Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life

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Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life; More of a docudrama, of course
Topic Started: Mar 29 2008, 01:28 PM (121 Views)
Laughing Gravy	Mar 29 2008, 01:28 PM Post #1
Revered in the UK Posts: 11,075 Group: Admin Member #1 Joined: August 31, 2005	Twenty years ago, when Brian De Palma's big-screen version of the Eliot Ness story, The Untouchables, was released, I was appalled at how far from the actual events the movie strayed -- if anything, even further than the classic TV series with Robert Stack had gone. Two generations of TV and movie watchers think of Ness and his small band of G-Men as the bullet-dodging task force of supercops that brought down Capone, smashing his operation and finally nailing him on tax evasion charges. Oh, and he battled Ma Barker, Machine Gun Kelly, and Baby Face Nelson, too. And Ness threw Frank Nitti off the roof of a building, right? And those folks who knew that Ness didn't do most of the things the TV show or movie credited him with assumed he was a braggart -- after all, they were adaptations of his own autobiography, The Untouchables (written with Oscar Fraley), right? For those who wanted to look, there are a few good books about Ness that tell his true story, which is interesting enough: Ness and his Untouchables went gunning for Capone's bootlegging warehouses, and kept his mob occupied while other agents built the tax case against him. Ness then moved on to Cleveland and broke up the rackets there, but his reputation was sullied by his inability to capture the notorious Torso Murderer of Kingsbury Run, a vicious serial killer who still caused my mother (raised in Cleveland) to tremble when she talked about three decades later. Ness ran for mayor of Cleveland on a reform ticket, was soundly trounced, and eventually saw his career ended by a DWI rap. He didn't quite live long enough to see The Untouchables make him a great American hero. Fictionalized adventures aside, a hero he was, as writer-director Max Allan Collins (The Road to Perdition) can attest. Collins has put together a wonderful labor of love called Eliot Ness: An Untouchable Life starring Michael Cornelison. The filmed version of the Edgar-nominated stage show is now available on DVD from VCI ($14.99) and it's the only true depiction of Ness that you'll find outside of books. The story is stylishly directed using just a few sets that take us from the Ness home in 1957 back to the early-'30s Chicago. Frankly, it's a tough task to engross an audience for nearly two hours of a one-man show, let alone a DVD film version of a stage show, but Cornelison and Collins manage to be both literate and entertaining -- the play succeeds completely in suggesting that you're listening to Ness tell his own dramatic story. The DVD includes commentary, a brief deleted scene, and a marvelous short subject noir thriller directed by Collins, An Inconsequential Matter, plus an excerpt from the actual live stage show. A must for anyone with an interest in Ness, The Untouchables, or Al "Snorky" Capone. (Yes, Capone's nickname was actually "Snorky". There's no truth to the rumor that Frank Nitti was called "Snuggy-Pooks" though.)


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