Television Chronicles: The Untouchables

From the time he first read the adventures of Sherlock Holmes as a teenager, Eliot Ness had wanted to be a detective, a desire which heightened after his sister married an F.B.I. agent named Alexander Jamie. After graduating from the University of Chicago, he found work as an investigator with a credit company before landing a post with the Prohibition Bureau of the U.S. Department of Justice.

But Ness soon found he was "a white knight on a broken horse." The vast, powerful booze syndicate run by Alphonse "Scarface Al" Capone in the late 1920s existed partially because nearly every politician, and more than a few law enforcement officials, were on Capone's payroll. This angered Ness no end, to the point where he became determined to do something about it.

In 1929, Jamie brought Ness to a meeting of "the Secret Six," a special citizens committee formed by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce devoted to fighting crime. That gave Ness the impetus to take the matter into his own hands. He wanted the Bureau to form a small, select group of agents who were above reproach. Each would be investigated thoroughly; some would even be recruited from other cities to insure they had no connections with the Chicago mob. Ness presented his case to United States District Attorney George Emersonn Q. Johnson, who not only approved the idea, but named the 26-year-old leader of the special squad.

Ness selected ten agents: Marty Lahart, "an Irishman with a perpetual devil- may-care grin," and an avid sports buff "who could, and did, quote batting averages, football scores and fight results by the hour if given the chance”; Sam Seager, a former prison guard at Sing Sing who was "absolutely fearless until he got into a hotel bathroom" (he wouldn't get into a strange bathtub without first cleaning it with a disinfectant he always carried in his suitcase); Barney Cloonan, a barrel-chested giant who was always "a stalwart when it came to physical action”; Lyle Chapman, a former college football player, and a meticulous man with a keen analytical mind (he often told Ness "he was happiest when working on a difficult office problem"); Tom Friel, a onetime Pennsylvania State Trooper; Joe Leeson, "a genius with an automobile" whose exploits at tailing a suspect's car were legendary; Paul Robsky, a telephone expert from New Jersey; Mike King, a man "who could sit in a room with half a dozen people and be the last one you would notice," but who also had a mind like a sponge; Mike Gardner, a college football All-American; and Frank Basile, Ness' personal driver, a former convict whom Ness had reformed.

Once, after an incident in which Lahart and Seager defiantly refused yet another hefty bribe from Capone's men, Ness decided to hold a press conference designed to "tell the world -- and 'Scarface Al' Capone -- that Eliot Ness and his men couldn't be bought." Every newspaper and motion picture company in town covered the event. By the next day, Ness and his squad were known in the press, and by the rest of the world, as "The Untouchables."

The battle continued for the next two years, until Ness finally nailed Capone on charges of income tax evasion in October 1931. After several failed appeals, Capone began an 11-year sentence at the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in May 1932; he was later moved to the facility on Alcatraz Island near San Francisco, where he died in 1947.

Although the likes of Bugs Moran, Klondike O'Donnell, Machine Gun Jack McGurn, Bomber Belcastro, Tough Tony Capezio, and the Terrible Touhys were still very much at large in 1932, Ness believed none of them, dangerous though they all were, ever belonged in the same class as Capone. "Those who remained were only muscle hoodlums, certain to be exterminated in their own feuds or by the revolver of the newest rookie policemen," Ness wrote in the concluding chapter of his book, The Untouchables. "None possessed the genius for organization which had made Al Capone criminal czar of a captive city. The other men of violence would try... but they would be conquered by the workaday channels of the law." Believing that their work was done, Ness disbanded his team of Untouchables shortly after Capone was transported to Atlanta.

In 1955, Ness began writing The Untouchables, his memoirs of the Capone case. Co-authored by veteran UPI reporter Oscar Fraley, the book is a straightforward, page-turning account of the battle which Ness frequently likened to a football game of epic proportions. The best-seller also captures the essence of Eliot Ness -- a brilliant tactician respected by his peers, and a man of quiet courage, ever mindful of the possibility that sudden death was literally always around the corner. But Ness never lived to enjoy the book's success. He died of a heart attack on May 16, 1957, at age 54, shortly before The Untouchables went to press.

In early 1959, Desi Arnaz announced that Desilu Productions had purchased the movie and TV rights to The Untouchables, and that it would adapt Ness' memoirs as a two-hour drama to be broadcast on consecutive weeks on its anthology series, The Desilu/Westinghouse Playhouse. Although The Untouchables would "premiere" on American television, it was actually filmed for the big screen, because Arnaz planned on releasing the film theatrically in Europe. Budgeted at nearly $600,000 (far above the $250,000 fee Arnaz would receive from CBS for the broadcast rights), Arnaz figured he would easily earn back his investment, plus another $1-2 million profit, from the box-office receipts overseas. (The film was in fact distributed internationally in late 1959, under the title The Scarface Mob.)

Emmy-nominee Paul Monash would write the script, which would be helmed by motion picture director Phil Karlson (Kansas City Confidential, The Brothers Rico, Walking Tall). The producer was Quinn Martin, a former sound editor whom Arnaz had given his first break in television.

