The Untouchables

Brian De Palma's film takes its title and its premise from Eliot Ness's own memoir, written with a sportswriter two decades after the events and already generous to its subject before David Mamet's screenplay reached it.

The core is true. There was a Prohibition Bureau squad under Ness that could not be bought, it did damage Capone's brewing operation, and Capone was in the end convicted of tax evasion rather than anything he was actually feared for.

What the film invents

Nearly all of the drama. Ness's team did not gather the tax evidence — that was the Treasury's intelligence unit under Frank Wilson, working for years through ledgers. There was no shootout on the stairs of Union Station. No juror substitution was engineered from the courtroom floor.

Most significantly, Frank Nitti did not kill Ness's colleague and Ness did not throw him from a roof. Nitti outlived the trial by twelve years and died by his own hand in 1943.

The film is a well-made western wearing a 1930s suit. Watch it for Chicago and for the performances; do not take a single procedural detail from it.