The Untouchables (1987) The Untouchables
Brian De Palma's adaptation of the Prohibition-era legend, written by David Mamet and scored by Ennio Morricone. Kevin Costner plays Eliot Ness, a Treasury agent who arrives in Chicago to enforce the Volstead Act and discovers that every institution he was taught to trust — the police, the courts, the political machine — has already been purchased by Al Capone (Robert De Niro). Ness recruits three incorruptible men to work alongside him: an aging Irish beat cop named Jim Malone (Sean Connery),b8 a police academy recruit and sharpshooter named George Stone (Andy Garcia),b10 and a Treasury accountant named Oscar Wallace (Charles Martin Smith).b9 The film is structured as an escalating war in which each side's losses raise the stakes until Ness must decide how far outside the law he is willing to go to enforce it.
Quick Facts
| Detail | Info |
|---|---|
| Director | Brian De Palma |
| Writer | David Mamet |
| Stars | Kevin Costner, Sean Connery, Robert De Niro, Andy Garcia, Charles Martin Smith |
| Composer | Ennio Morricone |
| Cinematographer | Stephen H. Burum |
| Editors | Gerald B. Greenberg, Bill Pankow |
| Production Company | Art Linson Productions1 |
| Distributor | Paramount Pictures |
| Budget | ~$25 million |
| Box Office | ~$187 million (worldwide) |
| Release Date | June 3, 1987 |
| Running Time | 119 minutes |
| MPAA Rating | R |
| Based On | The Untouchables by Eliot Ness and Oscar Fraley (1957) |
Key Pages
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NEEDS CITATION — flagged by /rewinder on 2026-04-30. Art Linson is the credited producer, but the formal "Art Linson Productions" production-company entity is not surfaced in the Wikipedia infobox extract reviewed (which lists Paramount Pictures only); the AFI catalog entry was not consulted in depth. Plausible but unverified. ↩