There are a lot of ways to approach how Brian DePalma’s most crowd-pleasing film came together: the Oscar nominated Art Direction by Patrizia von Brandenstein, Oscar nominated Costume Design by Marilyn Vance, Oscar nominated Score by Ennio Morricone. (The budget went $7 million over because of moments like transforming an entire block of LaSalle Street in Chicago into the 1930s, complete with 125 Extras and 60 period vehicles.)
However, one moment clearly stands out from everything else when it comes to what is famous about this movie, even bigger than Sean Connery’s Oscar winning performance. You could make a feature documentary out of the oil and water combination of wordsmith David Mamet’s screenplay in the hands of DePalma the visual virtuoso. Film critic Pauline Kael said the film is at its best when DePalma wasn’t locked into Mamet’s sentence structure and was allowed to play, and nowhere is that more obvious than during the Union Station shootout.
Shot in six days at an additional cost of $100,000, it was written by DePalma as a replacement for what would’ve been a more expensive sequence inside a 1930s locomotive. The movie stands still and nearly every shot is slow motion. It even has some of the director’s goofy touches – the poor sailor – and also has Andy Garcia as the coolest Federal Agent in cinema. The film is a classic and there are many great scenes, but the time I would want to spend working on The Untouchables is an easy answer.
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