Jensen thirsted to learn every aspect. “From Day 1 in the film industry, I was wanting to direct and would like that job,” he said.

He enrolled in the University of Southern California film school. On days when stunts were not required, he returned to the set, observed directors and helped out. His career advanced by earning credentials with the Stuntmen’s Association of Motion Pictures and the Actors Studio in New York.

He savored travel to exotic locales. “I have been on every continent except South America, even under the polar ice cap. The places that they paid me to go! I had the most amazing career. But my injuries caught up with me.”

Early stunt work was on TV shows like “Walker, Texas Ranger,” as well as Chuck Norris’ 1983 movie “Lone Wolf McQuade.” He fell off a seven-story building in “The Fall Guy,” and appeared in episodes of “Falcon Crest,” “Knight Rider” and “Magnum, P.I.” He fought with Jackie Chan on “Cannonball Run 2” in 1984 and Sylvester Stallone in the 1989 “Rambo III” movie, where he was second-unit director. That year he performed stunts in “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” with Harrison Ford.

Fighting — or pretending to fight — meant developing eye and hand coordination to effectively “pull punches.”

“The worse thing you can do is hit an actor or hit the camera,” he said. “Fighting is all choreography for the camera. It’s all rehearsing, blocking. It is all a big con.”

On rare occasions where performers actually hit Jensen, he made sure he was paid extra.

Another inside secret is how stunt coordinators plan car chases and crashes. Jensen is amused to reveal how they use tiny “Matchbox” toy cars to help multiple drivers learn their moves before they did the real thing for the rolling camera. “We are creating illusions, we are not crashing,” he said.

Jensen cherishes memories of working with big-name stars, especially those who recognized his skill. “I put my physical well being on the line so they can be safe,” he said. A treasured 1987 snapshot from the set of “The Untouchables” shows Sean Connery and his double — Jensen, with identical costume and mustache. Another shows him with Donald Sutherland, who he describes as “very thoughtful.”

The contrast in scenes ran the gamut. In “Running Man” in 1987 with Schwarzenegger, he was a motorcycle rider who attacked brandishing chainsaws then flew over the handlebars. Doubling for John Goodman in the 1994 “Flintstones” movie, meant wearing a dress when Fred put on a disguise.

One spectacular stunt was for Dolph Lundgren’s 1992 adventure “Universal Soldier.” The scene called for Lundgren’s character to Australian rappel (standing, facing down) 650 feet down the Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona border.

“I wore five layers of gloves,” Jensen said, recalling meticulous preparation that included making sure the rope was long enough. “If I trip and fall, I die. You have to lean out at a 90-degree angle. I did it six times, once with a camera on my head.”

Jensen appeared in three of the “Star Trek” movies, but laments the change to CGI (computer generated images) in many of today’s films. “I love making movies,” he said. “I hate the business of movies,” alluding to how money is wasted, “but I love the process.”

From a TIME magazine article by Richard Corliss, June 22, 1987:

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 the snazzy, derivative thrillers (Carrie, Body Double) and dope operas (Scarface) that made him notorious. The new picture would be neither parody nor eulogy; it would be the story of a straight arrow, told with a straight face.

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."

I get hung up on this stuff, too, though it’s easy to easy to overlook the lies, narrative or visual, for other compensations. “The Untouchables,” for example. Director Brian De Palma and Chicago-born screenwriter David Mamet filmed a lot of their 1987 Eliot Ness/Al Capone saga here, at Union Station, or on the Michigan Avenue bridge over the Chicago River.

Factually the film is full of it, and I don’t mean facts. It makes stuff up. (It’s a fictional narrative based a little bit on fact; in other words, not a documentary.) At one point, Mamet bailed on rewrites ordered up by producer and fellow Chicago native Art Linson involving Ness tossing gangster Frank Nitti off a rooftop.

It’s a pretty dumb scene, but “The Untouchables” has many I love. Some take glorious advantage of filming here, in the city where the story is set, as in the simple establishing shot of Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia and Charles Martin Smith crossing LaSalle Street, backed by the 44-story wonder that is the Chicago Board of Trade Building. That famous corridor has never been given grander screen treatment, with the possible exception of “The Dark Knight.”

