The Untouchables (1987)

directed by Brian De Palma

Joshua Wetjen

A white steaming towel enshrouds the face of a man lying back in a barber’s chair. Attendants prepare for a shave. The shot pushes in. The towel is yanked off. A paunchy Robert DeNiro as Al Capone turns toward a reporter, who asks if Capone is the real “mayor of Chicago.”

“It’s touching,” he says, flattered. But no. He only fulfills the will of the people.

His barber, letting the razor slip, cuts the cheek opposite from the one carrying his eponymous “Scarface” mark.

Capone puts his finger to it. Sticky blood on his forefinger runs darkly, like rich and illicit liquor. Capone then sends a bomb to punish an irascible store owner, killing an innocent girl in a moment of collateral damage. He cries at the opera, but defends his son’s innocent ears, and destroys a rival by beating his head to a pulp, wine dark blood pooling across the tablecloth. The blood he touches, touches everyone.

1987’s The Untouchables boasts a meet-up of Kevin Costner, a Reagan-era aspirant to James Stewart’s classic-Hollywood-good-guy throne; an avuncular Sean Connery in full roguish quip mode; and Andy Garcia as a brooding Italian American hero, a counterpoint to the Italian gangster trope. The script is Mamet. The direction is DePalma. The suits are Armani. The soundtrack is Ennio Morricone. On every level, the production is an epic endeavor.

The Untouchables was also my childhood introduction to the legendary figures surrounding the era of American Prohibition and to the grand cinematic crime genre. I watched it for the first time when I was ten—that age when many boys first understand the adult world can be compromised—the same age I understood my parents were good people but didn’t always have perfect intentions or follow-through—the age when my friends’ parents struggled to keep marriages together, and I could see it happening—the arguments and the dissembling—the stories my friends told of their vulnerable, child-like tears behind closed doors.

I watched The Untouchables repeatedly at sleepovers with some of those same friends, captivated by Ness’s plucky goodness and his partner Malone’s pragmatic roughness, a common cop and Western drama trope, but one that was new to me then. The spacious early twentieth century Chicago in the film lacks the more unsettling and intractable visual complications of class and poverty, but its screeching violence was tolerable enough for us, just pushing the edge of my boyhood G.I.-Joe-action-figure-playing, justice-seeking sensibilities. We found the underlying sentiment of the story equally disquieting and fascinating. Like its gorgeous forebear The Godfather, the film has the tantalizing reward of a classic crime story—an uncomfortable foray into dark corners of the human heart wrapped in sumptuous cinematic trappings.

And crime and its consequences in the film are about drawing blood—the metaphorical razor’s edge from the opening scene continues bloodletting throughout. When Charles Martin Smith’s nerdy accountant Oscar Wallace discovers the pleasure of killing, he charges through an intercepted bridge caravan of whiskey smugglers, eliminating each thug with a round from his shotgun. Right before the charge, he humorously laps a sip of whiskey streaming from a barrel pocked with bullet holes. He’s unwittingly touched the poison, the touch of Capone, with the equivalency of blood to liquor the film has established. He has become impure, and later will die in an elevator where the henchman Frank Nitty will horrifically write “Touchable” on the wall in his blood, the same hiddenness come to light as in Capone’s razor cut.

And the true hero of the film—the ensemble’s fulcrum of streetwise knowhow—Malone—will similarly die after he takes a sip from the whiskey he has stashed in his oven. No one sees, he thinks, but we see him scoped by a henchman, the camera floating in POV gaze across the frames of Malone’s windows in pure surveillant De Palma creepiness. Malone, an old single man of experience and grit, in his Irishness a surrogate and celibate priest to initiate Ness into what really counts, is the only one on the team to have tasted life on the streets. And he’ll also pay. After making a clichéd racist quip to the man he thinks is his designated assassin—“Just like a wap to bring a knife to a gun show”—the real gunning happens. Malone suffers a Bonnie-and-Clyde level piercing from another flunky concealed a level down on the fire escape.

As a kid I didn’t make the immediate connection that a sip of liquor for a hero meant a later death by the bullet. I did get the more visceral effect, however. Both Wallace and Malone were super cool guys, cool good guys—they were two versions of a kind of decency necessary to keep the world moving toward redemption. Even they couldn’t live up to their ideals. Malone especially had to be flawed to enact justice—without his street-earned sense of retribution, Ness’s work would have gone nowhere. 

The moment where Malone sips the whiskey sticks with me to this day—I summon it every time I feel inadequate to my ideals. In my twenties I once dated someone who told me “No one has perfect motivation” as we tried to figure things out and I had to choose my path. That’s exactly who Malone is—heroically imperfect and vulnerable—a man with imperfect motivation. It is reminiscent of that cultural moment decades later when we read about Barack Obama skulking away for a cigarette now and then. Anyone burdened with the weight of the world’s ideals must be a little dirty, or at least flawed and better to know it then pretend it’s not there. In the film’s equation, this equivalence of liquor and blood means they will be punished for touching the source of things, like Capone, the man generating the touch of blood. Perhaps everyone good will be punished in some way. In life, we’re all prone to mistakes and doing good only means becoming more aware of our own capacity for duplicitousness and contradiction. Our ideals always exceed our efforts. Khaled Hosseini in The Kite Runner puts it this way: “The man with no conscience does not suffer.”

How can someone enact justice without knowing who’s on the other side, without some sense of temptation? In some East Asian cultures, crime syndicates and the police worship the same god of war. That’s something The Untouchables gets right, which is to say, it gets right about people. I grew up in a protestant household, inundated with the concept of human flaws and original sin, but more than a lot of Sunday school lessons, The Untouchables showed me the possibilities of fallenness even for those who seek the good. No one is purely one thing or the other. And its touch of blood equivalency is also a warning against methods. The touch of violence not only affects the innocent—those who would borrow it to foment justice inevitably share in and admit to, their own corruption.

Joshua Wetjen is a high school English teacher living in Minneapolis and working in St. Paul. When not grading or chasing his two children, he likes to tinker on his jazz guitar and try new restaurants with his wife. His work has appeared in The Pinch, Newfound, and Yalobusha Review, among other publications.