In the 1970s and beyond, Kehoe ran in the same circles as Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Jill Clayburgh, and others. Before The Untouchables, Kehoe and De Niro had also both been part of the cast of James Goldstone's The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight. A year after The Untouchables, Kehoe appeared in Martin Brest's Midnight Run, which starred De Niro. Kehoe had also appeared in an early Art Linson production, Car Wash, in 1976.

From Mike Barnes' Hollywood Reporter article:

In '70s cult classics, Kehoe portrayed Scruggs, the cowboy who pumps gas, in Car Wash (1976) and the marksman "Set Shot" Buford in The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh (1979). His résumé also included Melvin and Howard (1980), Warren Beatty's Reds (1981) and The Pope of Greenwich Village (1984).

In the best picture Oscar winner The Sting (1973), directed by George Roy Hill, Kehoe portrayed the Erie Kid, the grifter who participates in the con game with Paul Newman and Robert Redford's characters to bring down Robert Shaw's crime boss.

He also was memorable that year as Tom Keough, one of the cops on the take, in Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973), and he reteamed with Al Pacino on Broadway in 1977 in David Rabe's The Basic Training of Pavlo Hummel.

Kehoe played Al Capone's (Robert De Niro) bookkeeper, Payne, in Brian De Palma's The Untouchables (1987) and Joe Pantoliano's two-timing employee, Jerry Geisler, in Midnight Run (1988).

Born on Nov. 21, 1934, in the Astoria section of Queens, Kehoe enlisted in the U.S. Army after high school and spent three years with the 101st Airborne Division.

After the service, he studied with famed acting teacher Stella Adler and appeared on Broadway in 1963 in Edward Albee's The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and in off-Broadway productions of Bertolt Brecht's Drums in the Night in 1967 and Eugene O'Neill's A Moon for the Misbegotten in 1968.

Kehoe made his big-screen debut as the bartender in Jimmy Breslin's The Gang Who Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971) and followed that with a role in Peter Yates' The Friends of Eddie Coyle (1973).

He appeared on television in the '80s reboot of The Twilight Zone, Miami Vice and Murder, She Wrote and in films including The Star Chamber (1983), D.O.A. (1988), Young Guns II (1990), Falling Down (1993), The Paper (1994), Gospel According to Harry (1994) and The Game (1997), his final onscreen appearance.

Kehoe chose not to work as often as others in the business.

"How much money does one person need in this life? How many cars can you own? How many houses can you live in?" he asked in a 1974 story in New York magazine. "I saw those TV series stars out on the coast riding around in their sports cars like kids with a ten-thousand-dollar toy, crashing into trees and driving off the edges of mountains because they're bored. They're not using themselves as actors anymore, and it all become about making money."

In 2011, Drago talked to Owen Williams at The Void about his role in The Untouchables:

[The Untouchables] was one of those films where even the things that went wrong went right. It was a difficult shoot in that it was period and we were actually shooting in the city so you have to periodise all those blocks. It was huge. And the studio didn’t know it was going to be a hit, and they actually called De Palma and shut it down. They said “okay we’ve seen the footage, you’ve got enough, we don’t want to spend any more money, that’s it, after the weekend you’re home”, and there were a whole load more scenes we were supposed to shoot.

That’s when they went and shot the Odessa Steps sequence in the train station, with a load of raw film stock that De Palma had stored up. That wasn’t even in the script. We were supposed to shoot at the race track and a lot of other stuff, and he said ‘We can’t shoot any of that stuff, so everybody pack up, but in the meantime I’m going to shoot my version of the Battleship Potemkin scene with all this film I’ve stolen’…

The first scene we shot was where the little kid gets blown up. So I’m outside waiting on the street where they’re lighting, and some older woman comes up with a little boy and asks for a picture, so I put my arm around the little boy and all that. And the next day in the newspaper I found that the picture was there! And the little boy was like Nitti’s great great grandson.