Apparently Arnaz had once given thought to casting himself as Eliot Ness. "Desi sprung that idea on me," recalls former Desilu and CBS executive Martin Leeds in Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz (William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1993). "I asked him, 'Des, do you really believe that the world is waiting for Ricky Ricardo to pull the plug on Al Capone?' He started to laugh and said, 'Okay, not such a good idea, sport.'"

Arnaz then sought film stars Van Heflin, then later Van Johnson, for the lead role. Johnson initially accepted, and the four-week-long shoot was set to begin on March 16, 1959. However, three days before shooting was to begin, Johnson backed out of the deal after his wife (who was also his agent) asked for more money. Arnaz then put out a mad scramble to locate his next choice, Robert Stack.

Although he had done some television (mostly in such prestigious anthology series as Playhouse 90, Producers Showcase, Celanese Theater, and Schlitz Playhouse of Stars), Stack was primarily a motion picture actor, with nearly 30 films under his belt at the time. He was, of course, "the boy who gave Deanna Durbin her first screen kiss" in First Love; his other films included A Date with Judy, To Be or Not To Be, Bullfighter and the Lady, The High and the Mighty, Good Morning, Miss Dove, and John Paul Jones. He received the 1957 Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Lauren Bacall's maniacal husband in Written on the Wind.

Arnaz located Stack late on a Saturday night, with shooting still scheduled to commence the following Monday morning. Stack initially declined, but changed his mind after some intense lobbying by his agent Bill Shiffrin.

Although the real Ness was flanked by ten men, Stack would have just seven at his side for the two-parter -- Lamaar Kane (Peter Leeds), a law school graduate; Eric Hansen (Eddie Firestone), an ex-prison guard at San Quentin; Martin Flaherty (Bill Williams, father of Greatest American Hero star William Katt), a former Boston cop with an excellent bureau arrest record; Jack Rossman (Paul Dobov), Ness' wiretapping expert; William Youngfellow (Abel Fernandez), a former All-American gridiron hero; Tom Kopka (Robert Osterloh), an ex-Pennsylvania State Trooper; and ex-con Joe Fuselli (Keenan Wynn), Ness' closest friend. Monash obviously patterned these characters very closely after the actual Untouchables, although he did exercise some poetic license in making Lamaar Kane a husband with two children. In his book Ness states that he deliberately selected men who did not have wives and/or families because he knew "the job was too hazardous for a man with marital responsibilities."

Neville Brand was cast as Capone, with Bruce Gordon as his first lieutenant Frank "The Enforcer" Nitti. Patricia Crowley played Betty Anderson, Ness' fiancé. Also featured, albeit as "bad guys," were future Untouchables co-stars Paul Picerni and Nicholas Georgiade.

As Abel Fernandez recalls, the actors playing the T-men "clicked" from the very beginning:

"None of the eight of us had ever worked together before that show -- we'd known each other, but we'd never worked together. On the first day of shooting, we filmed the scene where we all meet for the first time. We're all in the big room, and then Keenan Wynn comes in. Bob tells everyone that Keenan’s an ex-con, and all that, and that somebody's got to get inside Capone's operation so we could tap the phones.

"We run through all the dialogue -- Phil Karlson, of course, was directing us, and Paul Monash was also on the set, watching. At one point during the sequence, one of us says, 'Somebody's got to get in there, so we could tap his phones.'

"Now, you couldn't have planned what happened next. Everybody looks at each other, and then Bill Williams says, 'Well, I don't mind playing in Capone's backyard. Who's gonna loan me a nickel for the phone?'

"Instinctively, everybody looked at each other, and we all reached into our pockets at the same time. And Phil Karlson just went crazy! He said, 'Cut -- print that thing, right now!' And Paul Monash said, 'I couldn't have written that any better!'

"That was the first day -- the first thing we did. So we knew something big was going to happen."

Quinn Martin was responsible for much for the show's unique visual style. Within ten minutes of Part One, you'll recognize many of the features that would become staples of the eventual Untouchables series (as well as the shows that Martin would later make as an independent producer): the movie-like quality of the editing; artsy camera angles; night-for-night shooting; and the staccato narration of Walter Winchell.

Because the story was unveiled in a semi-documentary style (akin to the motion picture newsreels of the 1930s), the selection of Winchell [by Desi Arnaz] was a master stroke. "He gave the viewers the feeling that The Untouchables was 'Honest to God' real," adds Alan Armer, who produced the series for three seasons. "Now, most people today (especially younger people) don't remember who Walter Winchell is, but at that time he had a nationwide radio show, and he was a syndicated newspaper columnist. His voice and his name were recognized all over the country. And that voice, and that manner, gave The Untouchables a feeling of legitimacy. He gave it the smell of reality."

Interestingly enough, some of the narrations did not come easily to Winchell. "He had a problem with sibilance," reveals Alvin Cooperman, who produced half of the fourth-year episodes. "We used to record him once a month. When we had all our narrations written out, he'd come in, always with his hat (and usually with a pretty girl). He had false teeth, and because of that, he had problems saying his S's. He'd have to read things like 'On Saturday, September Second, Eliot Ness and his Untouchables...,' and he'd have to do it over and over and over! But, of course, he was wonderful."

