got his start as the playwright behind such revered works as Sexual Perversity in Chicago (adapted for the screen in 1986 as About Last Night...) and 1984's Pulitzer Prize-winning Glengarry Glen Ross, itself later turned into a feature film scripted by Mamet himself. The playwright moved into screenwriting starting with 1979's TV movie A Life in the Theater, and he scored his first major cinematic success with Sidney Lumet's 1982 adaptation of Barry Reed's novel The Verdict, for which Mamet received his first Academy Award nomination. By the time The Untouchables hit theater screens five years later, Mamet had moved into directing himself; his feature debut House of Games, from his own original screenplay, was released the same year as The Untouchables (directed by Brian De Palma). None of this, however, was knowledge that I possessed upon my first viewing of The Untouchables. So why did I know this guy was a major-league player? Well, maybe because he could, in fact, write a script like The Untouchables. Tough, hard-edged, and graced with the profane street poetry that is the writer's better-or-worse trademark, Mamet's screenplay served as an exceptional introduction to his oeuvre and still, I think, ranks among his finest screen accomplishments.
It's no secret that I watch a lot of gangster movies, and The Untouchables is unusual in the genre in that it pits our rooting interest squarely on the side of the law. Most gangland sagas present us with cops who are minor players at best, and they are customarily portrayed as either woefully ineffectual (as with the majority of the lawmen sprinkled sparsely throughout GoodFellas) or deep in the pockets of the very men they are sworn to bring to justice (none perhaps as memorably as Sterling Hayden's snaky cop McCluskey in The Godfather). Indeed, Mamet kicks off The Untouchables by dropping us quite literally in the lap of the mob, as Al Capone (an enjoyable piece of self-parody by Robert DeNiro) holds court from his private barber's chair, declaring himself to be merely a simple businessman while across town, enforcers in Capone's employ bomb a general store that refuses to carry their liquor, killing an innocent little girl in the process. Like many film gangsters, the Capone of The Untouchables is presented as well-dressed, witty and possessing a certain sleazy charm, but unlike with other crime pictures from Casino to the De Palma-directed Scarface, there is never one moment in which we are encouraged to sympathize with these gangsters or wish to emulate them. These men, if one can even call them that, are motivated solely by greed or, as in the case of Capone's chief enforcer, the white-suited, dead-eyed Frank Nitti (Billy Drago, as one of the most hateful of all screen villains), by simple, naked bloodlust. Indeed, Mamet's villains here are so loathsome that they run the risk of shading over into caricature, especially daring in that they are largely based on real-life individuals. But Mamet, perhaps wisely, takes his villains so far over the top in their hatefulness in order to let us know that this is not going to be your typical gangster movie that places the audience on the side of the black hats. These are not villains you love to hate. You just hate them, and from the very first scenes, you're looking for someone to bring them down.
That unlikely avenger arrives in the person of Eliot Ness, played by Kevin Costner in a career-best performance that helped, along with the same year's No Way Out, to turn him into a major star. Like the earlier listed gangster classic Bonnie and Clyde, this film is a "print the legend" work that takes considerable liberties with the historical record, and while some of these changes are made to make the material more dramatic and "movie-friendly" (the real-life Nitti was a mousy accountant-like figure, a businessman rather than a killer, who took his own life instead of meeting the spectacular end Mamet fashions for him here), some are made to bolster Mamet's thematic points, and such is the case with his portrayal of Ness. One of the most iconic of American lawmen, Ness was in real life a native of Chicago, but Mamet here presents him as an outsider recently transferred to the city by the U.S. Treasury Department to lead a special task force assigned to take down Al Capone and bring an end to bloodshed on the streets of the Windy City. This alteration of the historical record is necessary in order for Mamet to provide Ness with the character arc that drives the narrative, in which the greenhorn, by-the-book law enforcer learns to do things "the Chicago way". Ness's first raid, on a warehouse alleged to be stockpiling a shipment of Canadian whiskey, is a disaster; busting the door down with a bulldozer and a phalanx of uniformed cops, Ness finds nothing but crates of Japanese parasols, the whole catastrophe captured on film by a nosy news photographer. Ness is humiliated before he's gotten started, but even here he reveals himself to be a man eager to learn from his mistakes (when Chicago cops tape the newspaper's disparaging headline about the raid to Ness's office door, he tacks it up on his bulletin board as a reminder that he's not infallible).