The guy who was my stand-in was the great grandson of a guy who’d had a Nitti contract out on him! And his grandfather had hidden out in the middle of Illinois until Nitti had died, and survived the hit. But even after that, he got ill and he was in the hospital, and the nurses complained about him because he was sleeping with a pistol under his pillow, because he was convinced he was still gonna get whacked!

I got to know the Nitti family. They still live in the Chicago area and they have grocery stores and businesses: regular businesses; they’re not mob connected anymore! They called the hotel where I was staying, which was the actual hotel that had been owned by Capone and Nitti during that period (in fact the very phone booth where Machine Gun Jack McGill was killed was right outside my door). I was down in the lobby and the concierge came over to say that the Nitti family would be by to pick me up at 8 o’clock. Nobody asked if I actually wanted to go… It was an offer I couldn’t refuse! But it would have been too interesting an adventure to turn down anyway. So at eight o’clock I’m down in the lobby and a limousine pulls up and a guy gets out and introduces himself as someone who works for the Nitti family, and we drove around every blues club in Chicago, and at every one it was like royalty had arrived. ‘The Nitti family is here!’ It was great fun but they were making me a little nervous because they gradually started treating me like I really was Frank Nitti. They made sure my back was to the wall so I could see everybody, and all the young Italian turks would come by to pay their respects, and they’d all say “Sooooo, playin’ Uncle Frank huh? Lookin’ good, lookin’ good…” It gave me a bit of an insight into what it would have been like and what had gone on…

They didn’t mind Frank being portrayed as such a villain; the legend is so big. They had to move Nitty’s grave several times because people kept digging it up to make sure he really was dead; they were so scared of him. Only the family knew where his grave was for a while. I wore a white suit in the movie because we thought of him as the angel of death. I talked to a very elderly gentleman once who’d been a policeman undercover, and he said that Nitti had found him out, and tied him up in a basement and put a gun in his mouth and waited to see if he would sweat. Nitti had a very famous saying: ‘I never killed a man who wasn’t afraid to die’. So if he’d sweated he would’ve been killed, but he didn’t so Nitti said ‘oh okay, he’s not afraid’ so he let him go.

My mother never quite forgave me for killing Sean Connery. Mom, I had to! They paid me!

Here are the opening paragraphs of Pelan's article:

Screenwriter David Mamet came up with a Stanislavski quote to describe The Untouchables: “Tragedy is just heightened melodrama.” Brian De Palma, director of The Untouchables, practically has “heightened melodrama” in his list of job requirements. De Palma and Mamet, Capone and Ness. A no-brainer, in retrospect. Yet both were just bodies for hire. The writing gig was first offered to the late Pulitzer-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein. Whatever the reason for her dismissal, the Chicago-born Mamet, who grew up with folk tales of Capone and his cronies, ended up taking the job for “a shitload of money,” off his own Pulitzer success with play Glengarry Glen Ross (The Writer’s Guild of America still wanted to give Wasserstein a credit however). As for “The Chicago way”? Just Mamet jazz, man. You take something, burn it down to the ground and then you build it back up again. And that’s how you get Capone! In 1984, producer Art Linson enthused with Paramount Studio’s president Ned Tanen about adapting The Untouchables television series into a film. Tanen envisioned a “big-scale movie about mythical American heroes.” Mamet saw it as a kind of Western, about “the old gunfighter and the young gunfighter… It occurred to me, what happens if this young innocent, who’s charged with defending the law but only understands that in an abstract way, meets an old disenchanted veteran, the caretaker of the law, soured at the end of his career because of the corruption in the city?” De Palma was approached, off the back of a couple of box office disappointments, after Mamet turned in his third draft. He also appreciated the Western angle, a kind of Magnificent Seven vibe. He considered The Untouchables to be “different from anything I’ve done in the past, because it’s a traditional Americana picture, like a John Ford picture.”

