Last November our Noir-Vember screening of Detour filled the Gold Theater. Two Hewlett High seniors played jazz standards before the film, and neighbors who’d never seen a noir left wanting more.
This year we’re going to Chicago.
On Sunday, November 22, the Cognitive Film Society is proud to present Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables (1987) for Noir-Vember — Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia and Robert De Niro as Al Capone, a David Mamet script and one of Ennio Morricone’s great scores.
And like last year, we’ve got a few surprises planned for the afternoon. You’ll just have to be in the room.
Three Strikes
The Untouchables might be the hinge of Brian De Palma’s whole career.
By 1987 he was down to his last strike. Body Double (1984) and Wise Guys (1986) had both flopped, and as he told producer Art Linson, “In Hollywood, three strikes and you’re out.”
In response, De Palma took the most Hollywood job he’d ever been offered and knocked it out of the park. The Untouchables made $76 million in the US, won Connery an Oscar and put De Palma back in business.
Somebody Is Always Watching
De Palma came up in the Village in the late sixties making scrappy satires with a young Robert De Niro. In Hi, Mom! (1970), De Niro plays a would-be filmmaker who shoots his neighbors through their apartment windows and tries to sell the footage to a porn producer. It wouldn’t be the last time De Palma explored the seedy side of the entertainment industry.
Many of my favorites of his films come from his “Hitchcock period” — Sisters, Obsession, Dressed to Kill, Blow Out — where somebody is always watching through a window or a telescope or a pair of headphones.
For much of the seventies you couldn’t see Vertigo or Rear Window anywhere — Hitchcock had pulled them from circulation. De Palma kept remaking Jimmy Stewart’s obsessions anyway, pushing genre filmmaking as far as it would go.
Body Double is Hitchcock meets eighties sleaze, a perfectly grimy movie and one of the few noirs that uses color to its advantage. It is my favorite of De Palma’s films — even though it is (by design) not nearly as mainstream as The Untouchables.
The Untouchables is where he takes all those tricks out of the shadows and into broad daylight. Most crime pictures of the late eighties are practically scored with a sexy sax. De Palma got Morricone, long before Tarantino made it a hipster badge of honor.
What Are You Prepared to Do?
Costner’s Eliot Ness is a Treasury agent with a young wife (Patricia Clarkson, in her first film). Capone owns the cops, the judges and the papers, and Ness’s first raid is a bust.
Connery’s Jim Malone, an old Irish beat cop, teaches him the Chicago way. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. Malone embodies the question that hangs over the film — what are you prepared to do?
That’s the fundamental question of all noir filmmaking.
Enthusiasms
Seventeen years after Hi, Mom!, De Palma made De Niro Al Capone. He put on weight for the part and tracked down Capone’s original tailors for the suits and the silk underwear. (Nobody was ever going to see the underwear. That’s De Niro.)
He gives the best speech about teamwork in the movies. If you’ve never seen it on the big screen, we’re thrilled to present it in its full glory.
Late in the film Capone weeps at the opera through “Vesti la giubba” while one of his men whispers that Malone is dead. He keeps crying, and he starts to smile. It’s De Palma all over — a man watching a show while the real violence happens somewhere else.
We can’t wait to discuss De Palma and his contributions to the noir genre. We’ll open with a short talk — from Hi, Mom! to Chicago — and after the film we’ll keep the conversation going with an audience Q&A. With a surprise or two along the way.
The Afternoon
Never stop fighting till the fight is done.
2:00 PM — Program begins: a short talk on De Palma and the film
2:10 PM — The Untouchables (1987), 119 minutes
~4:10 PM — Audience Q&A
Location: Gold Theater at the Hewlett-Woodmere Public Library, 1125 Broadway, Hewlett, NY 11557
Free and open to everyone, as always.
See you Sunday, November 22! Get there early!
The Cognitive Film Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to cultivating film culture through educational programming and community engagement.