The Untouchables

“The Untouchables” is heavy on the fiction, but thanks in large part to those great Chicago locales, it feels palpable and real.

To paraphrase William Butler Yeats, the moral, psychological, and emotional center of The Untouchables, like that of all of De Palma’s movies and like that of Reagan’s administration, simply cannot hold.

The Untouchables is a terrific movie, full of the same brand of fierce vitality that made the 1930s gangster films so compelling.

While overtly melodramatic, The Untouchables is a perceptive and hard-driven actioner. It's an intriguing character confrontation, loaded with ironies, both personal and social.

The Untouchables is two hours of fairly solid entertainment, an eventually uplifting parable about right beating might, cast in the form of a Warner Brothers social realist picture of the thirties.

A deeply satisfying and entertaining Prohibition gang-buster directed with a Tommy gun's rat-tat-tat.

Brian De Palma and David Mamet's genre masterpiece is an opera of sentiment and sadism, the story of a good man who adopts the brutish tactics of his enemy but somehow remains untouched.

It is an impeccably acted film with some strong cinematography and a fine score from Ennio Morricone. It successfully updates its 50s source material and still feels timely over 30 years removed from its release

The Untouchables still holds up incredibly well after more than thirty years. Production-wise, not only do the sets and costumes seamlessly resemble the Prohibition Era, but Brian DePalma’s technically impressive blocking and framing are a joy to watch.

It more than delivered when I finally saw it during the summer of 1987. It was nice to see that it still holds up after all these years.