The film opens with its own “opening crawl” if you like, De Palma riffing on pal George Lucas. Before that some very film noir titles, with marching shadows cast across the credits by the letters of the title accompanied by Ennio Morricone’s “Strength of the Righteous” theme. Sycophantic gentlemen of the press wait in silence upon Capone (Robert De Niro), wrapped in hot towels for his morning shave in his opulent hotel suite—off to the left in an overhead descending crane shot, whilst text illuminates:

1930. Prohibition has transformed Chicago into a City at War. Rival gangs compete for control of the city’s billion dollar empire of illegal alcohol, enforcing their will with the hand grenade and tommy gun. It is the time of the Ganglords. It is the time of Al Capone.

Art director William A. Elliott and De Palma envisioned that Capone and his environs should be reminiscent of the court of Louis IV (“He’s the Sun King”), hence the sunburst motif in his suite’s inlaid wooden floor. Everyone waits for him to speak, or for a burst of anger, tamped down, when the barber pricks his skin after a question about illegality. He laughs it off instead. “Responding to the will of the people,” against the strictures of the Volstead Act (Prohibition of booze) is so much hyperbole to the suck-ups. “People are gonna drink,” he smirks… “all I do is act on that.” Like Donald Trump and his “build that wall” mania, Capone plays on people’s base desire, whilst he lives large in the pampered luxury of his own Trump Tower, the Lexington Hotel (I suppose the main difference between Capone and Trump is the former was an actual hard case, three people dying by his hand, or bat, and he has a working business brain, making actual money hand over fist). “My image of The Untouchables is that corruption looks great,” De Palma says in the DVD extras, “like Nazi Germany. It’s clean, it’s big, everything runs smoothly. The problem is all of the oppressed people are in some camp somewhere, and nobody ever sees them. So the world of (Capone’s) Chicago is a slick world, a world that’s run by big money and corruption. And it has to look fabulous.” Outside and in—De Niro even wore the same Sulka and Co. branded silk underwear as Capone.

In contrast, Kevin Costner’s white knight Treasury agent Elliot Ness, brought in from outside the corrupt city limits to tackle Capone head on, is introduced anonymously in his modest home, face not even revealed as he takes his morning coffee. His wife Catherine (the luminous Patricia Clarkson) sees him off to work after reading about a car bomb that kills a young innocent, caught up in Capone’s enforcer Frank Nitti’s crackdown on those who don’t buy their watered-down booze. Ness is revealed face on finally at the police headquarters, this time to a cynical press. Did this choir boy wear a hair shirt under his wardrobe?

Never has the old adage—when the legend becomes fact, print the legend—been more apt. Ness and Capone never met, and going to jail for income tax evasion is not very suspenseful. “So I made up a story about two of the good guys,” Mamet recalled. “Ness and Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery, playing a jaded beat cop), the idealist and the pragmatist.” The real squad comprised Ness and nine handpicked men. The film whittled the number down to a manageable four, the remainder comprised of Andy Garcia as cadet crack shot George Stone (real name Giuseppe Petri, kicking against inherent force racism), and Charles Martin Smith as the almost comic relief accountant Oscar Wallace, who unlocks the trick to bringing down Capone. De Palma and Linson originally wanted Garcia for the Nitti role, but he wisely pushed for his star making turn here (“You got him?” “Yeah, I got him.” We’ll get to that gem of a scene later.). Billy Drago, a one-time stuntman with stiletto bladed cheekbones and sly eyes did however make an indelible mark as Nitti, aided also by wardrobe. The natty killer always dresses in white suits, like “an angel of death.” As for Wallace, De Palma’s direction to Smith was, “I want the audience to be laughing with your character right up until ‘boom!’ (spoiler) you get it.”

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Tonight’s #RedWineCinema:

Brian De Palmas’ The Untouchables

Brian Koppelman, co-screenwriter of the unproduced Untouchables prequel Capone Rising, responded to McQuarrie's initial tweet: "I know every shot and line by heart."

The Nerdy Hub then challenged both of them: "What is the last line of the movie without checking google (even though I can’t check to see if you did or didn’t lmao)".

