Of the many criminals who have become big names in American history, perhaps none has stood out more than Al Capone. Alphonse Capone was born and raised in New York City, where he soon got into that gang scene and then became part of what would later become the Mafia. During this time another hoodlum, angry at a remark Capone made to his sister, slashed his face and gave him the nickname “Scarface”. Capone moved to Chicago, where he rose to become the head of the mob. Unlike other mob bosses, he loved public attention and was practically winking at the Law as he managed alcohol bootlegging, gambling racketeering, protection rackets, and other illegal enterprises. Eventually he got nailed on tax evasion and went to prison, but not before helping establish the Chicago Outfit that would dominate the underworld for decades.
Originally
the movie industry disallowed real outlaw figures on film, moreso later in the 30s with the Hays Code, but the story of Capone’s
rise and fall inspire many crime pictures. Most obvious was Scarface, which used his nickname for an
ambitious but violent Italian-American ganger named Tony Camonte (Paul Muni). This movie even has him
in Chicago leading an Italian-heavy south side gang against the rival north
siders. Late in the 50s, restrictions were loosened and finally Capone made it
to the big screen as himself. I’ve decided to review two movies, one where he’s the main
character and the other where he’s the villainous antagonist.
Al
Capone (1959)
Of all the higher profile actors in Hollywood in the 1950s, Rod Steiger was the best choice. It’s hard to find someone who looks like Capone, but Steiger does have a rounder head like him. The makers of Capone’s first big screen outing certainly thought he was the guy, because they had to rewrite the script several times to gain his acceptance. Reportedly, earlier drafts softened up the gangster. It’s not clear why, but perhaps it was going to focus on his more sympathetic qualities. Steiger wanted people to understand how bad Capone really was and how he hurt people. With little more than 100 minutes to cover Capone’s entire criminal career, however, it was probably wise not to spend time on his soup kitchens and other charitable works, which might have been cynical ploys to deflect negative public perception anyway.
And
that’s probably the main downside of the 1959 Al Capone, which for its time was a pretty accurate movie. Capone’s
career in Chicago spanned 1919 to 1932, so the movie has to cut out a lot of
characters and events. Pretty much none of his notable underlings show up, at
least with names. The only low-level guy is Capone himself at the start of the
movie, so this is a good time to talk about Steiger’s portrayal. His Capone is
absolutely irredeemable, willing to do anything to rise to power and keep it.
Even characters he’s chummy with end up shot under his orders.
The
St. Valentine’s Day Massacre is of course one of the big set pieces. This is
when a group of Capone’s men, disguised as cops, lined up seven men of the
North Side gang and then mowed down with Thompson submachine guns. The killing
was so shocking that the public started to take crime in Chicago much more
seriously. The actual details about why and how the killing was planned are
hard to discern. The movie has Capone planning everything out from Florida and
getting giddy when he learns of the massacre.
The
movie doesn’t even have any of Capone's family to make him more human. In real life
he had two brothers who helped him out. There was Frank Capone, who was killed
by policemen during the violent 1924 primary elections in Chicago, and Ralph
Capone, who ironically during prohibition ran a racket involving non-alcoholic
beverages. His wife Mae is not here, making him look unmarried, and more notable he doesn’t have his half-deaf son Albert. Instead we get a fictional
romance where Capone goes after a widow (Fay Spain) whose husband he had
killed. At first it looks like Capone is actually in love with her, but it
eventually becomes apparent that she’s just another pretty face he wants around
to validate his own ego.
Rod Steiger chomps a cigar as Al Capone
Aside
from Capone, the other gangsters are all the major players. Big Jim Colosimo
(Joe De Santis) is portrayed as an out-of-touch older gangster who doesn’t see
the financial opportunities provided by Prohibition. The younger gangsters take him out and now Johnny Torrio (Nehemiah Persoff) takes over. He serves as
Capone’s mentor, and while also a criminal leader, he does seem able to restrain
Capone’s wilder tendencies. As in real life he steps down after surviving an
assassination attempt, ensuring that Capone gains control of the Italian South Side
Gang. The real life Torrio was a reserved, comparatively quiet gangster who
never indulged in the vices he peddled in and preferred to spend nights with
his wife reading and listening to music.
