Cinema: In The American Grain THE UNTOUCHABLES

“So much violence,” murmurs Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) as he cleans out his desk at the end of The Untouchables.

A truer, sadder sigh has never escaped from a movie sound track. He has, after prodigies of bloodshed and the loss of precious friends and values, fulfilled the classic destiny of a movie hero. Garbed in a mysterious, often near comical purity, he has arrived in a profoundly corrupted community and, by imposing his eerie conscientiousness on it, awakened its conscience. Now the city is at peace, in part because Ness has taken upon himself some of its wickedness. Or, as he puts it, “I have become what I beheld, and I am content that I have done right.”

The Untouchables is not a realistic recreation of Chicago during Prohibition. Nor is it a typical effort from Brian De Palma, who has often put his awesome technique and his admirable sense of film history to trashy (Dressed to Kill) or trivial (Wise Guys) ends. Instead, it goes to that place that all films aspiring to greatness must attain: the country of myth, where all the figures must be larger and more vivid than life.

We might therefore join De Palma and Screenwriter David Mamet in a prayer that their epic work — a masterpiece of idiomatic American moviemaking as well as a plangent commentary on its traditions — will be spared from the literalists, complaining both that the gore is too real and that the characters are not real enough. Protect them as well from the wrath of the traditionalists, who resist the intrusion of originality on their passion for the endless restatement of stale generic conventions. Deliver them instead to the audience that will be galvanized, as the filmmakers were, by the chance to reimagine all the cliches of crime fiction.

Begin with Al Capone, from whom all factual and fictional descendants have learned some of the elements of style. But skip all that gangster-as-tragic- hero stuff. In Robert De Niro’s grandly scaled performance he is demonically expansive, our first thug celebrity. And a man who in his secret life, the life his romanticizing fans did not want to hear about, illustrates a lecture on teamwork by taking a Ruthian clout at a traitorous underling’s skull with a baseball bat. What he evokes, finally, is pure horror (and maybe some black humor) but — and the film is rigorous on this point — no sympathy.

Ness is even more radically redefined. Mamet says he sees him as a lone town tamer of Western legend. De Palma has evoked the name of John Ford to suggest the classic qualities he was aiming for. And Costner has something of the grave beauty Gary Cooper used to bring to these roles.

But he is something more than the Western hero transplanted to the city’s wilderness. He is not a detached solitary; he is a family man, pleased when his wife tucks a love note into his brown-bag lunch, careful to include both an Eskimo and a butterfly kiss in his little daughter’s good-night ritual. Nor is he a man who has educated himself along the trail; instead, he proudly asserts his learning through the punctilious formalities of his manner and diction. Indeed, he is a man whose survival (and killer) instincts are in dire need of on-the-job training and support.

That is where his untouchable (read incorruptible) “posse” comes in. Moral fiber might be enough to carry the day against frontier bandits. But in urbanized America, where crime is mechanized, industrialized and partially subsidized by government, it needs a modest organization to back its play: the nerveless trigger finger of George Stone (Andy Garcia), like Capone, Italian; the accounting genius of wimpy-looking, stouthearted Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith); and above all, the mentoring heart and long memory of the Irish cop, Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery). He is a weary, steady man, very clearly seen by an actor whose every gesture is wryly informed by the humorous, and uncynical knowledge of a lifetime.

What is true of Connery’s work applies to the whole movie. Mamet’s elegantly efficient script does not waste a word, and De Palma does not waste a shot. The result is a densely layered work moving with confident, compulsive energy. One sequence is set in Chicago’s Union Station, where Ness and Stone must take a key witness from the Mob’s protective custody. Into their stakeout blunders a mother maneuvering a baby carriage up a staircase. What delirious conflict between Ness the lawman and Ness the family man, as he tries to protect the infant and simultaneously conduct a shoot-out. What wild comedy in this conflict between duty and humanity. And De Palma ices the cake by shooting the scene as a parody of Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence from Potemkin.

Such riches abound in this film, but it is as parable, not parody, that it grips us. The Untouchables all begin as archetypes of American goodness. And they do triumph over evil; they send Capone to prison. But the cost is death or loss of innocence, for it is only by adapting crime’s methods that they can defeat it.

This is, perhaps, the implicit lesson of almost all action films. But most of them have permitted their heroes to reclaim their honor at the end. The good guys are allowed to think their fall from purity and motive was a temporary aberration. There is no such escape for Eliot Ness. Despite its driving pace, style and wit, this film’s pervasive mood is a strange and haunting sadness. The Untouchables is, of all things, touching.