Written by Musgo Del Jefe
Can I criticize an artist at the beginning of his career as he just starting to hone his craft? The artist in question is producer Quinn Martin on The Untouchables and the work is the new DVD release of The Untouchables - Season 1, Volume 2, which contains the second half of the 1959-1960 rookie season. Martin would go on to produce The Fugitive, The F.B.I., Barnaby Jones, and The Streets Of San Francisco among other hits. These shows would all be known for a distinctive and unique style. Does The Untouchables carry that same level of quality that I would come to expect from a Quinn Martin production?
The premise of the show is simple to set-up. The series is based on the real-life adventures of Eliot Ness (Robert Stack), a U.S. Treasury Agent who fought crime out of Chicago in the 1930s, and his group of agents called The Untouchables. Eliot's main nemesis is Al Capone (Neville Brand), but the series focuses on all kinds of mob crimes. Unlike the groundbreaking The Fugitive, the stories and quest to put Capone behind bars is not told in chronological order. In fact, a majority of the stories are set after Capone's arrest in 1931. Telling the stories out of order gives the writers more freedom from continuity, but it also disconnects the viewer from any ongoing drama. These standalone stories never gain momentum of a greater cause and it ends up feeling like an anthology show.
Some of the conventions of later Quinn Martin shows are here. There is a general structure that would later become the labeled Act title cards. There's a compelling narration by Walter Winchell that keeps each episode moving along. The typical episode starts with a short scene that will happen later in the show. I've always been confused by this structure - first encountering it in The Flintstones as a child. The narration of the title sequence, giving us the names of the actors and the title of the show sets a serious mood, but Winchell's narration isn't that of a storyteller. It's that of a newsman and makes the episodes too often seem like newsreels.
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