The Untouchables: Season 1, Volume 2

Prohibition is over. Al Capone is in jail. "Are we gonna be out of work?" one of Eliot Ness' “Untouchables” asks in "The Unhired Assassin," a two-parter in the 14 episodes that complete this vintage series' killer 1960 first season. Not to worry: from armored car heists and assassination attempts to extortion rackets, there is plenty to keep Ness (Robert Stack) and his elite mob-busting squad busy. Ness and company are the heroes of this series, but it's the criminals (and the great character actors who portray them) who maintain as tight a grip on our imaginations as the mob had on the city of Chicago during the 1930s. Bruce Gordon's Frank Nitti, Capone's impulsive enforcer, is a particularly nasty piece of work, as witness his ordered hit on incorruptible Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak in "The Unhired Assassin," and the season finale "The Frank Nitti Story," which chronicles Nitti's own finale. Anne Francis guest stars in "The Doreen Maney Story" as the titular Tennessee girl gone bad as one half of "The Lovebirds," responsible for a series of deadly armored car heists. And the outwardly straight-arrow Ness is not above double-crossing a mob goon for information, or, in "Head of Fire, Feet of Clay," refusing to call an ambulance as one bad guy lies bleeding ("You got no damn heart!"). Nearly five decades later, these episodes still play like gangbusters, with gritty language, blunt violence, and great hardboiled dialogue. The Untouchables was produced by Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball's Desilu Studios, and a fun extra on this four-disc set is "Lucy the Gun Moll," an episode from The Lucy Show, featuring Stack as a federal agent who recruits Lucy to impersonate a gangster's girlfriend. "You know who you look like?" Lucy asks him. "They kid me about it all the time down at headquarters," he replies. Recommended. (D. Liebenson)