McQuarrie responded, "Probably have a drink", and then Koppelman added, "'I know some of you take a drink' earlier in the movie is such a great Mamet characterization though language."

Comey is what Saul Bellow called a “first-class noticer.” He notices, for instance, “the soft white pouches under” Trump’s “expressionless blue eyes”; coyly observes that the president’s hands are smaller than his own “but did not seem unusually so”; and points out that he never saw Trump laugh — a sign, Comey suspects, of his “deep insecurity, his inability to be vulnerable or to risk himself by appreciating the humor of others, which, on reflection, is really very sad in a leader, and a little scary in a president.”

During his Senate testimony last June, Comey was boy-scout polite (“Lordy, I hope there are tapes”) and somewhat elliptical in explaining why he decided to write detailed memos after each of his encounters with Trump (something he did not do with Presidents Obama or Bush), talking gingerly about “the nature of the person I was interacting with.” Here, however, Comey is blunt about what he thinks of the president, comparing Trump’s demand for loyalty over dinner to “Sammy the Bull’s Cosa Nostra induction ceremony — with Trump, in the role of the family boss, asking me if I have what it takes to be a ‘made man.’”

Throughout his tenure in the Bush and Obama administrations (he served as deputy attorney general under Bush, and was selected to lead the F.B.I. by Obama in 2013), Comey was known for his fierce, go-it-alone independence, and Trump’s behavior catalyzed his worst fears — that the president symbolically wanted the leaders of the law enforcement and national security agencies to come “forward and kiss the great man’s ring.” Comey was feeling unnerved from the moment he met Trump. In his recent book “Fire and Fury,” Michael Wolff wrote that Trump “invariably thought people found him irresistible,” and felt sure, early on, that “he could woo and flatter the F.B.I. director into positive feeling for him, if not outright submission” (in what the reader takes as yet another instance of the president’s inability to process reality or step beyond his own narcissistic delusions).

After he failed to get that submission and the Russia cloud continued to hover, Trump fired Comey; the following day he told Russian officials during a meeting in the Oval Office that firing the F.B.I. director — whom he called “a real nut job” — relieved “great pressure” on him. A week later, the Justice Department appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel overseeing the investigation into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

During Comey’s testimony, one senator observed that the often contradictory accounts that the president and former F.B.I. director gave of their one-on-one interactions came down to “Who should we believe?” As a prosecutor, Comey replied, he used to tell juries trying to evaluate a witness that “you can’t cherry-pick” — “You can’t say, ‘I like these things he said, but on this, he’s a dirty, rotten liar.’ You got to take it all together.”

Put the two men’s records, their reputations, even their respective books, side by side, and it’s hard to imagine two more polar opposites than Trump and Comey: They are as antipodean as the untethered, sybaritic Al Capone and the square, diligent G-man Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma’s 1987 movie “The Untouchables”; or the vengeful outlaw Frank Miller and Gary Cooper’s stoic, duty-driven marshal Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 classic “High Noon.”

One is an avatar of chaos with autocratic instincts and a resentment of the so-called “deep state” who has waged an assault on the institutions that uphold the Constitution.

The other is a straight-arrow bureaucrat, an apostle of order and the rule of law, whose reputation as a defender of the Constitution was indelibly shaped by his decision, one night in 2004, to rush to the hospital room of his boss, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, to prevent Bush White House officials from persuading the ailing Ashcroft to reauthorize an N.S.A. surveillance program that members of the Justice Department believed violated the law.

One uses language incoherently on Twitter and in person, emitting a relentless stream of lies, insults, boasts, dog-whistles, divisive appeals to anger and fear, and attacks on institutions, individuals, companies, religions, countries, continents.

The other chooses his words carefully to make sure there is “no fuzz” to what he is saying, someone so self-conscious about his reputation as a person of integrity that when he gave his colleague James R. Clapper, then director of national intelligence, a tie decorated with little martini glasses, he made sure to tell him it was a regift from his brother-in-law.