Chicago as an authentic 20th-century screen entity has a sadly incomplete history, largely thanks to Richard J. Daley. In 1957, NBC-TV premiered the Chicago-set police drama “M Squad,” starring Lee Marvin as the tough guy who, decades later, inspired Frank Drebin in “Police Squad!” and the subsequent “Naked Gun” movies.

Daley and then-Police Commissioner Timothy O’Connor had no love for it. In their eyes, “M Squad” made Chicago look bad. A 1959 epsoide depicted a cop on the take, which made Daley vow never to make special accommodations for outside film crews. That same year, Marvin told TV Guide: “We shoot locations, twice a year. No permit, no cooperation, no nothing. They don’t want any part of us .… Any public building, but nothing else, no stopping traffic. We shoot it and blow.”

A decade later “Medium Cool,” with its culminating scenes filmed during the downtown Chicago melee during the August 1968 Democratic National Convention, gave the city and the mayor another image problem. Daley let John Wayne and “Brannigan” film here, in the mid-’70s, but only when the Jane Byrne mayoral years commenced did Hollywood feel welcome and free to take over Chicago’s streets and beat things up a little, the way the 1980 smash-‘em-up “The Blues Brothers” did.

“Judas and the Black Messiah” may not give you any of the real or period-approximated Chicago of the Fred Hampton years, but Cleveland turned out to be a reasonably effective substitute. Oddly, it’s “The Trial of the Chicago 7″ that looks and feels more fraudulent in terms of atmosphere, even though Sorkin filmed some scenes here.

Moral of the story? You never know. Filming “Holidate” here wouldn’t have saved “Holidate.” And, though I love it, the Chicago-set and Chicago-filmed “Widows” apparently had just enough script issues and knotty storylines to prevent it from connecting with the mainstream audience it deserved.

We’ll close with a little-known story behind the Union Station sequence in “The Untouchables.”

At the time, cultural historian [Tim] Samuelson was working for the Commission on Chicago Landmarks, helping with location scouting for De Palma’s crew. They needed, as he recalled, “a building that looked like a 1920s hosptial with a lot of stairs in front of it, plus a landing.”

Samuelson told them about a couple of churches he knew, here and there. Those might work, he said. How about a church instead of a hospital? No, doesn’t fit the script, the crew said. Well, the only other place, really, is Union Station, Samuelson replied.

A day or two later: “Thanks a lot,” one of the production liaisons told Samuelson, laughing. “Thanks to you, we had to rewrite the whole (expletive) script!” And that’s the scene we have today, filmed on the steps of our beautiful downtown train station, the only possible location for such a preposterously effective homage to the Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s “The Battleship Potemkin.”

It never really happened. It’s fiction. But you know? Who cares?

From James Southall's 2013 review of Ennio Morricone's Untouchables soundtrack, via Movie Wave:

De Palma has always believed that music has a very important role to play in a film and as such, the scores for his films tend to be striking and very much at the forefront; and he’s worked with some wonderful composers including Bernard Herrmann, Pino Donaggio, John Williams, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Danny Elfman and others. On three occasions, he worked with the great Ennio Morricone.

The first of those was The Untouchables (with Casualties of War and Mission to Mars to follow in later years) and Morricone’s up-front, arresting music is quite brilliant. The score opens with “The Strength of the Righteous”, which introduces the main action theme (one of five major themes in the score), as electronic beats accompany a repeating five-note phrase heard on low-end piano and then strings, all with a wailing harmonica accompaniment. It’s a portentous opening to film and score – particularly dark yet somehow wonderfully colourful as well. Interestingly, of all the great melodic themes in the score he could choose from, when he performs the music in concert it is this dark action piece that Morricone chooses. The harmonica theme without the five-note accompanying figure is heard in the brilliant-but-brief “In the Elevator”. “The Man with the Matches” is another reprise of the material, this time filled with even more tension (and on the extended version of the album, appended with the brief “Nitti Shoots Malone”, adding a brilliant piece of anguished string writing to the end of the piece). The previously-unreleased “Courthouse Chase” is a brilliant variant on the material, on this album providing a good introduction to the familiar “On the Rooftops”, the score’s primary action cue.

