Shooting Up the Box Office

By RICHARD CORLISS

Here's a picture with no space wars, no music videos, no cute beasties, no bikinis. It is a period film in the wrong period. Kids want to go back to the '50s, not to Chicago during Prohibition. They weren't even born when this movie was a TV series. The producer, Art Linson, makes little pictures, and Brian De Palma directs naughty ones that rarely go gold. David Mamet writes Pulitzer-prizewinning plays, not boffo movies. O.K., so who's in the cast? Robert De Niro: his last hit was 1978's The Deer Hunter. Sean Connery: splendid actor, but the only time he's struck it rich lately was when he played 007 one more time. As for the leading man, Kevin Costner, his most memorable movie turn was as the corpse in The Big Chill. So there's no way this film is going to make back its $25 million tab. It will be Ishtar without the camel.

Such were the odds The Untouchables stacked against itself before its June 3 opening. Now, after drawing enthusiastic reviews and a robust $15.9 million in its first week, Paramount's gangster epic is starting to look like Beverly Hills Cop II, Too. The Eddie Murphy action comedy has earned a phenomenal $89 million in its first three weeks. But The Untouchables may challenge Murphy with durability, what the industry calls "legs." A.D. Murphy, Variety's guru of grosses, credits The Untouchables with a "most auspicious beginning. It could run all summer." Privately, industry honchos now believe by year's end it may top Cop II.

Like the TV show that spawned it, The Untouchables dramatizes the holy war that Federal Agent Eliot Ness (Costner) proclaimed against Chicago's racketeers in the waning years of the Volstead Act. Al Capone (De Niro), with the police and politicians in his silk pocket, runs the city, abetted by gun- crazy Frank Nitti (Billy Drago). Ness's "untouchable" aides are an Italian- American sharpshooter (Andy Garcia), a bespectacled accountant (Charles Martin Smith) and an aging cop, Jimmy Malone (Connery). Malone is a father figure, an Obi-Wan Kenobi to Ness's Luke Skywalker, alerting him to the ways of the wicked world. Perhaps Ness becomes too alert. He defeats Capone, but, he notes, "I became what I beheld."

Two years ago David Mamet beheld Art Linson (Fast Times at Ridgemont High) across a Manhattan dinner table. "David," Linson recalls saying, "now that you have just won the Pulitzer for Glengarry Glen Ross, don't you think the right career move would be to do a remake of a TV series?" Mamet was faced with correcting a familiar flaw of biographical drama: "That something is true does not make it interesting. There wasn't any real story. Ness and Capone never met. Capone went to jail for income tax evasion, which is not a very dramatic climax. So I made up a story about two of the good guys: Ness and Jimmy Malone, the idealist and the pragmatist."

Dawn Steel, president of production at Paramount, recalls that Mamet's first draft was an "outline, very sparse." How sparse? Capone was hardly in it. To flesh out Mamet's bare-bones script, Steel and her boss Ned Tanen wanted De Palma. "In the past," she says, "Brian hasn't chosen the material that was worthy of him and that he was worthy of. He was making homages to Alfred Hitchcock. This one is a homage to Brian De Palma -- he felt it instead of directing it. With this picture he became a mensch." It surely marked a ! change from the snazzy, derivative thrillers (Carrie, Body Double) and dope operas (Scarface) that made him notorious. The new picture would be neither parody nor eulogy; it would be the story of a straight arrow, told with a straight face.

There are the familiar De Palma touches: lots of photogenic blood, a gorgeous tracking shot that leads our heroes from euphoria to horror, an endlessly elaborate set piece reminiscent of the Odessa Steps sequence in Potemkin. But the director's chief contribution is to the film's handsome physical design. "I wanted corruption to look very sleek," he says. "Some people in positions of power with ill-gotten money insulate themselves with over-the-top magnificence. They buy paintings and expensive clothes. And deep inside they know they're cheats and killers."

Visual Consultant Patrizia Von Brandenstein (Amadeus) accompanied De Palma to Chicago to devise the film's production design. "I thought about these four unlikely little guys going up against the mythic monolith of Capone," she says. "So I used architecture that showed mass and power: the Chicago Theater for the opera house, Louis Sullivan's Auditorium Building for Capone's hotel, a spiffed-up Union Station for the Odessa Steps sequence. Fortunately, Paramount let me really run wild." Steel also suggested the essential extravagance of signing Giorgio Armani, the Milanese couturier, to dress most of the characters. Working from photos of '30s gangster films, Armani reworked period shapes into a style that was less stiff, more drapable. Instead of dressing Ness blandly, Armani put him in darkly glamorous three-piece suits; rather than make Nitti gritty, he clothed him like a sepulchral angel, in gleaming white synthetics.

Now all the filmmakers needed was actors to fill the clothes. Harrison Ford and Mel Gibson were considered for Ness; both were unavailable. On the recommendation of Steven Spielberg and Lawrence Kasdan, and with Linson's avid support, De Palma selected Costner. Says De Palma: "Like Connery, he's very straightforward. He gives you everything he's got, but he wants you to play by the rules." It worked out fine; in a week the actor has gone from Who's he? to heartthrob. That is a status Connery has easily worn for a quarter-century, and he was happy to fall into Malone's sack-of-potatoes haberdashery and the film's complex ethnic weave. "There's the Mediterranean style of Capone," Connery notes, "very much in favor of the pleasures of life. Then the Wasp syndrome of Ness, very puritan. And finally the European-Irish cop -- me -- in the middle, finding his way through that minefield."

Casting Capone was potentially explosive as well. De Niro, the first choice, deferred accepting the role for so long that English Actor Bob Hoskins (Mona Lisa) was hired. Then De Niro said yes, and the studio fired Hoskins and ate his $200,000 salary. De Niro's scenes were to be filmed at the end of the twelve-week shoot. "I met him when we were in the final stages of rehearsals," Linson says. "He was thin. He looked about 15, 20 years too young to play Capone. He had a ponytail. I panicked. We'd fired Bob Hoskins for a quiet guy in a ponytail looking 30. Then De Niro went off to Italy for ten weeks, and when he came back he was unrecognizable. His entire head was redesigned. His hairline was moved back. He had gained 25, 30 lbs. He had his own tailor and costume designer. He wore special silk underwear from A. Sulka & Co., who made Al Capone's underwear. All these things helped him get into the character."

And, presumably, helped get audiences into the picture. But only word of mouth can get them to keep coming. They probably will, for The Untouchables has all the right lures: ripe violence, period flash and the triumph of good over venal. As De Palma puts it, "It's like a John Ford western. A good guy is on a mission and gets help. At the end he walks off into the sunset. It's a simple story told in a classical way." That might seem a bit too simple for De Palma, Mamet, De Niro and the other smart lads who have made careers breaking popular icons instead of retooling them. But like Ness's, and Capone's, theirs is a story of hard-earned success. And what's so bad about making good?

With reporting by Elaine Dutka and Denise Worrell/Los Angeles