One is an impulsive, utterly transactional narcissist who, so far in office, The Washington Post calculated, has made an average of six false or misleading claims a day; a winner-take-all bully with a nihilistic view of the world. “Be paranoid,” he advises in one of his own books. In another: “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.”

The other wrote his college thesis on religion and politics, embracing Reinhold Niebuhr’s argument that “the Christian must enter the political realm in some way” in order to pursue justice, which keeps “the strong from consuming the weak.”

Although the characters in David Mamet’s new novel, “Chicago,” never sound like real people, they always sound like David Mamet people, which is a strange indication of his success. We would recognize these guys in a dark alley, not from any actual experience in dark alleys but from “Speed-the-Plow,” “American Buffalo” and “Glengarry Glen Ross,” plays that have explored 86-proof masculinity for decades.

In “Chicago,” Mamet returns once again to the city where he was raised and where he started to work in theater. The novel also marks a return to the Prohibition era of “The Untouchables” (1987), Brian De Palma’s gangster film for which Mamet wrote the screenplay. But what’s striking is how little difference the time makes. Past or present, Mamet’s men must always contend with the rapidly changing currents of the day. The moment you hear Mamet working in 1920s Chicago, it’s obvious that this bullet-ridden era fits him as comfortably as a newsboy cap. Yet he’s often felt like an on-the-money writer, catching the zeitgeist even before the cigarette smoke clears the room. Remember that “Oleanna,” his deeply unsettling play about sexual harassment, opened just months after Clarence Thomas joined the Supreme Court. And now, while releasing this novel set 90 years ago, he’s working on a script about recently disgraced Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein.

“Chicago” is not overly inconvenienced by the actual history of the 1920s. “Received chronology,” Mamet notes at the opening, “has been jostled into a better understanding of its dramatic responsibilities.” (Leave it to Mamet to be more responsible than God.) But if this isn’t the exact history of Chicago, it’s still the city you think you know. Italian and Irish gangsters rule competing halves of the town. Al Capone makes a cameo. With alcohol illegal and ubiquitous, the city government is an institution of organized influence peddling. Every crime scene is picked over by sticky-fingered policemen shopping for their wives and girlfriends.

Firstly, it is important to realize that the 70mm prints were blown up from a 35mm anamorphic negative which means in order to maintain a 2.35:1 screen aspect ratio, it became necessary to introduce frame lines top and bottom that, unfortunately, may be projected.

Therefore, any help you can provide toward alleviating this problem (either by adjusting your screen masking or cutting new projector mattes) would be greatly appreciated.

It is also hoped that in converting your print to a platter format, clear rather than opaque tape be used to join the reels and that fast drying white ink or some other commercially available marker be employed to mark the joins.

Though these procedures may take some extra time, they are plainly in the interests of our audience.

Finally, a note on changeovers.

If you intend to screen your print on 2,000 ft. reels, be advised that the changeover cue marks at the end of reel 1 may be difficult to see. As scribed in, they occur at the end of a scene in which Robert DeNiro (Capone) reads a paper in bed while smoking a cigar.

Fortunately, these cues are the only ones you need to worry about, as the rest are clearly visible.

Thank you for hearing us out.

We wish you much succcess with The Untouchables and trust you won't hesitate to call the T.A.P. hotline (1-800-545-2525) should any problems arise.

Sincerely, Brian DePalma

The way Hoskins told the story to Absolute Radio in 2009 was that De Palma sent Hoskins the Untouchables screenplay and told him to look at Capone. "I went to meet him at his hotel," Hoskins said on the Christian O’Connell Breakfast Show, "and he said ‘really I want Robert De Niro to play him,’ and I thought, ‘well great what am I doing here?’ He then said ‘but if he don’t do it, would you sort of step in?’ and I said ‘yeah of course I will’. Anyway months went by and I read the papers and saw De Niro was doing it. I’d sort of forgotten all about it, and then Linda – my Mrs – was opening the post one morning and said ‘what’s that?’ and it was a cheque for £20,000. It said ‘thanks for your time Bob, love Brian’. [He laughed] I phoned him up and I said ‘Brian, if you’ve ever got any films you don’t want me in son, you just give me a call!’”