Learning of the deep-seated corruption and institutional apathy that allows Capone to operate, Ness enlists the aid of Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery, in an Academy Award-winning performance), a gruff but dutiful Irish beat cop who assists Ness in picking additional operatives for his special anti-crime crusade. Reasoning that any longtime Chicago cops will be too tainted by corruption to be useful, the men recruit "George Stone", nee Guiseppe Petri (Andy Garcia), a crackshot cadet from the Academy who's chosen the law as his ticket out of the city's rough, gang-controlled south side. The team is rounded out by Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith), a bespectacled accountant from the Washington bureau who has hit on the insane notion of going after Capone for his years-long failure to pay his federal income taxes. Try a stone killer for tax evasion? Even Ness thinks it's nuts, but with the bullets flying and Capone about to smuggle his bookkeeper (Jack Kehoe) out of Chicago, Ness has to ask himself the question Malone poses to him time and again: "What are you prepared to do?"
This issue, the lengths to which an otherwise upright and virtuous man will go to see justice done, is at the heart of The Untouchables, and throughout the film, Ness grapples with the implications of Malone's challenge. From the start, Ness presents himself as squarely on the side of law and order; when asked by a reporter about his own feelings on Prohibition, Ness responds merely by asserting that "it is the law of the land", and when Malone first puts the hard question to him following his initial failure, Ness states without hesitation that he will do "everything within the law" to get Capone. Malone's scoffing response to Ness makes the message clear: that ain't gonna fly in Chicago. "If you open the ball on these men, Mr. Ness," Malone assures him, "you must be prepared to go all the way, 'cause they won't give up the fight until one of you is dead." Malone, a textbook Campbellian mentor figure, schools his young charge in the ways of the city (when asked about how Capone was tipped off about Ness's planned warehouse raid, Malone simply responds, "Welcome to Chicago") and lets him know that the battle they've joined is an elemental eye-for-an-eye struggle in which they must be prepared to be as uncompromising as the forces arrayed against them. In a famous speech that likely won Connery his Oscar, Malone outlines for Ness "the Chicago way" of dealing with Capone: "He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue." The bloodshed at first comes hard for Ness. During a shootout at the Canadian border with Capone-backed smugglers, Ness shotguns a gangster who wouldn't freeze when told to, then screams at him in frustration ("Didn't you hear what I said? What are you, deaf?") and throws his weapon to the ground. But at every turn, Capone proves himself willing to go a little further, push Ness a little harder. Bribery doesn't work, so the crime lord resorts to sending Nitti around with a covert threat against Ness's family, then finally dispatches the gunsel to the police station disguised as a uniformed officer to gun down Wallace as he escorts a Capone flunky set to testify against his boss. Upon Wallace's death, Ness, in his most reckless display of bravado, marches into Capone's hotel headquarters and challenges the gangster to a one-on-one fistfight right there; he's dragged out by Malone as Capone taunts him in classic Mamet style ("You got nothing! Nothing! You don't got a thing, and if you were a man, you'd have done it by now!").