Josh Horowitz: What's the one that scarred you for life? What's the one that still haunts your dreams, all these years later?

Stanley Tucci: There were two of them. One was Brian De Palma, who I went in and auditioned for. And my friend Ellen Lewis cast it. So Ellen cast all of my films when I was making them in America. Well, three of them, three of my films. And, um, he, Brian De Palma... I auditioned for The Untouchables.

Horowitz: Yep.

Tucci: To play, like, Frank Nitti, or one of the bad guys.

Horowitz: Okay. That'd be ironic, considering you went on to play Frank.

Tucci: I know. I know. And he... then I did it, and he just sort of sat there and stared at me. It was weird, it was in a conference room, he was sitting at a desk, and I was standing sort of next to him, and the whole thing was weird. And then I did it and he went, "Ooh. Scary." And I was like, I don't know how to react to that. And then there was some minor chit-chat about nothing, and then I left. And I was so depressed. It was just creepy and bad and rude.

As for Connery, Mamet said he was a pleasure to work with and that he brought legitimacy to the tough guy cop character he’d written. Said Mamet: “I was talking the other day to somebody whose brother was a cop and who said to her, ‘the best portrayal I’ve ever seen of a cop in a movie was the one by Connery. What Connery exhibits is what every cop needs and many don’t have, and that is common sense.’ Mamet said that was conveyed in scenes that included one where Connery’s Malone confronts Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness on a bridge at night. “Malone says, ‘why are you carrying a gun’ and Ness replies, ‘Because I am a treasury officer.’ When Connery says okay and walks away, Costner says, ‘ Why would you turn away from someone with a gun, just because he claims to be a treasury officer and Connery says, ‘Who would claim to be that, who wasn’t?’ It is the perfect example of the common sense a cop needs,” Mamet said.

I ask how Connery compared to the many other actors who delivered Mamet’s signature tough guy dialogue. The playwright-turned-filmmaker declined to eat the sushi, er, swallow the bait.

“Ever hear that joke, how do you make 99 of 100 little old ladies say, ‘fuck?’ I confessed I hadn’t. “Have the other one shout, Bingo! It’s the same thing here. Why would I alienate innumerable great actors I’ve worked with by picking one over another? I’ve been blessed since the earliest days in my career when we started our theater company in Chicago and I worked with Billy Macy, Joe Mantegna, Patti LuPone, Laurie Metcalf and others. I’ve worked with a lot of real tough guys,, like Dennis Farina, a real tough cop, and Dennis Franz, a tough Vietnam vet. I’ve worked with actual bank robbers, after they came down state, just superb actors.

“I stopped watching the news five months ago, I just couldn’t take anymore, and my wife and I have been watching old movies, pre-code movies, from back when they made 2500 films a year,” he said. “We’re watching King of the Newsboys, which starred Lew Ayres when he played light heavyweights, before Dr. Kildare, and in one scene they are getting drunk sitting at the bar and a woman wakes up, looks around and says, ‘Oh, am I still here?’ I think, that is genius, there’s no other line in the movie nearly that good. What happened? I think about it and figure, she misread the line, most probably.

“I remember a scene from a film I wrote and directed, Heist. Gene Hackman is in a scene with Danny DeVito. I’m crazy about Danny and he’s talking to Hackman on the phone and the line is ‘Are you fucking with me, are you fucking with me, or are you done fucking with me.’ With the emphasis on the world ‘done.’ As we’re shooting, I think, Jesus, no, don’t let him read it with the emphasis on ‘done’ instead of ‘fucking’ with me. And he reads it the correct way, the way a regular guy would. He was great. Sometimes, these things just happen.”

...

Back to Connery?

“My wife [actress Rebecca Pidgeon] is Scottish and I remember running into Sean in Edinburgh one year, maybe it was at the Edinburgh Festival,” Mamet said. Obviously Connery, who was knighted in his home country, would have been wearing the traditional kilt.

“What I’ll say about Sean is, not only did he do everything well, but he looked great in a skirt,” Mamet said.

