"Corruption in humans is the same as compassion in God. Corruption's our only hope." -Bertolt Brecht, Mother Courage and her Children

The Untouchables. It's a name that smacks of boyhood fantasy, a treehouse club solving mysteries from the comfort of their own backyard, a quartet of underage crime-fighters who go head-to-head with diamond thieves and vicious smugglers on a daily basis and consistently emerge with nary a scratch on them. It's a one-eyed faith in the twin bases of incorruptibility and invulnerability on which the group and its ethos rests, a value system with no currency behind it but a blind understanding. That's what The Untouchables are; that's what The Untouchables is about.

The Chicago depicted in The Untouchables' opening scenes is torn straight from the pages of a pulp fiction comic book. DeNiro's Al Capone is a swaggering burlesque of a kingpin, wandering in from a Dick Tracy cartoon to drawl "Somebody messes wit' me, I'm gonna mess wit' HIM."- he is a pantomimetic stage villain who it is impossible to take seriously, a charismatic King Rat of a straw target. His eponymous opponents are sketches slightly more lifelike, but are still little more than sterotypes, the sea-green incorruptible, the grizzled veteran who knows what's what, the little guy with the big heart and the reliable crack-shot all stock characters from any band of brothers or Crew of Light worth its salt. The farcical failure of Ness's first raid gives way to the bloodless, painless success of The Untouchables' inaugural bust with an ease that makes Murder She Wrote look gritty and uncompromising- the photo of the four officers sitting at the table celebrating their victory over cigars could be the closing frieze of an episode of Police Squad. For the movie, it is the end of the beginning, for The Untouchables, the beginning of the end.

Although The Untouchables' war on crime is kicked off by an enforcement of prohibition, the movie quickly abandons this unsustainable impetus, replacing it with a linear conflict between The Untouchables and Al Capone- but far from sidestepping questions about the dubiety of the motives which engineer the combat, this move actually obfuscates and confuses the issue entirely. It's never exactly clear what The Untouchables are fighting for or against, or what they represent- they are incorruptible insofar as they will not be swayed into supporting the values of another, but they have no particularly clear values of their own. We, like The Untouchables, like all childhood groups of idylic wish-fulfilment, intuitively understand that there is a "Good" and an "Evil" in the matter, and understand which side we're on; but what the nature of this "Good" or "Evil" is is shadowy and obscure. Costner's Ness clings desperately to the law and order that gives solid substance to his incorruptibility, but his values are ambiguous and only semi-coherent, losing sight of what he is supposed to be defending (his family, the baby in the perambulator) as he is drawn into a feud with what he is supposed to be defending it from. Ness is an innocent whose world view is shattered by the murder of Wally and the bloody daubing "Touchable" on the elevator wall- the physical and ideological vulnerability of The Untouchables plunges Ness into the search for value in a valueless world.

What is interesting, however, is that Ness's progress is piecemeal and unconvincing, his struggle to break away from his received modes and principles a constant and uneven one. When he murders Frank Nitti because the assassin suggests that Malone's death was unheroic, it is no climactic success, simply an indication that Ness has finally managed to internalise some of his values, bypassing his 'incorruptibility' to examine the framework of priorities it defended- merely a step, not a victory. When Ness clambers across the courtroom to the sentenced Al Capone only to find that he has nothing to rub in the gangster's face but the mawkish platitude "Never stop fighting 'til the fight is done" -a mawkish platitude which Capone forces him to repeat by childishly pretending not to have heard it- both men wind up looking like fools. The optimistic final note, when Ness meets the news of the impending revocation of the prohibition laws with the expressed desire for a drink, is no indication that there has been massive upheaval and change, internally or externally, but merely that, for Ness, change has finally become an option, where staid constancy and untouchability had been the only way before.