Ness finally learns his lesson in the hardest way imaginable as Malone, in one of the most wrenching death scenes in crime cinema, is tommy-gunned to death by Nitti while Capone, at the zenith of his loathsomeness, sits crying at a performance of I Pagliacci. When Ness arrives at his fallen friend's side, the barely-alive Malone has both the schedule for the escaping bookkeeper's soon-to-depart train and one final question for Ness. It is, of course, "What are you prepared to do?" And now, at last, Ness is prepared to do anything. For the first time, in the train station, Ness shoots first against Capone's goons, and he's willing to put an innocent woman and her baby right in harm's way to bring down his men. (During the shootout, the baby's carriage clatters down the station's grand staircase in an homage to Battleship Potemkin that admittedly feels much more like De Palma than Mamet.) Finally, during Capone's tax evasion trial, Ness uncovers a piece of evidence directly linking Nitti to Malone's death and, after a run-and-gun shootout over the courthouse roof, the unrepentant gunsel gloats about his hand in the old cop's killing ("I said your friend died screaming like a stuck Irish pig"). But Nitti doesn't know that the straight-arrow Ness is now a changed man...which he proves by hurling Nitti off the roof to his death. And Ness doesn't feel a single pang of remorse. As he tells the judge in his chambers, "I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right." In recent years, Mamet, a self-confessed "recovering liberal", has embraced a newfound conservatism unfashionable within the theatrical circles in which he operates, but the seeds of this sort of philosophy were already present in The Untouchables, a film released in the waning years of the Reagan era that falls perfectly in line with the by-any-means-necessary law-and-order ethos of those times. Ness learns that the only way to stop a killer is to kill them yourself, and that when Malone told him he was taking a "blood oath", they weren't just fancy figurative words. He was writing that oath in real blood that turned out, tragically, to be his own.
This is not to say, of course, that The Untouchables presents a system that is above reproach in its attitude towards governance and law enforcement, and he fully recognizes in the film's Chicago a deep-seated institutional corruption that allows men like Capone (or later white-collar criminals like Bernard Madoff and Kenneth Lay) to thrive. Malone is the mouthpiece for much of Mamet's disgust with the system's inherent dishonesty; the old cop describes his hometown as a place that "stinks like a whorehouse at low tide", and himself as "the one good cop in the bad town". Indeed, Malone helps Ness lead the charge against Capone largely out of his own sense of indignation at the criminality amongst his beat-walking brethren that he's been forced to swallow for decades, a hypocrisy so thick and nauseating that he's willing at this late stage in his life to throw his own colleagues under the bus just to get the stink of their shame out of his uniform (it's telling that Ness and Malone forge their bond while kneeling in a church, with Malone fingering his medallion of St. Jude...patron saint of lost causes). In an electrifying scene, Malone confronts one of his oldest friends on the force, the grizzled police chief Mike Dorsett (a nice, understated turn by Richard Bradford), about his complicity in Capone's crimes. Mike, who we've earlier seen both joking with fellow cops about Ness's failed warehouse bust and letting Nitti walk out of the police station right under his nose after killing Wallace (although he's nicely hypocritical enough to cross himself as he sees the killer escaping), blasts Malone for his willingness to turn his back on his own past, but Malone wants no part of it. He says he's sick of being sick over the things he's seen in his years as a cop, and flat-out tells Mike that if he doesn't give him the information he needs to get Capone, "I'm gonna rat you out for all the shit that I know you've done in your life! I'm gonna turn you over!" Fortunately, Mamet is a smart enough writer, and true enough to his period, not to turn Malone into a simple stick figure of righteous vengeance. He is a man with his own failings, such as his unrepentant anti-Italian racism; he blasts Stone, upon finding out he's an Italian, as "a lying member of a no-good race", and he throws around "wop" and "dago" with a frequency that is jarring in a contemporary film, but undeniably honest to the era in which the film is set (it almost makes one wonder if Malone's sensibilities would have been so offended if an Irish gang was taking over the city streets). It is also notable, as well, that we see Malone, shortly before his murder, sneaking a drink from a bottle he keeps hidden in his stove. Two of the Untouchables, Malone and Wallace, take a drink during the course of the film. Neither of them makes it to the final reel alive. Hypocrisy is thriving in the Chicago of The Untouchables, but if you'll kill to keep others from taking a drink, you'd better be prepared to bleed if you take one yourself.