Competing
with them are the three main leaders of the North Side Gang: Dean O’Bannion
(Robert Gist), Hymie Weiss (Lewis Charles), and Bugs Moran (Murvyn Vye). The
assassinations of O’Bannion and Weiss are portrayed accurately, the former
killed by fake customers in his famed flower shop. Bugs Moran is shown hobnobbing
with them and the leaders of the South Side gang near the beginning, but in
truth he didn’t rise to leadership until after the assassinations.
Unusually,
Martin Balsam plays Mac Keely, who’s just Chicago
Tribune reporter Jake Lingle under a different name. In the movie Keely
provides bridging information as he talks to lawmen and criminals alike. His
official status as a reporter seems to make him think he’s free of Capone’s
wrath, as he starts to make comments on the gangster’s flaws. He ends up like
his real life counterpart, Jack Lingle, when he’s murdered in a railroad
terminal. The real Lingle was initially considered a martyr after his death,
suspected of having gotten too close to exposing the South Side Gang. Then
Chicagoans learned the truth, that Lingle had gotten chummy with Capone and his
men and had even participated in some of their rackets before he fell afoul of
them. The movie is accurate in presenting him, making it strange that the
screenwriters felt they had to change his name.
Not
much is made of Capone’s downfall, which is not surprising considering that the
movie stays fairly close to the historical record outside the romantic subplot.
It’s mentioned that he’s gone down for tax evasion, but there’s no heroic cop
against him, no Eliot Ness, and no big scene of him going down. The movie ends
with the other inmates at Alcatraz Island abusing him, many out of revenge for
what he did to their gangs back in Chicago. This never happened. Capone served
his sentence without drama and then got released early after syphilis began to
afflict him (the narrator calls syphilis the “incurable disease” due to the
censors). The beating was included so the audience could see Capone suffer for
his crimes. Simply being thrown in prison and having a sentence cut short
wasn’t going to cut it.
Al Capone is an alright
biographical film with a strong lead. It is for the most part historically
accurate but regrettably misses numerous fascinating details.
Rating:
6/10
Here's the original trailer.
The
Untouchables (1987)
Many people are aware that Al Capone went to prison not for illegally selling liquor or any of the murders he ordered, but for failing (more like arrogantly refusing) to pay his taxes. What many still mistakenly believe is that lawman Eliot Ness is the one who brought him down. In truth Ness - while leading a federal unit that shut down much illegal liquor activity in Chicago - was not the one to ultimately put Capone behind bars. It was Frank Wilson of the IRS who found and exploited Capone’s faulty financial records. After Prohibition ended, Ness’ personal life became a mess, and worse was quite public. Adding to his woes, he failed at just about every business and political venture he undertook. Now impoverished, he sought to rescue himself with a book detailing his high point: his anti-bootlegging activities in Prohibition-era Chicago. Working with journalist Oscar Fraley, he produced a memoir that had much fact, but also quite a bit of self-serving myth that both made the book a more engrossing read and made him feel better about himself. It was called The Untouchables. Ness died just around the time of the book’s release and he became an American hero. The book inspired two filmed properties of the same name: a crime television series starring Robert Stack as Ness and an entertaining but even more inaccurate film in 1987.
Directed
by Brian de Palma, The Untouchables turns
an already gripping tale of the battle against crime into an action movie, and
with a few western elements in it (the western doesn’t end with the start of
the 20th Century, it just adapts itself). The basics of the
historical record are the same, but almost everything else is changed. For
example, this Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is apparently not native to Chicago as
he was in real life. Instead he starts off as a bumbling newcomer who needs the
street smarts and mentorship of Irish beat cop Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery).
Ness’ family is also a little further along than it was in real life around
1930. De Palma wanted to do something different from Robert Stack’s tough guy
on TV, so he emphasized Costner’s Ness as an ordinary everyman with a family.
Sean
Connery’s Malone is a cool, but completely fictional character. This is true
for the other two members of the Untouchables, the tough rookie George Stone (Andy
Garcia) and dorky treasury agent Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith). Oscar
Wallace is something of a fictionalized expy of Frank Wilson, except now he
answers to Ness and Capone’s financial records have to be achieved through a
series of violent action scenes. Said action scenes are well done. The first of
the two really big sequences is the apprehension of a cross-border booze
shipment from Canada. In reality the Untouchables stayed in and around Chicago.
