"What if you had a special squad. Small, operating on its own. Every man thoroughly investigated. Brought in from all parts of the country. Men who'll spit on Capone's graft. Just a few he can't buy." - Eliot Ness (Robert Stack) proposing to form "The Untouchables"
The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 1 DVD Review
By Jude Clement
Now that The Sopranos is about to sing its last note, you might be worried about not getting your regular dose of Mob-based sex and violence. Well, you can breathe easier. With the release of The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 1, your prurient needs will be met.
The time is 1930s Chicago. Prohibition is in full swing, but the city's gangsters are doing their best to provide residents will all the hooch they can stand. Murder and other forms of violence are up as the crooks battle for turf. They have an unlikely group of allies - the Chicago Police Department. For a palmful of cash, the cops are willing to look the other way while the hoodlums practically run the city. Then federal agent Eliot Ness (Robert Stack) comes up with a plan to take on the gangs. Rather than relying on corrupt local officials, he will recruit a small team of investigators from around the country...investigators who are so morally upright that they will be impervious to bribes and graft. Ness finds his team, and together they begin to rid Chicago and the rest of the country of its most notorious criminals: Al Capone, Dutch Schultz, Lucky Luciano, Mad Dog Coll, and Frank Nitti, just to name a few.
The Untouchables is a pleasant mix of film noir and extremely heightened drama. At times, the series is so stylized it verges on becoming cartoonish. Some of the villains are so broadly played they would be right at home in an episode of Batman. In early episodes, the mobsters speaka likea they auditionin' for a spaghetti commercial.
"Ma Barker and Her Boys" is a perfect example of the hyperbolic style. Ma Barker (Claire Trevor, Oscar winner for Key Largo) loves her sons. A lot. She just wants her boys to do their best, even if they are murderous thugs. When her youngest son is killed while robbing a hardware store, she hits the road with her three other sons and helps them to plan their crimes. She's godly, though, singing hymns while shootin' at the Feds. And when another son lies dying in the living room, she comforts him even as a hail of bullets shot by Ness and his crew pepper the room. Campy? Yes. But also deliriously entertaining. Even at its most over the top, the series still works.
For a show that premiered in 1959, The Untouchables is surprisingly violent and sexually charged. Why try getting a bad guy with a single shot when a machine gun can fire a whole barrage of bullets? The series features so much gunfire that sometimes you can't even tell who's shooting who. Hardly an episode goes by without a broad getting smacked around. An incorruptible judge is graphically mowed down by a speeding car. Luckily, the most potentially stomach-churning violence - hooligans setting uncooperative marks afire or throwing acid in their faces - takes place off-screen.
The sex - even though it is most often simply implied - is also shockingly contemporary. Molls sleep with strange men at the bidding of their Mafioso boyfriends. Ness tenderly strokes his fiancée's arm while toying with a phallic bullet. A burlesque dancer suggestively lights the cigarette hanging out of her mouth by touching its end to a lit cigarette hanging from the mouth of a man she just met. The image is by no means explicit, but it still manages to be outrageously erotic.
Some four decades before Janet Jackson became a pariah when her breast was bared for a split second during a Super Bowl halftime show, the pilot episode of The Untouchables features a scene in which a stripper's bare breasts are flagrantly on display. Well, she is wearing a pair of sparkly pasties, so perhaps "bare" isn't the right word. Who said that the '50s were staid? You surely won't after spending some time with The Untouchables.
Eagle-eyed viewers are sure to spot a few familiar mugs in Season 1, Volume 1, including Frank DeKova (F Troop), Frank Wilcox (Perry Mason), Neville Brand (Laredo), Keenan Wynn (Dallas), Louise Fletcher (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest), Jack Lord (Hawaii Five-O), Jack Warden (Crazy Like a Fox), Phyllis Coates (Adventures of Superman), Cameron Mitchell (The High Chaparral), Timothy Carey (Beach Blanket Bingo), Clu Gulager, Martin Landau (Mission: Impossible), Gavin MacLeod (The Mary Tyler Moore Show), Alan Hale Jr. (Gilligan's Island), Florence Halop (Night Court), Marion Ross (Happy Days), Whit Bissell (The Time Tunnel), Cliff Robertson (Charly), Jack Elam (Easy Street), Henry Silva (The Manchurian Candidate), Harry Dean Stanton (Big Love), and J. Carrol Naish (The New Adventures of Charlie Chan).
The fourteen episodes and the film version of "The Scarface Mob" that make up The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 1 are divided onto four discs. All four discs are housed in what, from the outside, appears to be a standard DVD keepcase. An interior swinging arms holds two discs while the remaining two discs are affixed to the interior front and rear covers. Each DVD is individually accessible, meaning that you won't have to fumble around and remove one disc to get to another. There is one flaw in the design - the keepcase is clear, allowing the double-sided coversheet show through to the inside of the case. The interior features episode titles, original airdates, and brief plot synopses. Because discs one and four attach to the interior covers, the discs must be removed in order to read the episode guide.
The static menus are bland but functional. Viewers can choose to play all episodes on each disc consecutively or individually. There are no scene selection menus, but chapter stops are included.
