Year Released: 1987
Directed by: Bryan De Palma
Starring: Kevin Costner, Sean Connery Robert De Niro Andy Garcia, Charles Martin Smith
R, 119 min.)
Genre: Crime, Drama

Academy Award 1987
Best Supporting Actor: Sean Connery

“You want to get Capone? Here's how you get him. He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue! That's the Chicago way, and that's how you get Capone!” Jim Malone (Sean Connery)

This 1987 film is even better than I remembered. Action, adventure, and a superb cast of characters who gain courage from each other as they fight against entrenched corruption both inside and outside the law.

It is the interplay between the leads, especially between eager idealist Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) and the curmudgeon Irish beat cop (Sean Connery in his Oscar winning role) who becomes his wingman that is the core of the film.

Their first meeting is after Ness has failed spectacularly in what he hoped to have been a big bust of Al Capone’s bootlegging operation. Looking to make a big splash, he lets a photographer in to catch the dramatic photo of him opening a wooden crate box with an ax. But Capone had been tipped off, and instead of Canadian whisky in the crate, Ness finds a cheap paper parasol. It pops open in his face just as the photo is snapped.

Humiliated when the photo makes the front page of the newspaper, Ness is at this low moment when he meets Malone:

“You just fulfilled the first law of law enforcement: Make sure when your shift is over you go home alive.” –Jim Malone

Those parting words from Malone show him cocooned into his beat cop role: safety is his first priority. But something is triggered here when he meets the lonely idealist, and ultimately Malone decides to risk it all. That shift from sitting on the sidelines to putting everything on the line with Ness is the beginning of a shared dedication, purpose, and most of all, friendship.

Malone begins his mentorship with some good advice about finding a few good men even though most of the police are corrupt.

“If you're afraid of getting a rotten apple, don't go to the barrel. Get it off the tree.”
–Jim Malone

And thus they find their third Musketeer, one of Different Drummer’s favorites, Andy Garcia. Just as in the first prickly meeting with Ness, Malone, the Irish cop, gets under the skin of new recruit and excellent marksman Joe Stone, who shyly admits he’s from the South Side. “With a name like George Stone?” Malone wonders out loud. And when Stone admits his given name is Guiseppe Pietra, Malone lambasts him as “a thieving wop” only to get a swift gun in his “stinking Irish pig” face. I seems George Stone has passed the test.

[Of course, growing up Oak Park, Illinois, near Chicago and next to River Forest, where the infamous Tony the Tuna Acardo lived with rumored gold faucets in his bathroom, not to mention Sam Giancana also in the neighborhood, Different Drummer is already attuned to the atmosphere. And being the daughter of a first generation Italian married to an Irishman makes all the ethnic traded insults all the more fun, as well as a refreshing change from our current Iron Curtain of coerced political correction today. No wonder I am loving this flick.]

Now mix in the nerdy accountant sent in from the Treasury Department (Charles Martin Smith) who has some crazy idea about arresting Capone on tax evasion, and our quartet of avengers is complete. Their second real caper on the Canadian border takes us back to the Wild West, where they ride horseback with rifles at their sides to catch a shipment of Canadian whisky as it enters the United States. No paper parasols this time.

It’s a combination of a shoot out at the OK Corral and a mob would-be massacre with a few noble Canadian Mounties thrown in for good measure. They don’t exactly ascribe to their American counterparts’ methods, though, especially when it appears Malone has shot one of the mobsters in cold blood. (Actually the guy is already dead, but his body helps fulfill a deadly masquerade to get the requisite details from the living mobster.)

Mountie Captain : [under the impression Malone shot a man in the mouth while he was still alive] I do not approve of your methods!

Ness : Yeah, well... You're not from Chicago.

And then there is the repulsive pig, Al Capone, played to perfection by method actor Robert De Niro, who gained 30 pounds to play the part of the porcine gangster. De Niro’s continued quest for perfection has earned him respect from his peers even though the actor himself “… has been a pain on set for years, requesting silk underwear, bossing directors around, and using real bullets for Russian Roulette.”

To prepare for the role, he researched Capone, watched film footage of him and “…even ran down Capone's tailors, and asked for identical clothing for his wardrobe. He even insisted on having the same silk underwear, despite the fact you can't see them in the film.”

If all that is not enough to meld this Irish Italian Chicago girl to this film, then they throw in Malone’s most treasured possession, his duty key attached to a St. Jude’s medal, that saint of impossible causes, the one my Catholic mother prayed to daily while my father was fighting in Okinawa and Iwo Jima. His destroyer was the only one of 16 to return to the United States and when this post war Baby Boomer was born, they chose my middle name of Judith to honor the saint who had answered my mother’s prayers.

***

But what will stay with you even after the action, superb acting, and saintly medals fade from the screen is the message about how one must persist to triumph over evil, and the toll it takes, whether it is the death of your comrades in arms or the taint of corruption that somehow stains you in the process. Eliot Ness says it best.

“Never stop, never stop fighting till the fight is done.”

“I have foresworn myself. I have broken every law I have sworn to uphold, I have become what I beheld and I am content that I have done right!” –Eliot Ness

Not to miss, and like love, even better the second time around.

–Kathy Borich
🥁🥁🥁🥁🥁

Trailer

Film-Loving Foodie

In the true nature of unexpected consequences, it was the moralistic temperance movement and the successful passing of Prohibition in 1920 that opened everything for gangsters to get into the then illegal liquor trade. And so the infamous Al Capone flourished in Chicago, where he became the kingpin of the most powerful Chicago mob.

Because liquor was sort of, ya know, illegal during Prohibition, speakeasies had to get creative with their cocktail mixing. Whether it was to cover up a particularly unpalatable batch of hooch, or to stretch a little bit a long way, the Prohibition era birthed some of happy hour’s most iconic cocktails. And while most of these recipes are simple, if you don’t pay attention to details, you can ruin a classic. –Christie Rotondo

Southside Cocktail

What’s in it: Mint, gin, lime juice, and simple syrup.
Where it comes from: One story is that the Southside got its name thanks to (in true 1920s fashion) some gangsters on the South Side of Chicago looking for a way to cover up their not-so-great hooch, and then somehow morphed into the drink of choice at waspy East Coast country clubs thanks to its summer-y nature.

Ingredients

Serve in a Coupe glass