Operations at the border would have been carried out by their own local law
enforcement groups. The stairway shootout at Union Station is the one everybody
knows about. Ness finds himself battling his own good guy tendencies, as he
wants to help a woman get her baby carriage up Union Station’s large stairs but
also needs to be ready and alert for when Capone’s accountant and bodyguards
arrive.
Left to Right: George Stone (Andy Garcia), Jimmy Malone (Sean Connery),
Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), and Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith)
Robert
de Niro plays Al Capone here and he does a great job for what the movie wants
to convey. He’s a little more layered than Steiger’s Capone, who eschewed almost
all of the historical figure’s charm. In his first scene, de Niro’s Capone is
answering a gaggle of reporters, making them laugh while all but saying he’s
running a criminal empire. Otherwise, though, this Capone is about as
irredeemable as the other one, and more spontaneously violent. In reaction to the
growing success of the Untouchables he bashes in a subordinate’s head with a
baseball bat. The real life Capone actually did this a few times, though he
didn’t actually kill them. He had the bludgeoned gangsters dragged away and
shot.
The
real Capone further ordered no resistance against federal agents, as this would
have increased heat on his operations. In this movie the gangsters are quick to
shoot at the Untouchables and Capone flat out starts ordering their deaths.
This leads to a curious change by de Palma. The real Untouchables were so named
because no one could bribe them. The group gets the name when they refuse a
bribe in the movie, but the rejected gangster frames the word “untouchable” as
they think they can’t be hurt by Capone.
Capone praises the value of teamwork in baseball.
Delving
further into the upped violence of the movie, one of the first scenes has Frank
Nitti (Billy Drago) bomb a business that refuses a protection racket during
daytime store hours. This results in the death of the store’s owner and a
little girl. The Capone Gang did bomb businesses, but the emphasis was on
property damage, with deaths to be avoided. Capone was worried enough about the
ramifications of collateral damage to people that he actually funded the medical
bills of any bystanders that got caught by shootings and bombings. He also had
a big soft spot for children, so the death of a little girl would have had him
flying in a rage at Nitti.
Frank
Nitti himself barely resembles the historical gangster. Here he’s a slim, likely
psychotic hitman who will literally kill a cop, disguise himself as said cop,
and infiltrate the station to commit a gruesome multi-murder (spoiler). The real Nitti
was involved in hits, but in an administrative role, choosing the killers and
providing names and addresses. Even then, he was more likely to be running some
of the more profitable rackets as gangland killings were not as frequent in
Chicago as often believed. Also, Nitti was not thrown off a roof to his death
in 1931. In fact he took over the gang when Capone went to prison and expanded the
Chicago Outfit’s business (according to some of the gangsters, Nitti’s
authority was actually often overridden by the next boss, Paul “The Waiter”
Ricca). Nitti’s death came in 1943 when, facing prison after his involvement with
a Hollywood extortion racket, he went to the railroad tracks in North Riverside
and committed suicide. In darkly comic contrast to the efficient killer of The Untouchables,
Nitti missed his head twice with a revolver before finally ending his life with
the third shot.
Nitti gives off super-villain vibes in his all-white outfit.
He reminds of philosophical villain Kimblee from Fullmetal Alchemist.
There
are two final things I want to briefly touch one. I find it amusing that two of
the Untouchables, a unit dedicated to upholding Prohibition law, sneakily take
a drink. Connery’s Jimmy Malone even keeps alcohol in his apartment! I was
surprised to learn that Ennio Morricone’s musical score is divisive. I thought
it was another good piece of work from him, but quite a few soundtrack
reviewers and film buffs have claimed that the music is overbearing or
mismatched. Oh well, I like it.
The Untouchables is in that
category of historical films that have little historical accuracy, but are a
blast to watch. It’s got a great cast and some well-done scenes of action and
suspense. The character work could be stronger in a couple cases, with Ness
finding himself overshadowed by Malone and Wallace. However, if you want a more
in-depth look at Capone’s outfit that’s still entertaining, you’d probably have
to settle for the seconday Chicago plots in HBO’s Boardwalk Empire show.
Rating:
7/10
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