The first half of the two-parter aired on April 22, 1959 -- ironically, less than a week after the premiere of another Prohibition drama, The Lawless Years, based on the exploits of New York undercover cop Barney Ruditsky (James Gregory). But while Ruditsky never caught on with the viewers, Eliot Ness and The Untouchables hit it big, scoring a 31.8 rating. Buoyed by excellent reviews, Part Two finished even better at 37.6 -- meaning that nearly 40% of the entire national television audience tuned in to watch Ness and his men put away Capone for good.

The tremendous response prompted CBS to explore the possibility of turning The Untouchables into a weekly series. Just because the real Ness broke up the team at the end of the Capone case, the TV Ness didn't necessarily have to follow suit. After all, there was still plenty of material from the era waiting to be exploited.

There was one minor obstacle, though. Stack had absolutely no interest in doing a series -- in fact, considering that nothing of the kind had ever been mentioned in his original contract, he was quite surprised when the matter came up. But the then-40-year-old star changed his mind after Arnaz offered him a hefty salary, plus a percentage of the show's profits.

Stack and Fernandez were the only Untouchables of the original two-parter that continued to do the series. Jerry Paris assumed the role of Flaherty, while Nick Georgiade played Enrico Rossi, a material witness to a gangland execution whom Ness protects, and later recruits, in the first episode of the series ("The Empty Chair"). Rossi was the team's driver. Charlie Hicks appeared in several of the early episodes as Lamaar Kane. About halfway through the season, Paris left the show and was replaced by Anthony George (Checkmate) as agent Cam Allison; he later co-starred in The Dick Van Dyke Show, and later became a prominent TV director. After George’s character was killed off in the last episode of the first season ("The Frank Nitti Story"), he was replaced by Paul Picerni, who stayed on board as agent Lee Hobson for the remainder of the series. Steve London also joined the show in the second year (he played Jack Rossman on a recurring basis).

The Untouchables premiered on October 15, 1959 -- on ABC, which had aced out CBS for the rights to the show. "The Empty Chair" picks up right where the two-parter had left off. Capone's conviction leaves a void at the top of Chicago's crime world, and both Nitti (again played by Bruce Gordon) and bookkeeper Jake "Greasy Thumbs" Guzik (Nehemiah Persoff) battle each other over who should rightfully succeed him as head of the organization.

Gordon, of course, became Eliot Ness' most frequent adversary. "Bruce was wonderful," says George Eckstein, who began as a casting director on the show, then later wrote nine episodes. "Bruce was great to write for, because he brought so much energy, and vitality, and excitement to the screen. He was a little 'over the top' sometimes, but always entertainingly so."

Gordon was so popular that he managed to continue appearing on The Untouchables even after Nitti had been gunned down at the end of the first season (in "The Frank Nitti Story"). "Dorothy Brown, who was the head of continuity acceptance at ABC [i.e., she was the censor], absolutely loved Nitti," recalls Alan Armer. "He was her favorite character, and she always bugged us to put him in more shows simply because she loved him! She thought he had humor, and that he had -- well, she never used the word 'balls,' but she always thought there was a lot of testosterone working in that character.

"Another reason we were able to do that with Nitti was simply because of the way the series was done. The stories were not told in a chronological order. One week the story might have taken place in 1934, the next week in 1928, the next week in 1932, so that even if Nitti were killed in a show that took place in 1934, we could always go back to an earlier year, and he would be very much alive. And that's what we did."

Gordon's agreement with the series required him to appear in at least four episodes a year. He would eventually star in a total of 24 shows.

Although the stories on The Untouchables were clearly fictional, the smell of reality was so overwhelming that many viewers -- including quite a few in high places -- took it very, very seriously. The F.B.I., for example, took exception to "The Ma Barker Story," in which Ness apprehends the legendary gangstress (even though the real Ness had nothing to do with the case). James Barrett, head of the U.S. Bureau of Prisons at the time, was so horrified by the first hour of "The Big Train" (a two-parter in which Capone forges an elaborate escape plan with the help of a crooked prison guard) that he threatened to have the licenses of ten ABC affiliates revoked unless they refused to air the second half of the show. Although none of the stations capitulated, ABC did air a disclaimer at the start of Part Two, emphasizing that the story was completely fictitious: "Nothing herein is intended to reflect unfavorably on the courageous and responsible prison guards who supervised Al Capone during his internment in the Federal Penitentiary in Atlanta, and during his transfer from Atlanta to Alcatraz."

Some real-life mobsters took The Untouchables seriously, too. Alvin Cooperman had planned to take a crew to Chicago to film exteriors during his tenure with the show in 1962. "We had sent out a press release to that effect," he recalls. "About a week later, my secretary buzzed me and said, ‘There's a gentleman on the phone who wants to speak with you, but he won't give his name.'

"Well, I talk to everybody, so it didn't matter to me whether he gave his name. I picked up the phone. The voice said, 'Mr. Cooperman?'

"I said, 'Yes.'

"He said, 'I understand yer plannin' to come to Chicago to shoot some film for The Untouchables.'

"I said, 'Oh, yes, that's right.'

"He said, 'I'm warnin' ya -- Don't.' And he hung up.

"So I went back to the powers that be. They didn't think it was a good idea... So we cancelled it."

