The Untouchables (1987) dir. Brian De Palma
I saw The Untouchables for the first time tonight. Bond always gets the best lines and the Oscar is well deserved even if his mastery of a Boston Irish accent sounds suspiciously Scottish
Robert De Niro's depiction of Capone is comic, verging on camp, but definitely a classic role. It's surprising how much his part in the film was ridiculed at the time by Roger Ebert. I think of the part as a precursor to his later more comic work and alongside his role in Brazil it's a bit of light relief after the epic Once Upon A Time In America. A few years later a fellow 'serious actor' Al Pacino, would play an equally comic cartoonish Italian-American bad-guy role in Dick Tracy.
Kevin Costner playing the moral lynch pin, is very much the same part he would replicate for JFK.
The homage to Battleship Potemkin is a nice touch, but it's dramatised in such a way that it's more of a Naked Gun type spoof. The obvious homage was drawn out almost as laboriously long as the classic scene in Battleship Potemkin.
There is one particularly superb piece of incidental music scored by the legendary Ennio Morricone, 'Al Capone's Theme' really captures the comic subtleties of De Niro's Capone. The melody is an impish play on Gangster clichés, recalling the incidental music from The Godfather, it takes the stereotype turns it inside-out with the huge 80s reverb drums, funky bass and synthesizer. Morricone must have been familiar with De Palma's Scarface as there is something of Giorgio Moroder's insidious Scarface theme in there as well.
