The Untouchables on PAL Laserdisc

Jeremy Clarke reviews The Untouchables Distributed by
Pioneer LDCE

• Cat. No: PLFEB 34451
• Cert: 15
• Running time: 114 minutes
• Sides: 2 (CLV)
• Year: 1987
• Pressing: UK, 1996
• Chapters: YES
• Sound: Dolby Surround
• Widescreen: 2.35:1
• Price: £24.99
  

  ---

  Director:

  Brian De Palma

  Cast:

  Kevin Costner
  Andy Garcia
  Robert De Niro
  Sean Connery
  Charles Martin Smith

---

There are some films which seem tailor made for the laserdisc format: this is one of them. Barely watchable in TV broadcast pan and scan format, it leaps into life on LD, where the crisp, finely detailed images and state-of-the-art DS sound mix provide as tremendous a home cinema experience as one could wish (and you don’t have to worry about it being cut so as ‘not to offend’ anybody).

Like the director’s current actionfest Mission: Impossible, this is based on a TV series, with Costner cast in the now familiar role of moral crusader, here as treasury official Eliot Ness sent to clean up prohibition era Chicago. The opposition is gangster Al Capone, brilliantly played by De Niro as a sharp-witted, wisecracking business magnate with a nasty penchant for publicly and unexpectedly whacking the head of unwary associates with his trusty baseball bat.

Faced with corruption among his immediate police colleagues, Ness hand picks an intimate crack force to topple Capone. Connery (The Hunt For Red October) is magnificent as the streetwise Irish cop confined to the beat for refusing to play the corruption game (and deservedly won an Oscar, a foolish and profit-reducing omission from the sleeve); Smith is born for the role of accountant who takes up the gun by default and rookie marksman Andy Garcia (Things To Do In Denver…) completing the backup trio.

De Palma, looking for a winning formula after box office nosedives Wiseguys (unremarkable) and Body Double (underrated, if quirky), finds it here. Less brutal than his Al Pacino gangster outings (Scarface, Carlito’s Way), this is held together by a solid David Mamet screenplay and bolstered by a top notch Ennio Morricone score, the latter a joy from opening martial drumbeats (echoing on rear channels) onwards. Sound is impressive throughout, but the explosion at the end of Chapter 2, followed by a car driving from left to right, spring to mind as high points.

Lavish hotel lobbies and impressive architecture jostle with functional police offices and seedy, wet city streets, lensed with cinematographer Stephen H. Burum’s gorgeous eye for widescreen. Amazing set pieces include Costner’s men with a screen-wide line of cavalry cops ambushing a drugs deal on a rural bridge, a couple of bloody murders of Costner’s team (not that either I or the shrewdly named chapter titles are going to reveal their identities in advance) and the famous re-staging of Potemkin’s Odessa Steps sequence in a gangster shootout in the city’s railroad station (can Costner save the baby racing down the steps in its freewheeling pram?).

Again, this is a great movie – the real question is how does it rate as a disc. Well, one minor carp: Chapter 2 consists of an introductory scene with De Niro and a gruelling pub bombing incident. Would it really have been too hard to make that into two chapters? Otherwise, I really can’t fault this disc. Did I mention the bargain price?

Film 5/5 Picture 5/5 Sound 5/5 Review copyright © Jeremy Clarke, 1996. E-mail Jeremy Clarke

Check out Pioneer‘s Web site.

[Up to the top of this page]