Desi Arnaz also received numerous crank calls and thinly veiled "death threats" over the course of the show. According to the Desilu book, underworld assassin "Jimmy the Weasel" Fratianno once claimed that Arnaz was the target of a Mafia "hit" ordered by Sam Giancanna because of the "bad publicity" the show gave to Al Capone and Frank Nitti. When told that the hit was cancelled because Fratianno "couldn't get close enough," Arnaz responded, "I don't know how the hell they couldn't get me. I always drive to the studio by myself, and I've never had a bodyguard in my life."

Arnaz did have to resolve another kind of emotional conflict when he decided to make The Untouchables. He'd grown up with Capone's son, who pleaded with him not to do the show. Arnaz, though, figured that even if he passed on the show, someone else would inevitably make it. The newspaper editorials denouncing Capone belonged to the public domain. (Capone's son unsuccessfully filed suit against Desilu Productions for defamation.)

Some "gangster-types," on the other hand, found The Untouchables kind of amusing. "Sometimes when I was in Vegas," says Nick Georgiade, "I'd meet some of these guys who were considered of 'ill repute,' and they would tell me 'the real way' those stories occurred."

The Italian-American community, however, was not amused -- they felt The Untouchables persisted in the stereotype that "all gangsters are Italians, and all Italians are gangsters" (an image the community still battles today, in light of the success of The Sopranos). While that may have been the perception of Italian-American leaders, the reality portrayed on The Untouchables was quite different. Although some of the villains on the show were of Italian descent (because the gangsters pursued by the real Ness were also Italian), an equal number of "Italian characters" were portrayed as shopkeepers, businessmen, and in other honorable occupations. In fact, one of the Untouchables (Enrico Rossi) was Italian. Nonetheless, many prominent Italian-Americans fought hard for the demise of the show.

Nick Georgiade: "Back in 1958, as a little bonus, Desi Arnaz invited me to Las Vegas for a weekend, as his guest at the Sands Hotel. And I fell in love with Vegas so much, I'd go back every chance I had [and, in fact, I eventually moved here].

"I got to know Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Don Rickles, the whole [Rat Pack] clan -- they were appearing in the Sands Hotel. I would see Sinatra almost every day whenever I was in town -- I'd see him at the health club, or I'd be invited to cocktail parties where he was present, and he'd always say, 'Hey, Nick.' He wouldn't always say much, but he was always very gracious to me.

"One day, Dean Martin said to me, 'You know, Sinatra doesn't dislike you. He just hates that show you're on.'

"I said, 'What do you mean?'

"He said, 'Well, he just hates that show you're on. He just hates that goddam show, and that's why he doesn't talk to you very much.'

"I said, 'Oh...'

"Dean said, 'Don't pay any attention to it. He doesn't dislike you.'

"I'd say, 'Hey, I'm only an actor.'

"'Well, he knows that. He just hates that show.'

"And then, in 1979, Bill Cosby asked me to take his wife Camille to see Tony Bennett, who was appearing at the Sands Hotel. I'll never forget it -- it was August of '79, and I had just finished doing a Quincy here in Las Vegas.

"So I took her to the show, and we ran into a good friend of ours, Henry Silva, the movie heavy -- who, in fact, did a number of Untouchables. Henry told us it was Tony Bennett's birthday that day, and that there was a party in the back. Well, I knew Tony from New York. I used to have pizza with him every night -- he's a pizza freak! His manager was a very good friend of mine, which is how I got to be friends with Tony.

  "The place was full of people. Tony had two girls that were working for him, and I knew both of them. One of the girls said, 'Tony, there's Nick Georgiade. You know Nick.'

"And Tony said, 'Yeah, I know Nick. In fact, Frank and I -- we're the ones responsible for getting that show off the air!'

"There was a silence in the room -- I mean, a pregnant silence. About two minutes later, Camille said to me, 'Do you want to leave?'

"I said, 'But we just got here. Why would you want to leave right now? Have them cut the cake.'

"She said, 'Well, he just insulted you, didn't he?'

"I said, 'No, he can't insult me -- he's my friend.' And we stayed. But there was a lot of pressure about being on that show from the Italian- Americans, no question about that."

A bizarre phone call to the set from an irate Italian woman would, ironically enough, become the source of many nightclub comedy routines during the 1960s. Paul Picerni: "One day, I was rehearsing with Bob in his dressing room on the stage, and Bob Daly, our assistant director (who later became a producer for Clint Eastwood), came inside the dressing room, and told us about this really strange phone call he'd just gotten. It was an Italian woman, and she said, 'Is thissa The Untouchabula?'

"Bob said, 'Yes, ma'am.'

"The woman said, ‘My name issa Mrs. Ponticello. I'm the secretary of the Italian-American Federation. All the time onna your show The Untouchabula, you show Italian people are bada people -- shoot, fight, kill. Italian people, we notta like that. We likea eat, we likea dance, we likea sing. We no likea violence. If you don't stop showing Italian people are bada people on your show, somebody gonna throw a bomb on your studio!'

"She never did blow up the studio, but I'll tell you what did happen. Later that year, I went to New York on a promotional tour for the show, and I told that story on the Johnny Carson show. Next thing I knew, the story was part of the routine of just about every comic in the country!

