Another of the movies that I had surprisingly not gotten around to seeing before is Sean Connery's Oscar-winning turn in The Untouchables. I noticed that it's been showing up on one or another of the movie channels in the Pluto TV streaming service, and since Pluto allows you to watch any of the currently-airing movies from the start, I decided to watch it. (It also happens to be availble on demand.)
The movie starts off in 1930 in Chicago, where Prohibition has resulted in the rise of the Mafia even more than in some other cities; here it is of course led by Al Capone (Robert De Niro). Capone controls much of the alcohol distribution in Chicago, and when bars or other providers of under-the-table alcohol don't want to get it from Capone's outfit, he has no qualms about bombing people into compliance, even if it kills little girls.
One such bombing pisses the people off enough that the feds finally send somebody in to try to bring Capone down, and that person is of course Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner). Ness is portrayed as one of those people who's straight-arrow honest, and will enforce the law as written simply because that's the law, even if it's something he might not agree with. Of course, he's also an egotistical dick. He brings the press on an operation to interdict one of Capone's shipments from Canada, so that he can get the publicity shot and look good. But the corrupt police tipped Capone off, leaving Ness with crates full of Japanese umbrellas. Ness treats the reporter who photographs this like dirt.
But the operation also leads to the key meeting with the one honest Chicago cop. Ness is despondent and standing on an el platform, and noticing that is Jim Malone (Sean Connery). Malone notices Ness' gun, not recognizing Ness as the federal agent he is. It takes some time, but eventually Ness gets the idea that he needs to trust a somebody who knows Chicago, so he makes Malone a federal agent. They then go to look for another honest man, concluding that they need to draft a recruit who hasn't actually served yet. Eventually the find "George Stone" (Andy Garcia), who was born Giuseppe Petri but doesn't want to be an Italian in the Chicago police force seeing how micks like Malone hate wops.
It's still going to be hard to take down an alcohol-smuggling operation, however, regardless of how much force the feds are able to bring to bear on Capone's outfit. Thankfully, they discover that Capone hasn't filed an income tax return in four years, so they use the tax law to go after Capone. Capone is still going to have quite a bit of influence, however, in trying to bribe the necessary authorities to get the case to go his way.
The Untouchables is another of those well-made movies, and it's easy to see why it got the very high reviews it did. If it has one problem, however, it's the same issue that I had with the recently-recommended Cry Baby, which is that the direction (by Brian Palma) can be a little too stylized at times. I don't know exactly how true to real history the story is, but the version of history presented here is more than entertaining enough.
If you haven't seen it before, The Untouchables is decidedly worth watching.
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