The Untouchables (1987)

The Untouchables arrives from 1987, a year in which a director could still make a gangster picture about tax law and call it entertainment. Brian De Palma stages David Mamet's script with elegance and a certain cold precision. The film's moral instruction concerns Prohibition, corruption, and the virtue of never stopping until the fight is done. It lectures, yes, but the sermon is about duty and the income tax code. No contemporary cultural curriculum is on offer, and none is needed.

On matters of casting, the picture is a monument to the demographic assumptions of its era. Andy Garcia, born in Cuba, plays George Stone, an Italian-American sharpshooter, which stands as the film's lone gesture toward a broader ensemble and is not really a gesture at all. Women appear as wives, mothers, and bystanders. Patricia Clarkson, in her debut, waits at a safe house while the men settle matters with shotguns. The Union Station sequence pauses for a mother and her baby on the stairs, a moment of sentiment that flatters the hero without granting the woman a name worth remembering.

The historical record is treated with cheerful contempt: the border raid never happened, Frank Nitti did not fall from any roof, and Ness had little to do with the conviction that made him famous. These liberties serve pulp, not a modern social argument. Capone is a brute in a white suit, not an indictment of capital. We are left with a well-crafted thriller whose cultural politics belong entirely to another century, which is either a relief or a disappointment depending on the inventory of the viewer.