"While I was in New York, I was staying at the old Sheraton Hotel, and one day I went downstairs to get a shoe shine. There was an old Italian man -- a wonderful, heavyset man in his 60s named Dominic -- and I asked him what he thought about all the Italian gangsters on The Untouchables.

"I'll never forget what he said: 'I'm'a tella you one thing, my friend. If it wasn't for Marconi, there ain'a-gonna be no television!' In other words, for every bad Italian, there's a lot of good Italians."

Likewise, for all the different organizations that rallied against The Untouchables, there were millions of viewers who absolutely loved the show. After a slow start, The Untouchables quickly caught fire -- by the end of its first season, it was consistently finishing among the Top 20 shows on television, as determined by the Nielsen rating service.

It was also a "marquee" show that a lot of actors from stage, screen and television wanted to do, because the "gangsters" were such plum roles to play. The guest stars had the best lines, and usually the majority of the screen time. Like the great anthology shows, The Untouchables showcased many of the finest performers of our time every week: Barbara Stanwyck, Thomas Mitchell, Ruth Roman, J. Carrol Naish, Dan Dailey, Jack Warden, Martin Balsam, Cloris Leachman, Robert Vaughn, Dick York, Jim Backus, Mike Connors, Jack Klugman, Lee Marvin, Nehemiah Persoff, Keenan Wynn, William Bendix, Dane Clark, Martin Landau, Victor Jory, Vic Morrow, Barry Morse, Claire Trevor, Cliff Robertson, Anne Francis, Elizabeth Montgomery, Arthur Hill, Lloyd Nolan, Vince Edwards, Peter Falk, Nita Talbot, Brian Keith, Jack Elam, Michael Ansara, Clu Gulager, Patsy Kelly, Frank Sutton, Harry Guardino, Sam Jaffe, Joseph Wiseman, Henry Silva, Dorothy Malone, Murvyn Vye, Herschel Bernardi, James Gregory, and Patricia Neal.

The series also attracted many motion picture directors, such as Howard W. Koch, Tay Garnett, Jerry Hopper, Robert Florey, Richard Whorf, and Ida Lupino, and screenwriters such as Ben Maddow, Harry Essex, and John Mantley. The production values were certainly "movie-like" in quality, from the costumes, to the vintage automobiles, to the way in which the episodes were filmed and edited. "We tried to make every one of the Untouchables special," adds Walter Grauman, who directed 19 episodes. "We tried to make them like 'features,' instead of 'television shows.' We used special effects, and had huge, elaborate sets, which you didn't see on any of the other shows that were on at the time."

The show had other kinds of standards that you didn't often see in television. Most of the action on The Untouchables took place at night. Whereas most TV shows filmed those sequences during daylight hours (using black muslin over the lens, so that when filmed it would appear darker than it was), Quinn Martin insisted on shooting those scenes during the evening hours, when it actually was dark, in order to achieve a more gritty (and more realistic) cinematic effect. The results were stunning. Martin's "night-for-night" shooting (or "QM in the PM," as it was known colloquially) forced other TV shows to upgrade their quality of production if they wanted to compete with the look of The Untouchables.

"Night-for-night" also meant that days were long, and that costs were high (because of all the overtime that had to be paid to the crew for working late hours). That was one reason why The Untouchables was one of the most expensive shows of television of its time. It was also one of the most grueling -- 18-hour-long shooting days were not unusual. In fact, after one of the show's camera operators was felled by a heart attack, a law was passed in California that limited the number of overtime hours in television.

By the end of the first season, The Untouchables won four Emmy Awards -- two for the series (Robert Stack as Best Actor, Ben Ray and Robert Swanson for Outstanding Achievement in Film Editing), and two for the original Desilu Playhouse episodes (Charles Swanson for Cinematography, Ralph Berger and Frank Smith for Art Direction and Scenic Design). Also honored with Emmy nominations that year were Phil Karlson, for his work on the Desilu two-parter; and the series itself, as Outstanding Dramatic Program. The series won a number of other honors, including the Look magazine award for Best Dramatic Show, and a Grammy nomination in 1961 for composer Nelson Riddle.

Stack's accomplishment is particularly remarkable, considering what he had to work with. Because the series was written to showcase the gangsters, as a rule Stack's dialogue didn't present him with many "dramatic" opportunities. In fact, most of his scenes "were terribly expositionary -- he was always on stakeout, or at his desk," adds George Eckstein. "But Bob made those scenes work because of the intensity he brought to Eliot Ness. That's the thing that made him stand out, and which made the show stand out from all the other cop shows on TV at the time. Bob, as Ness, didn't just 'not like' the bad guys -- he had a pathological hatred for them. And it was that intensity that drew the audience in every week."

Stack recognized that he would have to play Ness as a "counterpuncher" -- i.e., as a stark contrast to the gaudy flamboyance of the guest villains. He often likened Ness as "a pot boiling with the lid flipping on top." Although a man who usually kept his cool in the face of disappointment, Ness could also explode at a moment's notice. It was that unique combination of quiet strength and unpredictability, Stack determined, that made Ness an extraordinarily powerful character.

Stack, who passed away in 2003 at the age of 83, possessed tremendous powers of concentration. An outgoing man, he could be searingly funny right until the moment he heard the word "Action!" – at which point, he became just about unflappable.

