Guide Note

The Untouchables is an Academy Award-winning film based on the true story of Treasury officer Eliot Ness and his attempts to put Al Capone on trial during the organized crime boom during Prohibition.

Fast Facts

1. Release Date: June 2, 1987
2. Director: Brian De Palma
3. Producer: Art Linson
4. Writer: David Mamet
5. Starring: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Andy Garcia, Charles Martin Smith, Robert De Niro, Patricia Clarkson and Billy Drago
6. Box Office Gross: $76 million
7. Sean Connery received the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor
8. Based on the 1959 ABC television series

One of the film's most memorable action sequences is an homage to the Odessa steps scene in Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. In Eisenstein's film, a Czar's soldiers march down a wide outdoor staircase, slaughtering families. In The Untouchables, Ness and his men chase down the steps to stop a baby carriage from flying down the stairs during a shoot-out with gangsters.

The sequence is regarded as an exciting and stylish example of film montage, popularized by Russian filmmakers in the 1920s.

• "I want him dead! I want his family dead! I want his house burned to the ground!"
• "You can get further with a kind word and a gun than you can with just a kind word."
• "If you're afraid of getting a rotten apple, don't get it from the barrel, get it off the tree."