This was a good six years after Hoskins had made his mark in The Long Good Friday. Another reason this double feature is interesting is that Mackenzie would go on, in 1986, to direct a TV movie out of a screenplay De Palma had developed with novelist Scott Spencer in the early 1980s, Act Of Vengeance.

Here are links and excerpts from the program notes for both films, as well as a couple of other recent articles about The Untouchables:

Kim Morgan on The Long Good Friday

Watching Bob Hoskins walk through the airport in John Mackenzie’s The Long Good Friday is one of those pleasures in cinema that doesn’t happen enough these days. And, really, watching Bob Hoskins do anything – walk, talk (that voice!), whisper, prepare a creepy dinner based on his dead mother, joke, yell, fall in love or spiral into an anger so intense that his neck looks bigger than it really was (and it already was big) and with his face so engorged that it could appear perilously close to bursting. He really could be gloriously terrifying. And charming – often at the same time. He shined and charmed and intimidated and moved you with his tenderness – he’d catch you off guard with it. He had those eyes too – nothing spectacular at first sight until he started emoting – orbs that, in a state of actorly rage, Helen Mirren said looked like, “two little shiny black olives.” Honoring her fellow actor and friend who passed away in 2014, Mirren, his co-star in The Long Good Friday, continued describing Hoskins as such: “Chock-a-block with testosterone, mucho machismo, a real bloke’s bloke, built like a brick outhouse, but with a gentleness, a sweetness and a love and respect for women that was very rare then, and is quite rare now.” That’s lovely – those seeming contradictions of the barrel-chested bruiser who claimed he was never as tough as he looked. As he put it: “You don’t end up with a face like this if you’re hard, do ya? This comes from having too much mouth and nothing to back it up with. The nose has been broken so many times… Oh yeah, plenty of courage. I’m the soppy sod who got up again.”

Just reading his self-description (from a terrific interview in The Guardian) makes me miss Bob Hoskins and miss his voice (if you can believe this insanity, at one point Hoskins’ voice was going to be dubbed for The Long Good Friday and the movie over-edited and dumped on TV). So watching The Long Good Friday again, and watch his swagger through the airport, that now famous opening entrance, was especially effecting. And he’s not even talking yet! I thought to myself, who is like this guy anymore? Who? And who ever was? An unlikely leading man in the vein of Edward G. Robinson, James Cagney, a bulldog (or, more, a pitbull) and that guy who either hugs or punches you (or both) after a long night of drinking, he was a stocky lug, short in stature but large in charisma, with a slangy eloquence that was rough-hewn melodious, a guy one loves to listen to – his rugged cadence was often full of wit and an energy that was both boot shaking and an absolute pleasure. Like this lovely/scary threat to a corrupt cop from Good Friday: “Don’t you ever tell me what I can or can’t do! Bent law can be tolerated for as long as they’re lubricating, but you have become definitely parched. If I was you, I’d run for cover and close the hatch, ’cause you’re gonna wind up on one of those meat hooks, my son.”

With the perfect cast in place to bring the story to life, De Palma was free to use his signature visual storytelling mastery, using long takes and his trademark-Hitchcock-influenced “creeper” sequence – shot from the killer’s point of view who is stalking the victim but doesn’t want to be seen. While the hand-held creeper sequence devoid of dialogue is always highly effective in the De Palma filmography, none evokes the emotional impact like the one that takes us through Jim Malone’s modest apartment – the climax of which solidified Sean Connery’s name on his Best Supporting Actor Academy Award. It’s a show stopper, and the most important lesson that Costner’s Ness needs to learn. The kind of lesson that Malone was trying to impart to Ness in the famous church scene that director of photography Stephen H. Burum shot from a low angle, making the two men appear larger than life, overwhelming the screen as Malone prods Ness – “What are you prepared to do?” Ness’s answer – “Everything within the law,” will fall woefully short to bring down Capone. The irony of the bloodshed that Malone forewarns will be the result of Ness’s crusade, while the two men speak of violence in a house of God, was a set location suggested to De Palma by Connery himself. This connection to the material was a perfect example of the veteran actor shepherding the characters not only onscreen, but off-screen as well.