Paul Picerni: "In one of the shows directed by Paul Wendkos, Bob and I had a scene together where we're at the morgue, and there's a body on a gurney covered with a sheet. Ness is supposed to throw back the sheet and identify the body.

"Now, the previous weekend, I'd gone fishing with a friend of mine, and we'd caught a 15-foot-long blue shark off the waters of Santa Cruz Island. I cut off the head of the shark, and I brought it to the set that day, thinking I'd use it to play a joke on Bob. So I told our prop man about it, and I told Wendkos, and we put the shark's head on the gurney where the head of the 'stiff' would be. Pretty soon everybody on the set knew what was going on -- except for Bob.

"So, we rolled the cameras, Wendkos says 'Action!' and we walked into the room. Bob pulls back the sheet... and without batting an eye, he said, 'Yeah, that's him!'"

While the gangsters were the most colorful characters on The Untouchables, they were also the most brutal. More bullets were fired, knives wielded, cars exploded, and corpses gathered per episode than on any other show on television. Ironically, although the series would be ultimately blasted for its frequent depictions of violence, it probably would have been criticized for being unrealistic had it not done so. "If you do the research on that period of history (or any period, for that matter, dealing with crime syndicates and/or the Mafia), you'll find that these people did a lot of terrible, horrifying things," explains Alan Armer. "They stuck people with icepicks. They drenched people with gasoline and set fire to them. And so, if you're going to tell stories about these kinds of people, you cannot do so with any honesty without inserting a certain amount of violence. Whether we went over the line... well, that's something you could debate for hours.

"I'll say this, though: the programming people at ABC were always very damn nice to us. They pretty much let us do whatever we wanted to do, in terms of shaping the series.

"I first came on board in the second season. Jerry Thorpe [who replaced Quinn Martin as executive producer that year] and I met with the people from Standards and Practices (the censors), who cautioned us about violence. Because there had been terrible rumbles in Washington with the P.T.A., and with the Italian-American society, the censors said, 'We will be watching you. You've got to be careful. We can't kill too many people. The show can't be too violent....'

"Then, the next day, Jerry and I had lunch with the programming people. They kind of winked at us, and said, 'We know you've had a meeting with the network censors, and we know that they all have jobs to do. But, just between us, we know that the audiences will expect, and even demand, a certain amount of violence every week. Violence is what made this series successful. Therefore...'

"Now, they didn't say this in so many words, but they were actually encouraging us to use as much violence as they felt we could get away with."

Ironically, as shocking as The Untouchables was in its day, the brutality of the show is practically mild, and certainly not nearly as graphic, when compared to some of the acts of violence regularly depicted in contemporary movies and television shows. At the same time, however, because The Untouchables had to adhere to the standards of its time, the violence of the show was presented in a style that is actually more effective, in terms of having an impact on the audience. Unlike much of the cinematic violence of today, The Untouchables leaves a lot to the viewer's imagination.

Walter Grauman: "The first show I directed was 'The Noise of Death,' written by Ben Maddow. That was also one of the first shows ever made, and I don't think the censors were as apprehensive about the show at that point as they would eventually become after it first aired.

"Ben wrote a scene early on in which a woman discovers her husband's body hanging from a meat hook in a walk-in freezer. I filmed a two-shot of Bob and Jerry Paris as they walk in the freezer; Bob strikes a match, and they notice something off to the side. The audience doesn't know what they've seen, but they can tell from their reactions it's not pretty. Then Norma Crane, who played the wife, enters the freezer. Bob blocks the door and tells her, 'Don't go in there!' But she pushes her way through. She, of course, becomes horrified by what she sees. At that point, I cut to the body, which I shot from about the waist down, but you can see that it's suspended from a meat hook. So we played that scene mostly off of the actors' reactions.

"I did something similar with 'The White Slavers,' with Dick York. That script had a scene in which Dick and his brother bring a truckload of Mexican prostitutes across the border, but when they discover Ness is waiting for them, they take the girls into the woods and shoot them. The girls have no idea what's going to happen to them -- they're poor, uneducated women, who think they're going to Hollywood to become movie stars.

"By that point, the censors were scrutinizing the show very closely. After Dorothy Brown read the script, she said to me, 'Walter, you cannot show these poor innocent girls being killed. We can't allow it. It's much too violent.' I said, 'Dorothy, let me see what I can do.'

"Now, as it turns out, Dick York's character is really a sort of 'reluctant' heavy. So I had Dick leaning against a tree, so that he sees (and we see) the girls in the center of a circle of killers with submachine guns, and then we see their guns firing from all sorts of angles. Then I cut to a close angle of Dick as he watches, and he starts to vomit. We played the killing of all these girls off of his retching against the side of the tree."

Grauman directed many of the best episodes of the entire series, including "The Antidote" (with Joseph Wiseman), "The Masterpiece" (with Rip Torn), "The Purple Gang" (with Werner Klemperer), and "The Rusty Heller Story" (for which Elizabeth Montgomery received an Emmy nomination).

"The network censors sat on us, and we often had fights with them," adds Armer. "For example, they'd let us hurt or kill people, but we couldn't hurt any animals. We once had a scene in a show where a pair of pet rats were killed; we had to change that.

