“The Untouchables” — the period crime show that ran on ABC from October 1959 through May 1963 — was widely and with good reason considered the most violent dramatic series of its day. It was also, as demonstrated by a new DVD box (CBS/Paramount), one of the best.
Partly drawing on the memoirs of the Treasury agent Eliot Ness and named for his incorruptible special unit, “The Untouchables” first appeared as a two-part drama broadcast by CBS’s “Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse” in April 1959. It arrived amid a cycle of low-budget Hollywood movies revisiting the gangsters of the 1920s and 1930s; Don Siegel’s “Baby Face Nelson” (1957), Roger Corman’s “I, Mobster” (1958) and Bud Boetticher’s “The Rise and Fall of Legs Diamond” (1960) are among the notable ones.
The show, starring Robert Stack as Ness and Neville Brand as Al Capone, was subsequently developed as a series for ABC, where it proved so successful that it helped propel the perennial third network into first place. (The pilot episodes were later combined as a theatrical feature, “The Scarface Mob,” included as part of the DVD set.)
Phil Karlson, one of the premier B-movie auteurs of the 1950s, directed the “Untouchables” pilot, and although he never made another episode, he did furnish a stylish template. Later directors made similar use of low angles, fluid camerawork and maximum chiaroscuro, cleverly recycling elements of the generic studio lot on which most episodes were shot.
Although “The Untouchables” dealt with material that was three decades old, the show had an urgent contemporary feel. Prompted by Nelson Riddle’s ominous theme and a rapid-fire, near-hysterical voice-over by the tabloid journalist Walter Winchell, the mood was grim and the violence brutal.
The highly stylized Mr. Stack played Ness with a sort of pained, dapper cool, pivoting into action at an angle that seemed to complement the tilt of his fedora. “He has smashed ahead so vigorously that the name of his series, ‘The Untouchables,’ might refer as well to the show’s rating success,” Richard F. Shepard wrote in a New York Times profile after the first season.
“The Untouchables” was immediately controversial. The second episode, “Ma Barker and Her Boys,” with the guest star Claire Trevor giving a ferocious performance as the criminal mother hen, was not just an instance of nonstop mayhem but also, as critics pointed out, an attempt to credit Ness and his unit with capturing a real-life gang that had actually been brought to justice by the F.B.I.
Details were authentic, but historical distortion was endemic. The show regularly pitted Ness against infamous Depression-era outlaws — Dutch Schultz, Legs Diamond, Mad Dog Coll, Bugs Moran, Lucky Luciano and Lepke Buchalter — that he might never have met, let alone collared. There were other issues as well. “The fact that so many of the gangsters in the series have Italian names has been a touchy problem,” Mr. Shepard noted in his profile.
Ethnicity was crucial to the show, and while recognizably Jewish and Greek hoodlums were also on hand, Italians ruled. “The Genna Brothers,” an episode from 1961 directed by one of the show’s mainstays, Paul Wendkos, has an incredibly volatile Sicilian clan holding an entire immigrant neighborhood hostage — a manifestation of malignant Italian-American power that was probably not equaled on TV until “The Sopranos.”
Thus, like Ness, “The Untouchables” garnered an impressive roster of enemies: J. Edgar Hoover; Dr. Fredric Wertham (the New York psychiatrist who, a decade earlier, had campaigned in print and Senate hearings against comic books); a group of Italian-American congressmen; the labor racketeer Anthony Anastasio; the Federal Communications Commission chairman Newton Minow; Cardinal Francis Spellman, the New York archbishop; and Frank Sinatra all attacked the show.
One prominent defender was Ayn Rand, who, writing in The Los Angeles Times, characterized “The Untouchables” as “profoundly moral.” Ms. Rand was particularly taken with Mr. Stack. His “superlative portrayal of Eliot Ness” was, she declared, “the most inspiring image on today’s screen, the only image of a real hero.”
Mr. Stack’s icy single-minded performance was accentuated by the robust array of heavies the show supplied each week. Bruce Gordon’s glowering mob boss, Frank Nitti, a study in pinstripe suits and heavy-lidded malevolence, was a particularly useful foil, but actors as powerful as Peter Falk, Lee Marvin and Joseph Wiseman made repeat appearances in villainous roles.
Ness’s adversaries were not only tough guys. “The Rusty Heller Story,” which opened the show’s second season in October 1960, provided a remarkable vehicle for Elizabeth Montgomery (a few years before “Bewitched”), playing a supremely manipulative prostitute who conceals her calculations behind a fetching Southern drawl. A different episode, directed by another mainstay, Stuart Rosenberg, features Patricia Neal’s touching portrayal of a solitary woman gallantly trying to hold her own in the gangster world.
Constant criticism probably contributed to changes that marked the show’s fourth and final season. Ethnicity was played down, the theme music was subtly softened, and an attempt was made to render Ness more human. A bit of moral relativism crept in as well. In one late-1962 episode, directed by Ida Lupino, a cop who has been unfairly fired (Mr. Marvin making his third appearance) goes rogue: Disgusted by police department corruption and his family’s economic hardship, he starts his own for-profit anti-gangster shakedown racket.
The show’s creators — and even Ness — appear to view the enterprising ex-policeman as less sympathetic than the aging mob boss he targets. I’m not sure that Rand would have agreed, but in any case life trumped art when the televised Senate committee crime hearings of late 1963 filled in for what would have been the fifth season of “The Untouchables.”
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