Burum originally wanted to shoot the film in black and white, but after De Palma explained that the studio would never go for that, he instead came up with a “compositional plan to shoot repetitive images.” In a kind of Kubrick-esque pattern, he set up shots with the same make of car lined up in identical formations on both sides of the street, creating a sense of period familiarity without overwhelming us with colors and busy sets. Burum also employed framing with a lot of “negative space” to remind the audience that things were still evolving, and there weren’t as many people jammed together in an urban environment like there was 30 years ago when the film was first released. Location Scout Eric Schwab and Visual Consultant Patrizia von Brandenstein return Chicago to its prohibition history, with essential locations that keep us in the film’s time period. The two were key contributors to the authenticity of the film’s period look, and put the green screen and computer mate backgrounds of today’s movies to shame.

When the production couldn’t afford to bring to life Mamet’s train collision at Union Station as it appeared in the script, De Palma shows off a bit, crafting the Odessa Steps homage from Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), forcing Costner and Garcia to deal with a baby carriage and its tiny passenger as it makes its way down the Union Station stairs, while they are engaged in a gun fight with Capone’s men. De Palma knew that it’s one thing to blow a cute girl with pig-tails to smithereens, but it’s something else all-together to have a baby killed. Who says De Palma films are too violent?

De Palma and Mamet created an opera with De Niro as a cherubic “Pagliacci” character that is both jester and royalty, and no opera is complete without costumes to enhance the story and the music that tells it – with Marilyn Vance nominated for Best Costume Design (Vance always took exception to the Armani credit) and Ennio Morricone nominated for Best Original Score. For all the film’s smart camera moves, genre raising script, slick production design, and standout performances, the key to the film is Morricone’s score. The sweeping music lifts you out of your seat, while the driving intensity pins you to it. His five note piano march builds suspense while the sharp notes of his haunting, hair raising harmonica, informs us that something wicked is lurking, and on a dime Morricone turns the Post Office raid into a pride filled victory for Ness’ crew, with a colorful musical exclamation mark of what would’ve otherwise been a simple scene unto itself. It’s incredible work by the genius composer.

The Untouchables is a handsome, incredibly satisfying film experience, that continually one-ups itself, and even the violence has a brilliant polish to it we can’t turn away from. The film sits on De Palma’s Mount Rushmore, remaining every bit as stylized in the crime genre as Tim Burton’s Batman that followed in 1989, or the comic book color palette of Dick Tracy in 1990, ranking among one of the decade’s finest crime films.

When I first saw The Untouchables as a teenager, I had never heard of Sergei Eisenstein or the Odessa Steps sequence that Brian De Palma masterfully cannibalized for the film's Union Station set-piece shootout. I knew serious actors sometimes transformed their bodies for a part, but never realized — until reading that Robert De Niro wore silk boxers to help identify with Al Capone — the lengths some went with preparations the audience would never see. And I'd never heard of its screenwriter, David Mamet, whose voice I'd soon encounter in both the plays others turned into movies (Glengarry Glen Ross) and the films (The Spanish Prisoner) he crafted from scratch as writer-director.

De Palma brought these and other highbrow elements together in a movie so well paced and entertaining that a budding cinephile could watch it on a sofa with friends whose tastes barely stretched beyond action blockbusters and broad comedy. The director had been smarting-up sleazy genre pictures for years by the time he made it, and had enjoyed success with the controversially violent Scarface; but here, almost 20 years into his career, was a four-quadrant hit like (if smaller than) those made by his contemporaries Lucas, Spielberg and Coppola. In terms of mainstream appeal, the only picture he would ever make to compete with it was the first Mission: Impossible.