The Untouchables is by no means a perfect screenplay. While Mamet's reasons for rendering his gangsters as vicious near-caricatures is understandable, one expects a little more dimension from villains in this day and age, and rendering Capone and his cohorts with more complexity might have made the battle even more compelling. Likewise, Mamet's script struggles, as his work often does, with its portrayal of its female characters. The only substantial role for a woman is that of Ness's wife Catherine (Patricia Clarkson), who basically serves to unreservedly support her husband and to show up out of nowhere at one point with a newborn baby; her role is so insubstantial that even though she's clearly identified in the dialogue as "Catherine", she's listed in the credits simply as "Ness's Wife" (which is even stranger when you consider that Ness's real wife at the time was named Edna; it makes you wonder why Mamet even bothered to make the name change). Likewise, Capone, who was both a doting husband and a patron of prostitutes, one of whom gave him the syphilis that ultimately killed him, here might as well be a celibate monk; I don't recall seeing a woman anywhere even near his presence during the course of the film. Arguably the most important female presence in the film is provided by the mother (played by Colleen Bade) of the little girl killed in the general store bombing; her tearful entreaty to Ness following his warehouse-raid gaffe is presented as one of the key spurs that keeps him from throwing in the towel. Important as this character is, though, she's only in the one scene, and The Untouchables is a prime example of a "movie for guys who like movies".
Even with these failings, The Untouchables still might have made this list simply on the strength of Mamet's dialogue. This was my first encounter with Mamet's four-letter fireworks, and he doesn't disappoint, delivering a script rife with memorable lines, dramatic speeches and that particular rhythmic cadence that can only be called "Mametian". Each character brings the linguistic goods in his own manner, from Ness's upright, almost formalistic speaking style (he has a great moment when he tells a bribe-bearing alderman, played by longtime Chicago improvisation master Del Close, to tell his "master" that "we must agree to disagree") to Malone's hard-nosed, Irish-inflected delivery (in a perfectly Irish-Catholic putdown, he assures a criminal he'll be "hangin' higher than Haman" if he doesn't cooperate) to Capone, who is the film's great speechmaker. Indeed, much of DeNiro's performance here consists of monologues, usually delivered for a crowd of sycophantic reporters whose presence reminds us that Capone was one of our country's first nationally renowned celebrity crooks. Here is Mamet utterly in his element, and he gives Capone's speeches a rough, sarcastic wit inflected always with the tough streets on which the man made his name. He's witty enough to quip about his chosen profession ("On a boat, it's bootlegging. On Lake Shore Drive, it's hospitality.") and curiously poetic even in rage, as when confronted with hollow protestations from his men following a successful Ness raid, he blurts, "What am I, alone in this world? Did I ask you what you're trying to do? Did I ask you what you're trying to do?" But Mamet knows that all of his colorful language threatens to make Capone too likable, so his most memorable moment is a silent one, in which he uses a baseball bat to bash in the skull of a lieutenant who has failed him. (By the way, this is another moment in which Mamet deviates from the historical record; it was actually two men that Capone grand-slammed into the grave.) Mamet, as much as any writer alive, has a dialogue style so distinctive that you can identify a film as his even with the picture turned off, and The Untouchables is a prime example of that style in full f-word-filled flower.
I have seen numerous Mamet pictures since The Untouchables, but it still ranks high on my personal list of his best pieces of screenwriting. It's a film that has had a tremendous influence on my own judgment of screenplays, my expectations from a quality crime picture, and my own screenwriting work (my own recently completed script has been compared by several of its first readers to Mamet, and to The Untouchables in particular). It turns out that my early, near-inexplicable assessment of David Mamet was correct. He is a big deal. After all...he's the guy who wrote The Untouchables.
AWARD NOMINATIONS: Writers Guild of America Award, Best Adapted Screenplay
0 comments:
Post a Comment