Keith Phipps, Vulture

And so we’re off to Kansas City’s Union Station for a big shootout. And if it looks a little familiar, that’s because Fargo shot the scene at Chicago’s Union Station. Even if you’ve never been there, if you’ve seen Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, you’ll recognize it as the setting of a gunfight that gives the movie its most famous set piece. It’s no accident that the battle in this episode evokes that famous scene, from its long set-up to its exaggerated soundtrack to its strategically deployed slow motion. (There’s no baby carriage rolling down the stairs Battleship Potemkin-style, however.) If the scene doesn’t come close to topping its inspiration, it gives the episode yet another moment that complicates our feelings toward its colorful criminals.

Scott Tobias, The New York Times

It’s probably unfair to chide “Fargo” for ripping off a major set-piece from Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables” since De Palma himself has been knocked for ripping off Alfred Hitchcock. And the set-piece in question, a shootout at Chicago’s Union Station, nods to the famed Odessa Steps sequence in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Battleship Potemkin.” Nevertheless, the quotes around quotes around quotes somewhat diminish the impact of a show that can seem, at times, like a shallow pastiche without the undergirding of original ideas or thematic purposefulness. Its pleasures are mostly on the surface.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. For the most part, this episode was an entertaining jumble of loose ends and Plan Bs, full of characters who are scrambling to figure out how to act when their schemes have been blown up. With various subplots zipping every which way, there’s not any single unifying idea that binds the hour together, but at this point in the season, there’s just too much narrative business that needs to be resolved.

The chaos that ensues from the Union Station operation — with Deafy and Swanee dead and Zelmare still on the loose — adds an encouraging volatility to the final batch of episodes this season. No one is in a comfortable spot here: Oraetta has to worry that Dr. Harvard will pursue attempted murder charges; Loy has to worry that the Faddas are finally uniting against him; the Faddas have to worry about Milligan; and everybody has to worry about Zelmare, who will surely be coming back to town, eager to settle some scores. Sounds like one or two more De Palma set pieces waiting to happen.

Robert De Niro, who, of course, played Al Capone in The Untouchables, also issued a statement on Saturday, according to Deadline's Alexandra Del Rosario. "I’m very sorry to hear about Sean’s passing,” De Niro said. “He seemed much younger than 90; I expected – and hoped– he’d be with us much longer. See you up there, Sean."

It was destiny that I got to work with him in The Untouchables. God works in mysterious ways. It was a great privilege for me. It was one of those things you think that someone will put a hand on your shoulder and say, “Wake up. It's all been a dream.”

We rehearsed for a week or so before we started [shooting] in Chicago. I remember during rehearsal, he was jabbing me with a clipboard that he had in his hands with the little metal part right in my ribs. And I remember knocking it out of his hand. And then he was like, “I like that. Let's do that in the movie.” So that's why it's in the movie like that because Sean was provoking me to get a reaction. Once I did, he said, “Good. I like this kid.”

We were doing a scene where I had to go down the hallway. The camera was looking down the hallway, and he was off camera. It was me answering the phone and having a conversation with him. But he was ready to go play golf right after the scene would be over. So I went in there to answer the phone, and Brian De Palma said, “Cut.” And I walked back to where they were, and Brian said, “Andy, we didn't see your face.” And then there was a discussion about how I’d answer the phone. I didn’t want it to look corny. And Sean looked up to me and said, “Come on, kid, it's not Hamlet: just answer the phone, turn around; let's get out of here.” So. I did another take. Brian says “Cut. Andy, we only saw one eye.” And Sean, with his great sense of humor, said, “You saw two eyes. They’re just very close together.”

His sense of humor was so quick, and you could be the butt of his humor very easily. And he would take it as well as he could give it. I would riff with him and try to hold my ground. And that was my relationship with him in the movie as well. I had to always come back with something. He wanted you to come back. He didn't want you to lay down. I made him laugh, and he treated me very warmly. He loved kids. He loved the fact that my kids were around on the set, and he would play with them. That showed the warmth of his character.

Sean took his work very seriously. He was a consummate actor, and he was highly prepared, so he set the bar very high. As soon as he walked into the room, he was ready, and you had to be ready around him. You had to show up ready to go. He had this masterful touch, imaginative, a sense of interpretation that he had with all of his parts going back to the early Bond.

