'THE UNTOUCHABLES': DE PALMA'S DEPARTURE (original) (raw)
Movies|'THE UNTOUCHABLES': DE PALMA'S DEPARTURE
https://www.nytimes.com/1987/07/06/movies/the-untouchables-de-palma-s-departure.html
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- July 6, 1987
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July 6, 1987
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As Brian De Palma movies go, ''The Untouchables'' is kind of tame. Quite a lot of blood is splattered on various walls in the course of the film, but for the director of such movie milestones as the chainsaw execution in ''Scarface'' and the electric drill murder in ''Body Double,'' that's small change. Then again, this time someone else - namely David Mamet - wrote the script.
At the moment Mr. De Palma finds himself in the curious position of being acclaimed for what many critics are calling his finest work, a breakthrough movie with more emotional depth and a moral dimension far beyond that found in his previous films. The problem is that according to Mr. De Palma, ''The Untouchables'' - which stars Robert De Niro, Kevin Costner and Sean Connery and promises to become one of the year's big hits - isn't really his film.
''Being a writer myself, I don't like to take credit for things I didn't do,'' said the 46-year-old Mr. De Palma, who has proved one of Hollywood's most durable, prolific and often most shocking directors over the last two decades. ''I didn't develop this script. David used some of my ideas and he didn't use some of them.''
Mr. De Palma acknowledges having helped to structure ''The Untouchables,'' but describes most of his contribution as simply assembling the dramatic elements needed to make an effective movie. ''I look upon it more clinically, as a piece of material that has to be shaped, with certain scenes here or there,'' he said. ''But as for the moral dimension, that's more or less the conception of the script, and I just implemented it with my skills - which are well developed.'' In Somebody Else's Shoes
Mr. De Palma seems to have viewed ''The Untouchables'' rather like a temporary vacation from the lurid machinations of his own brain.
''It's good to walk in somebody else's shoes for a while,'' he said. ''You get out of your own obsessions; you are in the service of somebody else's vision, and that's a great discipline for a director. It's fun to make a movie that's sort of uplifting. It's like it's great to do musicals as opposed to 'No Exit' or 'The Crucible.' ''
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