"Also, they never seemed to mind whenever we had people shot or blown up, but they frowned upon having people killed with 'personal' instruments, like knives, because (1) using a knife is more painful and personal than using a gun, and (2) they didn't want us to show killings done with objects that could easily be found in every home. Apparently, there was another ABC show in which a character was strangled with a coat hanger; because there were a number of 'coat hanger stranglings' that occurred throughout the country within months of that broadcast, the network initiated that particular policy."

But the relationship between the producers and the censors wasn't always adversarial. "Sometimes when they reviewed the script or the film, and recognized problem areas, their suggestions were very helpful," Armer continues. "Dorothy Brown was particularly helpful in that regard. We did a show called 'The Organization' in which a character was stabbed in an icehouse. At first, Dorothy objected, because of the network's stance on using 'personal' instruments. But we needed the stabbing in order to make the story work. Dorothy came over to the editing room, and she went over that one scene with the cutter and me for about 90 minutes until we found a solution that we both found acceptable. Dorothy was a very gutsy lady, and it was not unusual for her to work with us in that way."

Yet even the most intense moments on-screen were not as frightening as some of the actual attacks leveled against the show. The Untouchables was the target of three Congressional investigations: the Senate Subcommittee on Violence on Television, the Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, and the Subcommittee on Communications. ABC programming president Thomas Moore was subpoenaed three times to testify before the juvenile delinquency panel.

Executive producer Jerry Thorpe was also summoned to Washington, as a witness before the committee on violence. "Jerry told me he'd never been so frightened before in all his life," relates Armer. "Those committees were determined to crucify the people who produced that series. They subpoenaed all our files, including all the confidential memos Quinn had written to his staff. It was a pretty scary time."

Indeed, The Untouchables was blamed for causing practically every social ill imaginable -- despite the fact that it was fundamentally a moral show which regularly presented mankind (as personified by Ness) in an uplifting light. Sure, the gangsters lived the good life, with custom-made suits, flashy cars, beautiful women, piles of money and, of course, plenty of booze readily at their disposal. They were also morally bankrupt, in contrast to the prototypical hero, Eliot Ness -- a truly untouchable man who cannot be tempted by evil because he knows it has absolutely nothing to offer him. The stories on The Untouchables were quintessential morality plays of right triumphing over wrong, with no gray shadings. No matter how clever the bad guys were (and they often came up with ingenious stratagems), they were always brought down at the end. The guest characters almost always had an Achilles heel (greed, arrogance, lust) which Ness would inevitably use against them. "In every promotional appearance we did, the first thing people asked was, 'Do you think The Untouchables is the reason why kids are on the streets picking up guns, and all of that?'" says Abel Fernandez. "I still work with youth groups, and I'm often asked the same question. My answer has always been the same: We were the good guys. We always showed that good prevails over evil. No matter how smart the bad guys were, they always went out crying."

Still, The Untouchables was blasted by Newton Minow, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, in May 1961 in his now infamous speech denouncing television as "a vast wasteland."

In addition, the Italian-American community continued to mount its campaign against the show. It organized protests outside ABC's headquarters in New York City. It coordinated nationwide boycotts of the products that sponsored the show (and eventually convinced the Liggett & Myers Tobacco Company, one of the major sponsors, to withdraw its participation). It pressured ABC to issue a new disclaimer at the end of each episode stating that "certain portions of this story have been fictionalized." Finally, in March 1961, representatives for both ABC and Desilu Productions announced a pact made with the National Italian-American League to Combat Anti-Defamation regarding the content of future episodes of the show. The major points of the agreement were as follows:

(1) The series would no longer give Italian names to any of its fictional hoodlums.

(2) Enrico Rossi would be given a more prominent role in the show.

(3) The show would seek opportunities to feature characters with Italian names that would reflect "the great contributions which the millions of American citizens of Italian extraction are making to advance the American way of life."

What did the producers do? "Obviously, we had to shift gears," says Armer. "There were, in fact, other groups involved in organized crime at that time. There was a Jewish Mafia in New York. The Irish were also heavily involved. So we used Jewish names, Irish names, German names, Dutch names, Greek names, Spanish names. And what happened, of course, is that by the end of the second season, we managed to offend just about every ethnic group except the Italians." (In fact, by the time Armer left the series at the end of the third year, about the only monikers the show could use without offending anyone were nondescript names like Smith and Jones.)

However, despite all the controversies that dogged the show during its second season, The Untouchables continued to attract big names and even bigger Nielsen ratings. The series consistently ranked among the Top 20 shows (and eventually finished as No. 8); by the end of the year, nearly 40% of every television household in the country tuned in every week. Stack, Montgomery and the show itself all were honored with Emmy nominations. The continued success of The Untouchables, not surprisingly, begat a number of other "crimebuster dramas," most notably The Roaring Twenties, The Asphalt Jungle (based on the W.R. Burnett novel, and the 1950 film adaptation by Ben Maddow), Cain's Hundred (created and produced by Paul Monash), Target: The Corruptors, and The New Breed (Quinn Martin's first series as an independent producer). While some captured the style of the original better than others, none came close to drawing the same kind of audience numbers. All of these shows were gone by the time The Untouchables began its fourth season in September 1962.

