Waste of time

Brilliant and touching

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

It is a whirlwind of delight --- attractive actors, stunning couture, spectacular sets and outrageous parties. It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

Chicago during the dry years (prohibition) was a venue which had a very rough exterior. Morally rigid guidelines, and a facet of poverty comprising of reprehensible destitution were unfortunate elements of American living which initiated an irascible backlash of pandemic criminal activity. Such tumultuous and illegal shenanigans embodied some extremely visceral emotions with hundreds of thousands of people who lived in Chicago! The television show "The Untouchables" dealt with hard bitten reality which evoked agitated behavior on both sides of the law! Elliot Ness was on a vigilante crusade to stop the flow of liquor into Chicago during the Prohibition era! As it turns out, Elliot Ness himself died of a heart attack which was attributable to his alcoholism! What is the point of this information? Not to depict Ness as a hypocrite, rather, to reiterate that Elliot Ness believed in enforcing the law, regardless of what his position was on any given social issue! The series, "The Untouchables" is an historically succinct account of how Al Capone ruled Chicago during a specific era! The federal agents were either bought off, or, like Ness, they were motivated by disdain and vehement objection for key members of the syndicate who were repetitively thwarting them! An onslaught of prominent actors and actresses made guest appearances on "The Untouchables". This made the series very powerful!! These special guest stars played the roles of Ness' scruple-less adversaries! More often than not, Ness would engage in an ideological diatribe with these criminals. In turn, these ruthlessly calm and collective masterminds of financially lucrative chicanery would emphatically ameliorate their reckless actions by blaming either their environment, or, the nation's prevailing circumstances! A couple of guest stars' appearances won Emmy awards for their segment performances on this series. (Elizabeth Montgomery and Robert Redford) The directing for "The Untouchables" focused on being extremely authentic! The narrating by Walter Winchell added a very wry and supercilious touch to the entire plot of each week's episode! The acting by guest stars and regulars (like Robert Stack) was outstanding! (Especially for the small screen). Chicago, in the twenties and thirties, was a city that cultivated it's identity by making nefariously illicit and felonious escapades their precariously notorious trademark!! The series "The Untouchables" illustrated such copious crimes with a very vividly pejorative and fatalistic disposition!! I loved this show, one of my favorites in all of television!! Mostly on account of the fact that as a Chicagoan, the show "The Untouchables" exudes a very definite and cynical identifiability!

"The Untouchables" was my all-time favorite television program when I was a teenager. I ordered the 22 disc set and was surprised to find out that 14 of the episodes were either "The Muppets" or "Grizzly Adams." In addition, 8 other episodes were defective and stopped during the middle of the show."The Untouchables" I did see were as good as I had remembered, and I forgot how many wonderful actors participated in this trend setting television program. I do advise you to be careful if you purchase this wonderful television program that has held up so well despite being 47 to 50 years old.You can imagine my bewilderment when "The Muppets" and "Grizzly Adams" shows popped up on the DVD instead of "The Untouchables." I have tried unsuccessfully to contact them (orders@dvdavenue.TV) 12 times. I will never order any DVDs over the internet again.There is a website called problems with DVD avenue.TV where customers who have been cheated by this incompetent company post their grievances. I estimate about 175 people have posted their complaints.P.S. Since I last posted I have watched 8 more episodes of "The Untouchables" and 3 of them stopped during the beginning and could not restart. At least I have not had to view anymore episodes of "The Muppets" or "Grizzly Adams."

I have been a historian of 20th century American culture for more than 25 years, with a specialty in the 1920s-1940s, as well as a film historian and filmmaker. "The Untouchables" is just as accurate any other Hollywood dramatization of gangland lore. When you have to crank out an hour-long TV episode every week for several years, who can afford to do research 24 hours a day? This show was more or less as accurate as it possibly could be. It is the ONLY version of gangland culture I have seen that has included Dutch Schultz's unforgettable babble, "A boy has never wept, nor dashed a thousand Kim." Hell, that was enough for me. If you need my credentials, check out my newest book (my 15th), "Warners Wiseguys," a look at the classic Warner Bros. gangland world.

This show's concept was hastily developed to become a one-hour weekly dramatic series after the success of the beautifully produced made-for-television movie "The Scarface Mob". At first, the producers tried filming the capture of other important criminals using Eliot Ness, the TV-film's fictionalized real-life hero, as their central character. Then they designed a unit like the 1930s "Untouchables" squad depicted in the TV-movie, a federal group combating gang activity and other crimes in Chicago, one headed by Ness (Robert Stack) who worked out of an office in the city. He had six men, with Martin Flaherty (Jerry Paris), Jack Rossman, (Steve London), Enrico Rossi (Nicholas Georgiade), Lamarr Kane (Chuck Hicks) and William Youngfellow (Abel Fernandez) as its mainstays. In the second year, Paris left to be replaced by Lee Hobson (Paul Picerni) for the remainder of the series' run, and Cam Allison (Anthony George) was added for that year only. It was also decided that Frank Nitti (Bruce Gordon) and other mob bosses would be used as the main scheming villains without a regular "Al Capone" being portrayed. Nitti was killed off four times during the series, but Gordon was so popular with the show's watchers he was resurrected each time. A stable of regular police and ganglord types was also developed, played by Oscar Beregi, Joseph Ruskin, Frank Willcox, and Nehemiah Persoff with regular police and useful guest stars being hired a number of times. As Robert Stack had feared from the beginning, the show tended to marginalize the role of the ethical Ness in favor of unglamorously and dramatically portraying the activities of the victims, criminals, or crimelords of the week. The use of a narrator, radio commentator Walter Winchell, helped to keep the ethical view uppermost in observers' minds; and frequently, Ness and his squad were able to get across the desirability of cooperating with police, as this idea finally sank in. Outside agents played by John Gabriel, Jack Lord and others were sometimes used to improve a script. But from the first, the show's outstanding quality was the abilities of writers, directors and guest actors to produce powerful hour-long series. "The Petrone Story", "The Rusty Heller Story", "Cooker in the Sky", "Ginger Jake" and a hundred others may have occasionally overdone graphic detail and use of machine guns, but they were often brilliantly cinematic. The list of directors who toiled for the series included 29 first-raters including Ida Lupino, Tay Garnett, Vincent McEveety, Paul Wendkos, Richard Whorf, Walter Grauman and Bernard L. Kowalsi among others. The writers' list included 40 names, many illustrious, such as Robert C. Dennis, David P. Harmon, Ernest Kinoy, Harry Kronman, John Mantley, Gilbert Ralston, Sy Salkowutz, Alvin Sapinsley, George Slavin, William Templeton. Guest stars such as Patricia Neal, Elizabeth Montgomery, Lee Marvin, Arlene Martel, Will Kuluva, Dolores Dorn-Heft, Robert Middleton, Ruth Roman, Brian Keith, William Bendix, Barbara Stanwyck and Joe de Santis were always an extra cause to tune in to the latest adventure. In the last year, producer Quinn Martin bowed to pressure groups and tried to replace Italian surnamed villains with others; but the top-ranked series was canceled after 4 unforgettable years. To measure the quality of "The Untouchables" against most other series is impossible; its scenes have far more power than those of almost any other series; It was not always ethical fiction; but the series always had first-rate production qualities, acting, writing and directing. It holds a very high place in U.S. film history.