The last time I saw Sean was at a tribute that we did at the AFI [in 2009], and I was honored to speak about him. After the event, we went together to an afterparty and sat together. We had a cocktail or two, and it was a beautiful thing. I never saw him after that. He lived in the Bahamas. He said, “Come to Nassau. We’ll play some golf.” I thought to myself, “Yeah, I gotta go do that.” I never did. It's a regret I have.

Raise your glass for him. It's never too early to toast Sean Connery.

“Do you know what a blood oath is, Mr. Ness?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Cuz you just took one.” — Sean Connery’s Jimmy Malone, shaking hands with Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness in “The Untouchables.”

Virtually every tribute to the late Sean Connery led with his signature role as the original James Bond, and rightfully so. But for many a movie fan and for Chicagoans in particular, when we think of Sean Connery, we think of the savvy and world-weary Irish cop Jimmy Malone in the “The Untouchables,” telling Kevin Costner’s Eliot Ness how to get Al Capone. As Malone and Ness kneel side by side at Our Lady of Sorrows Basilica in East Garfield Park, Malone asks Ness, “What are you prepared to do?”

“Everything within the law,” comes the reply.

“And THEN what are you prepared to do?...You want to get Capone, here’s how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. THAT’S the Chicago way, and that’s how you get Capone.”

There are certain movie moments where an actor clinches an Oscar, right then and there — and that was one of those moments. Connery had won the Oscar for best supporting performance of 1987 before Jimmy Malone and Eliot Ness left that church.

Brian DePalma directed the highly fictionalized and enormously entertaining “The Untouchables,” but it was David Mamet who gave the film its voice with his brilliant screenplay, and it was Sean Connery who turned Jimmy Malone into one of cinema’s great and lasting characters.

And what a Chicago film it was! DePalma and his production team made great use of the city, from the lower pedestrian deck of the Michigan Avenue Bridge where Ness meets Malone to the canyons of La Salle Street in the Loop to the Blackstone Hotel to the magnificent foyer of the Chicago Theatre standing in as the entrance to the Lexington Hotel. (Jimmy Malone’s apartment has been replaced by University of Illinois-Chicago buildings.)

“The Untouchables” featured an outstanding ensemble cast — Robert De Niro, Kevin Costner, Andy Garcia, Charles Martin Smith — and of course Costner was the leading man and hero, but it was Connery as Jimmy Malone that gave the movie heart, that gave it a big-shouldered Chicago personality. He owned every moment he was onscreen.

In the wake of the news today, Mamet shared two personal stories about Connery with The Hollywood Reporter's Seth Abramovitch:

Sean Connery, who died on Saturday at age 90, was nominated just once for an Oscar — and won.

It was for his work in 1987's The Untouchables, in which he played Jimmy Malone, a veteran Irish-American cop who teams up with federal agent Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) to put Al Capone (Robert De Niro) behind bars.

Malone's most famous Untouchables monologue — and arguably the most memorable line from the film — involves a scene in which he advises Ness: "You want to know how to get Capone? They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way."

The author of those words, Untouchables screenwriter David Mamet, shared two stories about Connery with The Hollywood Reporter.

The first is a reminder of Connery's dry and self-effacing wit.

"I met Sean [for the first time] on set," says Mamet. "Me: 'I am very pleased to meet you.' Sean: 'I never made a dollar off of James Bond.'"

The second story involves a gesture of kindness by Connery that forever stuck with Mamet.

"During post-production [Sean] was in Majorca, and we made a date to speak on the phone," he recalls. "Before our scheduled call my cousin called. She was in Ohio with a failed marriage, a husband who'd just lost his job, and, no doubt, the attendant kids down sick."

"In any case," he continues, "she was beyond despair. I told her I'd have to get off the phone as I was expecting a call from Sean Connery, and I'd call her back after the business call."

"'Give him my love,'" the cousin implored. "'Please; I adore him. Tell him first thing.'"

"Then Sean called. I said, 'My cousin adores you.' He asked about her, and I sighed, and told him the tale of her troubles."

"'What's her number?'" was Connery's reply.

"I gave it to him, he rang off, called her in Ohio, and chatted for half an hour. Rest in Peace," Mamet says.