The fourth year brought a new producing team (Leonard Freeman and Alvin Cooperman) and a new approach that would change the scope of the series. The storylines would emphasize less violence and more complex characterizations; Ness in particular would be explored more fully as a "rounded personality," as Variety reported at the time. Not only would Ness actually lose some cases (as in "The Night They Shot Santa Claus," wherein a murderer he tracks down is acquitted at the end of the show), he would be made vulnerable in other ways (he is blinded and held hostage by a psychotic in what proved to be the final episode of the series, "A Taste of Pineapple"). Freeman promised that the violence in the fourth-year shows would not be "without motivation. In fact, in some shows, we will have no killings at all."

"Lenny and I came in at the tail end of the controversy surrounding the show over the violence and the complaints from the Italian-Americans," explains Alvin Cooperman. "So we looked for other kinds of stories that we thought were dramatically interesting. We decided to show Eliot Ness was human. We did shows like the 'Pineapple' show -- which the people at Desilu hated, because they never wanted Eliot Ness to be hurt or shot. But we felt kind of 'trapped' by that point, in that we couldn't go 'the full route' in terms of telling stories about organized crime."

The new producers also brought in a second-unit production team that would shoot new location footage for use on the show. "We thought about what we could do to change the 'look' of the show, and make it more exciting, without having to deal with more violence," Cooperman continues. "At the time, we had the old RKO 'New York' street at Desilu. We'd change the signs, or paint over the store fronts, but it was still the same street. So I had the bright idea of saying, 'Why don't we put a second unit on film?' That hadn't been done before on the show. We shot all over Los Angeles -- we found warehouses, and streets, and skylines, and things like that. Bob Butler was one of the second-unit directors who shot exteriors for me; later that year, he directed some of our shows." Freeman and Cooperman also brought in jazz artist Pete Rugolo to compose new music to complement the original orchestrations by Nelson Riddle.

Desilu also announced early in the campaign that several of the fourth-year episodes would double as pilots for prospective series. Barbara Stanwyck played a missing persons investigator in "Elegy" and "Search for a Dead Man," both of which were designed to launch a show called The Seekers. The episodes with Dane Clark ("Bird in the Hand," "Jake Dance") were pilots for a possible spinoff entitled The White Knights, while "The Floyd Gibbons Story" was a vehicle for a potential Scott Brady series called Floyd Gibbons, Reporter. "I don't like spinoffs unless the show involved fits into the series in which it's seen," said Desi Arnaz at the time. "We don't want to weaken The Untouchables, but these properties do integrate into the series." It also didn't hurt that the show was still an audience draw (it was placing in the Top 20 late in the 1961-1962 season).

While the new music and visuals enhanced the look of the show, the thematic changes were in sharp contrast to the basic morality play that made The Untouchables the success it was. No matter how many bullets were fired each week, the audience knew that Eliot Ness, and all that he stood for, was going to win at the end. When that was taken away from him, the viewers left the series in droves. By the middle of the season, Freeman and Cooperman were gone; Alan Armer was brought back as executive producer for the balance of the year.

Two other Freeman/Cooperman shows are worth noting, though. "Come and Kill Me" includes an authentic recreation of a horse race at Arlington Park. "Snowball," written by George Eckstein, has become known as "the Robert Redford episode" (and, in fact, it was the segment shown at the Museum of Broadcasting History's tribute to The Untouchables in 1993, an event in which Stack, Georgiade, Picerni, Fernandez, Armer, Grauman, Eckstein and Cooperman all participated).

Compounding the ratings problem: the grueling production pace of the series finally took its toll on star Robert Stack, who was sidelined for several weeks after hemorrhaging a vocal cord. Not surprisingly, he declined an offer to return for a fifth year (although the ratings were down, ABC was still interested in continuing the show). Eliot Ness and The Untouchables retired at the end of the 1962-1963 season, although the reruns have continued to air throughout the world ever since. In addition, Columbia House released 54 of the 118 series episodes, as well as the original Desilu Playhouse two-parter, on VHS in the late 1980s. Though no longer available directly from Columbia House, many of these tapes can still be purchased through eBay, amazon.com and other online vendors.

Stack completed several motion pictures before returning to television in 1968 in The Name of the Game. He also starred in two other series (Most Wanted, Strike Force), as well several more features and TV-movies, before becoming host and narrator of Unsolved Mysteries in 1987, a role he maintained through the end of the series in 2002. Although best known for his dramatic roles, Stack also did a lot of lighter fare in his twilight years, including Beavis and Butt-Head in America, King of the Hill, and BASEketball, not to mention his memorable turns in Airplane! and Caddyshack II.

Stack also sent up his most famous role in “Lucy and the Gun Moll,” a 1966 segment of The Lucy Show that parodied The Untouchables. Normally, of course, whenever he examined a bottle of booze, Stack as Ness would take a sip from the bottle, then immediately spit it out. But in “Lucy and the Gun Moll,” Eliot Ness actually got drunk. (The Lucy episode also features Bruce “Frank Nitti” Gordon, who also headlined his own series in 1966: Run, Buddy, Run, a parody of The Fugitive co-starring fellow Untouchables alum Nick Georgiade.)