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Lang's The Big Heat is a closer model than the television series, a moppet is blown up at the onset to clinch the connection. Chicago ca. 1930 "stinks like a whorehouse at low tide," all in the pocket of Al Capone (Robert De Niro), seen luxuriating like an underworld pasha. (He emerges from beneath barbershop wraps like Muni's Scarface and credits success to "a kind word and a gun," to the delight of an audience of journalists.) His opposite number is Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner), the Treasury Department agent stumbling out of the gate on his Prohibition crusade. The group of untainted vigilantes is founded on the seasoned Irish brawler (Sean Connery) who gives the hero grief for littering, and includes the Italian sharpshooter (Andy Garcia) and the bureau accountant (Charles Martin Smith). "Let's take the fight to them, gentlemen!" A deluxe dilation of the Thirties for the Eighties, a David Mamet ode to morality and conformism mined by Brian De Palma for swank and swagger. Ancient Rome is briefly evoked in relation to the modern city's corruption, a Foreign Correspondent view of an airplane gives way to a miniature Western along the Canadian border, Ennio Morricone's score apes Aaron Copland accordingly. De Palma's fiendish technique is in full swing: An overhead shot of the brained underling's syrupy blood spreading on an opulent table cuts to cloying bedtime prayers at the Ness household, the camera outside Connery's apartment floats within and leads to the shotgun in the Victrola. (The kingpin's teary smile at a Pagliacci performance is a friendly jibe at Coppola.) Down Union Station's marble steps with Eisenstein, up on the rooftop with Billy Drago's jagged Frank Nitti. "I have become what I beheld..." Beatty's Dick Tracy brings crayons to the template soon enough. Cinematography by Stephen H. Burum. With Richard Bradford, Jack Kehoe, Brad Sullivan, and Patricia Clarkson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |