The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 1

Long before Brian De Palma's splashy 1987 feature film starring Kevin Costner as Prohibition-era federal agent Eliot Ness and Robert De Niro as Al Capone, The Untouchables was a popular TV series, airing on ABC from 1959-63. Criticized at the time for violence (by contemporary standards, of course, it now seems positively genteel), The Untouchables—featuring narration by then-famous columnist Walter Winchell—starred stone-faced Robert Stack, who played Ness as a stoic, incorruptible icon of justice, as well as Neville Brand as a scowling Capone and Bruce Gordon as his lieutenant Frank Nitti. The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 1 includes the feature-length two-part pilot (which covers the same basic territory as De Palma's film) that aired on the Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse anthology series in the spring of 1959, together with the first 14 episodes in an extra-less four-disc boxed set. The first of the hour-long episodes continues the Capone story with the struggle for control of the gang after Scarface's conviction, but the remaining 13 go off on increasingly fanciful tangents focusing on bringing down other Depression-era criminals. What distinguishes them all is a wonderfully noir-ish atmosphere and ripe turns from a small army of the era's talented actors—including Nehemiah Persoff, J. Carrol Naish, William Bendix, Martin Landau, Jack Warden, Lloyd Nolan, Cliff Robertson, Jack Weston, and Jack Lord. The bottom line is that The Untouchables is melodramatically over-the-top, but great fun. Highly recommended. (F. Swietek)