The Untouchables is a dream of gangsters in Chicago. It isn’t De Palma’s dream, though. This isn’t a “personal” movie. He isn’t the voluptuary satirist here that he is in Carrie or Dressed to Kill or the hallucinatory The Fury; he isn’t the artist that he is in Blow Out. And The Untouchables doesn’t have anything comparable to the romantic lushness or the obsessive, sensuous rhythms that Leone brought to Once Upon a Time in America. The picture is more like an attempt to visualize the public’s collective dream of Chicago gangsters; our movie-fed imagination of the past is enlarged and given a new vividness. De Palma is a showman here. Everything is neatly done in broad strokes—the gangsters’ bulging bodies in their immaculately tailored suits, the spats and fedoras, the tommy guns and gleaming cars, the gilt on the furniture, the deep, plushy reds of the blood. And the slight unbelievability of it all makes it more enjoyable.

De Palma has been developing a great camera technique, and in this movie—it’s his 18th—he uses it more impersonally than in the past. He’s making a self-consciously square movie. He works within the structure of Mamet’s moral fable, and Mamet is a master of obviousness. This writer is all deliberation—his points are unavoidable. Yet his characters have a fullness: you get what you need to know about each one. His dialogue is pointed; it has tension. And the scenes have a satisfying economy. He’s a good engineer, and his construction provides De Palma with the basis for reaching a broad audience. De Palma employs this engineering without being false to his own sensibility. He puts almost no weight on Mamet’s moralism. (The film isn’t at all like the Mamet-Lumet The Verdict.) De Palma doesn’t press down on the scriptural language—he uses it as much for its rhetorical color as for its import—and when Ness makes a speech about how the war with Capone has changed him, De Palma glides over the words.

De Palma’s resistance to Mamet’s heart-tugging devices results in a neutral tone in some of the scenes. (The mother of a little girl who has been killed by a gangland bombing comes to see Ness to encourage him in his efforts; there are interludes of Ness at home with his wife and small daughter to show us the domestic tranquility he’s trying to protect; and his wife puts little notes in his lunch bags telling him how proud she is of him.) But if De Palma’s cool neutrality is infinitely preferable to the cloying emotions that other directors might have piled on to scenes such as the one where the little girl is killed by the bomb (she might have been a bonny little lass), it nevertheless creates dead spots. At times, you feel that he’s going through the motions pro forma, in order to preserve Mamet’s structure. Yet De Palma takes such pride in camera angles and the organization of the shots that even the dead spots are likely to have some visual life. (The cinematographer, Stephen H. Burum, uses Panavision to spectacular effect. The imagery, though, isn’t always backed up by the music; every now and then you wonder what Ennio Morricone’s throbbing disco-synthesizer beat is doing in this period.)

De Palma demonstrates his technical command in a stakeout on the marble staircase of Union Station, where Ness and his sharpshooter have gone, hoping to grab Capone’s bookkeeper. They’ve been tipped off that he’s going to try to slip out of town, and they know that he’ll be escorted by gunmen. A young mother is struggling up the steps with two suitcases and a child in a cumbersome old-fashioned baby buggy. Ness, positioned at the top of the stairs, keeps looking down at her progress, knowing that she’s going to be right in the line of fire, and De Palma has the beautiful effrontery to make us experience Ness’s anxiety in suspended time, as in the instant of a car’s skidding into a tree. He holds sound in suspension, too: the shooting is punctuated by the noise of the buggy as it rolls down, clattering slowly, step by step. The sequence deliberately evokes the Odessa Steps montage in Potemkin. It doesn’t involve crowds and armies, though—only a small number of people—and it isn’t meant to be taken as real life. It’s a set piece, and when it’s over, you want to applaud De Palma for having the nerve to bring it off.