CONNERY’S UNTOUCHABLE STAR QUALITY

Having been made to look like a chump by the mobsters, with the help of crooked cops, Kevin Costner stands on a bridge, staring into the dark waters of the river on a dark Chicago night.

Enter Sean Connery as a beat patrolman, making his rounds and looking more dapper than any Chicago cop, day shift or night shift, in history. The bridge is real but the whole scene is so tidy, somehow, that it could be from a proscenium musical, with Costner and Connery about to burst into song. “Getting to Know You,” maybe.

They have in fact only a brief and guarded although significant exchange. But “The Untouchables,” which has already provided plenty of action, now acquires the excitement of character--without which nothing else about a movie much matters.

Until then, director Brian De Palma and scriptwriter David Mamet had been playing a dangerous game, presenting Costner’s Eliot Ness as somewhere north of wimp but well south of macho , a postal clerk who got somebody else’s marching orders by mistake, you start to feel.

But Connery, with that immense, quiet, assured authority that only the senior screen personalities achieve, suddenly reveals what this “Untouchables” is to be, and isn’t.

It’s the very good versus the very bad, as the television series always was, but it is now also the story of a mentor-pupil relationship, a rite of passage/coming of age exercise with a strong thematic link to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs,” and a heroic portrait of the incorruptible man remaining incorrupt while all about him have long since been been tainted.

With all this, De Palma, as always, has made a film that aims at the viscera and that suggests the work not so much of Alfred Hitchcock, usually cited as De Palma’s inspiration, but of Robert Aldrich--solidly mounted, vividly photographed, muscular, characterful, suspenseful and gorily violent.

Why the violence in “The Untouchables” should seem, as it does, somehow less disturbing than comparable violence in the works of Aldrich and Peckinpah or De Palma’s own “Dressed to Kill” is a provocative question.

Primarily, I think, it is because the convention of violence in gangster films has been so well-established for so long. It began, in fact, as what were really docudramas made when Al Capone was still among us. The splatterings are gaudier than they used to be, but we haven’t really come that far from “Public Enemy.”

But what is also true is that the violence derives from an unambiguous confrontation of good and evil. The bad guys are not seen to come from broken homes or other deprivations; the good guys are not tinged with a love of mayhem (like Peckinpah’s wild bunch), although they don’t mind seeing vengeance done and scores settled. You know where you stand.

Another way to say it is that, in the oldest tradition of drama, Mamet and De Palma have given us characters to root for, and to root against.

And at the heart of this drama is Mr. Connery. He is the very good actor we saw in Sidney Lumet’s powerful prison camp drama “The Hill” 22 years ago, a long way from the chorus of an English company of “South Pacific” where he began, a long way from “Darby O’Gill and the Little People,” which he made here in 1959 in the thin years before he became 007. He was wonderful as Bond and has frequently been very good indeed, but never, it seems to me, quite so commanding.

I have no idea what Connery was paid for “The Untouchables.” I assume quite a good deal, and worth every quid of it. Indeed, he gives an answer to the frequent question about whether the vast sums paid to actors are justified.

If the project isn’t really viable at the script stage, no star is worth those multiple millions, because no star simply on the strength of his personality can fetch audiences to a dead fish. But if you have Mamet’s script and De Palma’s eye, then the presence of Sean Connery will substantially increase the vitality of the film, and the vitality of the box office.

“The Untouchables” is a classy operation all the way. Robert De Niro’s Capone is winningly nasty and Costner’s Eliot Ness develops a nicely rising curve from earnest naivete to forceful action and at last a weary, triumphant wisdom.

But Connery in his glory, all the years of dues-paying worn like service stripes on his policeman’s uniform, is what the movie is about, and what the movies are about.