D:
Phil Karlson. P: Quinn Martin. W: Paul Monash. Ph: Charles Straumer. M: Wilbur
Hatch. St: Robert Stack (Eliot Ness), Keenan Wynn (Joe Fuselli), Barbara
Nichols (Brandy La France), Patricia Crowley (Betty Anderson), Neville Brand
(Al Capone)
This
two-part pilot for the TV series The
Untouchables (1959-63), later prepared for theatrical release, makes a
fascinating companion piece to Brian de Palma’s extravagant staging of the same
events in 1987.[i]
Inspired
by the gang-busting memoirs of Treasury agent Eliot Ness, The Untouchables was the eighth most popular show in the US in
1960, its first season, with an estimated audience of 12.7 million. Viewing
figures declined in subsequent years but it remained influential – and
controversial, because of its violence and hot-blooded Italian-American stereotypes.
Much of the series was fictionalised, pitting Ness and his incorruptible
associates against Prohibition’s most wanted, from Ma Barker to Lucky Luciano. (The
stories were “in spirit, the same” as Ness’s actual exploits, commented his
wife at the time.) The pilot, although it also stretches the truth, dramatised
the case that made Ness’s name – the campaign against Al Capone.
Karlson
graduated from Poverty Row to craft a series of exceedingly tough crime dramas.
(The town-taming plotline of his Phenix
City Story – one of the most violent American films of the Fifties – foreshadowed
The Scarface Mob, as well as
Karlson’s best-known work, the inflammatory Walking
Tall.) Inevitably his style is somewhat cramped here, not so much
aesthetically – it is a visual treat, with pin-sharp monochrome contrasts – as tonally.
There is plenty of rough stuff, stronger than most networks’ output at the time,
but he leaves the heavy hitting to the untouchables’ commandeered five-ton
truck, augmented with a steel battering ram. (That said, there is a gunshot
victim rigged with squibs, a rare sight in American cinema before the mid-Sixties,
and virtually unheard of on television.)
The Scarface Mob is more than a dry run for the Eighties
‘remake’. Rooted in the semi-documentary tradition of procedural noir (adopted
to compelling effect by Karlson in The
Phenix City Story), with stentorian narration by the celebrated journalist Walter
Winchell, it recounts the same events as the later film – brewery raids,
intimidation, episodic brutality – with Karlson’s customary terseness. Ness,
played with square-jawed steadfastness by Stack, assembles a team of morally
upright professionals (cast deliberately with unglamorous actors) to bypass the
bribery and corruption endemic in Chicago. Outstanding among them is Wynn’s
ex-con Fuselli. More streetwise than Ness, Fuselli – broadly the equivalent of Sean Connery’s
character in de Palma’s rendition – shows his boss “the Chicago way”, as it
were, as the narrative progresses to a bathetic conclusion: Capone’s famous
conviction for tax evasion.
The
pace is a little pedestrian until Neville Brand’s intervention as Capone injects
manic energy and provides Ness with a formidable antagonist, his iridescent mood
swings more than compensating for the grey pallor of his subordinates. (What’s
lacking is a strong secondary villain. Capone’s lieutenant, Frank Nitti, is here
a businesslike bully – a more accurate reflection of the real Nitti, perhaps,
but in dramatic terms a pale shadow of Billy Drago’s stylish sadist in the 1987
Untouchables.) There are other colourful
sketches: Joe Mantell as Ness’s tragically naive mob informant; Barbara Nichols
as his blowsy wife, a stripper who flirts with anything in trousers; the veteran
Polish actor Wolfe Barzell as Fuselli’s surrogate father figure, who pays
dearly for crossing Capone.
The
production design instils a sense of verisimilitude; Desilu evidently backed
Karlson’s vision with a decent budget. The script does likewise, certain
liberties notwithstanding. Like many documentary-style postwar thrillers, the
film relishes details, from the newfangled wiretap technology employed by an
undercover agent in one of Capone’s speakeasies, to the mob’s kiss-of-death ritual,
anointing potential assassins before a hit.
Were
this a fully fledged Karlson noir he would probably have made more of Ness’s
frustrations, pushed the implicit comparison between the strong-arm methods of
the outfit and those of the untouchables further than he does. (He may even
have broached this Prohibition champion’s rumoured alcoholism, for bleakly
ironic effect.) Ness had died just two years before production, however, and
the film preserves him as a figure of respect. Slugging gangsters when they threaten
your wife is one thing; throwing a suspect off a courthouse roof (viz. Kevin
Costner in The Untouchables) quite
another. Kevin Grant
[i] The episodes that comprise The Scarface Mob were filmed for the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse anthology
series, which also produced, in 1958, The
Time Element, Rod Serling’s prototype for The Twilight Zone. A second Untouchables
TV series aired without much fanfare in 1993-94, with Tom Amandes as Ness and
William Forsythe as Capone
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