Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Untouchables
1987 · Brian De Palma · The Untouchables on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice how low angles make courthouses and ceilings loom over Ness. (camera)
De Palma and Burum repeatedly frame institutional architecture from below, isolating small figures against coffered ceilings and marble.
Payoff: The city itself becomes the pressure Ness must act against, not just Capone.
Follow the camera as it glides slowly down corridors before scenes. (staging)
The Steadicam moves at a slow, deliberate pace toward rooms and doorways, building dread before anything happens.
Payoff: Space itself feels predatory, warning you before the plot does.
Watch how interiors sit in pools of light against deep shadow. (light)
Interiors use high-contrast light against dark, with amber and cold blue marking day from night.
Payoff: The palette evokes the 1930s without copying old films outright.
Listen for Morricone's trumpets rising before each major set piece. (sound)
Morricone gives the set pieces propulsive brass, the family scenes a lyrical motif, and violence a rising dread.
Payoff: The music tells you which register a scene belongs to before the images do.
Watch how differently Connery, Costner, and De Niro seem to act. (performance)
Connery plays naturalistic and weary, Costner plays iconic and blank, De Niro plays big and theatrical, yet the film holds them together.
Payoff: The mythic mode lets three acting styles share one moral universe.
Once you have seen it
Count the separate lines of action cut together at Union Station. (cutting)
De Palma cross-cuts several actions at once and stretches individual moments with optical slow motion, echoing Eisenstein's Odessa Steps.
Payoff: The gunfight becomes as much about film history as about Ness catching Capone's men. In the reading: attraction-image. The sequence turns action into a citation of action, what Deleuze calls the attraction-image.
Notice the straight-down shot of Malone's body on the floor. (staging)
De Palma's overhead shots recur at key moments, flattening figures into geometric shapes within a pictorial frame.
Payoff: The camera stops narrating and starts composing, turning death into an image to be read. In the reading: the closed set (cadre). The overhead view flattens Malone into a shape in a picture, what the reading calls the closed frame.
Watch Capone circle the banquet table before the bat comes out. (performance)
De Niro stages Capone as performing for an audience in every space he occupies, from opera house to courtroom.
Payoff: Capone treats every room as a stage, and violence becomes something acted rather than merely done. In the reading: reflection-image (the Figure). Capone performs violence for the men at the table, action turned into staged spectacle, what the reading calls the reflection-image.
Carry this in: Watch the frame more than the plot: De Palma keeps turning gunfights and rooms into pictures to be read.