The Untouchables · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

De Palma's *The Untouchables* is, at its core, a masterclass in the **action-image**: a sensory-motor world where moral clarity pressurizes every scene into forward momentum, where Jim Malone's question — 'how far are you prepared to go?' — is not a philosophical open question but a narrative engine demanding violent resolution. Mamet's binary moral architecture (the lawman, the gangster, institutional corruption arranged like chess pieces) descends from the genre's foundational grammar, and De Palma honors it without irony, letting the structure carry its ethical weight while he reserves his formal ambitions for the set pieces. Those set pieces operate on the logic of **montage** at its most deliberate. The Union Station sequence — De Palma's explicit citation of Eisenstein's Odessa Steps — suspends the film's genre clock: slow-motion, rapid intercutting between a tumbling baby carriage, converging gunfighters, and frozen bystanders produces what Eisenstein called montage-as-collision, meaning generated by the shock *between* images rather than within any single one. The agonized duration is the argument; violence acquires moral weight through accumulated rhythm. Threading through both registers is **deep focus**, which Burum inherits directly from Gregg Toland's work for Welles on *Citizen Kane*. Low-angle shots inflate Chicago's institutional architecture into moral landscape; overhead compositions flatten the Untouchables into geometric chess-pieces, staging civic order as pictorial proposition. The lineage is precise: Toland's anamorphic grammar of power passes through Burum's lens, and the corruption-soaked architecture of *Citizen Kane* finds a direct descendant in the amber-and-shadow interiors of Prohibition-era Chicago.