How thrilling can the moment before a gunfight be staged in a gangster film? Our streaming tip for today will cost you all your nerves before the escalation begins.
Brian De Palma is a great director when it comes to living out every single moment of a story. With his camera, he prefers to watch characters watching characters – because something incredibly exciting could happen at any moment. He uses the simplest of means to create maximum suspense.
He succeeded particularly impressively in The Untouchables. The crime film with Kevin Costner, Sean Connery and Robert De Niro takes us to Chicago in the 1930s, where the gangster boss Al Capone is up to no good. A group of intrepid agents wants to put a stop to him.
In The Untouchables, Brian De Palma delivers 10 of the most thrilling minutes in film history
Costner takes on the role of Eliot Ness, who is revealed to be the leader of the group. The Treasury agent does everything he can to put Capone behind bars. In the process, a major shootout takes place in Chicago’s Union Station, making for ten of the most nerve-wracking minutes in film history.
You can watch The Untouchables sequence here:
Everything in this sequence signals that something very bad is about to happen. De Palma, however, delays the moment of escalation until the last second. The cut is his most important ally: Before even a gun is drawn, we know about all the things that are in motion in the station.
Nervous glances at the clock, men in long coats and the pram with the screaming baby, not to mention the music that drives you crazy: De Palma uses all possibilities to make the tension unbearable. And then the pram also has to be carried up the stairs – unbelievable!
Were it not for Battleship Potemkin, the pram staircase scene in The Untouchables would never have existed
A masterpiece of film history, Sergei M. Eisenstein’s 1925 Battleship Potemkin, served as the blueprint for this sequence. Here, too, the editing of the film, a grand staircase and a helpless pram play a crucial role in adding drama to a key sequence
This is how Eisenstein staged the staircase and the pram:
Eisenstein has the pram roll down the steps of the staircase to illustrate the panic just before the Odessa harbour massacre. It is the most famous sequence from the silent classic that is still regularly quoted today. Most recently, for example, in Mission: Impossible 7 – Dead Reckoning Part One, there was a pram to be discovered during the chase in Rome on the Spanish Steps.
