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Quotes

Jimmy Malone: He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That's the Chicago way!

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When Eliot Ness is at Jim Malone's house for the first time, Malone's collar is opened, then buttoned, then open again. See more...

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Brian De Palma hired Bob Hoskins to play Al Capone believing that his first choice, Robert De Niro, might not be available. When De Niro took the role after all, Hoskins was paid $200,000. See more...

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The Untouchables (1987) - 17 corrections

Directed by Brian De Palma, starring Andy Garcia, Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro, Sean Connery (add more)

Genres: Crime, Drama, History, Thriller

Comments made in brackets are corrections from other visitors. To submit your own corrections for mistakes, just click "edit" under an entry, then choose "correct entry". You can also submit corrections for corrections, if you think a mistake has been unfairly removed.

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When the four Untouchables are in Canada working with the Mounties, the smugglers are charged by a pack of Mounties on horseback. Despite the use of many tommy-guns, not one horse or rider is injured, even though they are riding wall to wall, with no spaces between them. [Not hard to believe, since the mounties were always very far away and Capone's men were in a panic, firing as they ran away.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
When Ness chases Nitti onto the roof of the courthouse, Nitti turns to fire back at him. He fires his .45 empty - we can see that the slide is back and the barrel is protruding - then runs a bit more, then turns to fire again. Anyone who knows anything about guns - like, say, a professional killer - would know when an automatic is empty. [He's a professional killer, yes, but that doesn't mean he wouldn't try to fire without checking the gun to see if the slide was back. Military personnel who handle firearms for a living have been known to do similar things in real life.]
Edit Corrected by jhoffman100@yahoo.com
In the shootout on the bridge between the U.S. and Canada, there are barrels of booze loaded on all the trucks. Bullets start flying and the barrels get shot full of holes with booze spraying out. There is a point where Agent Wallace runs at a man who has shot Agent Stone and hits him with the butt of his gun. Somebody forgot to turn the "booze pumps" on until midway through this shot. No leaky barrels, then suddenly booze everywhere. It oddly gives the look that all the barrels have spontaneously burst full of holes. [The barrels didn't just "spontaneously burst full of holes." The pimp was pumping the whole time, but it did loose pressure for a second in the scene.]
Edit
When Ness shoots the white-suited gangster in the shack at the border shoot-out, he shoots him with a shotgun in the chest so therefore there should be exit wounds visible on his back, but when Malone picks him up and pushes him against the window there is not a tear or a blood stain on the back of his white coat. [The shotgun blast contained up to one dozen .32 caliber pellets. It would be normal for the pellets to expend all of their energy in the torso of the gunshot victim, rather than penetrating through. Each pellet just isn't that heavy and doesn't contain that much kinetic energy. It would be more a mistake if the filmmaker had made them go all the way through and out the victim's back.]
Edit Corrected by Mobrien316
When Jim Malone is handing out pump action shotguns for the first raid (just before the carry a badge, carry a gun line) He hand one to George Stone who loads a shell. When the gang get to their target they crowd round a door (which Malone smashes with an axe) Stone does the loading motion again, a pointless exercise. [Pointless exercise, maybe. But not a mistake. This was Stone's first real operation, so he did it just to be prepared. Also, at the cabin in Canada, Malone told him to leave his weapon alone since he already checked it. Stone is just being overly cautious and prepared.]
Edit
You can't switch juries mid-trial, not even in 1930s Chicago. [Funny, but that is pretty much exactly what happened: His only chance of reducing his sentence now was to influence the jury and during the summer before the trial, Capone's gang began the process of bribing and threatening all of the twelve jurors. Realising what Capone would do, Judge Wilkerson made other plans, and on the day of the trial he openly switched jurys with another trial. The following day, after nine hours of deliberation, the new jury found Capone guilty of some, but not all, counts of tax evasion. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/crime/caseclosed/alcapone.shtml, http://www.crimelibrary.com/gangsters_outlaws/mob_bosses/capone/trial_26.html.]
Edit Corrected by Rlvlk Time
When Elliot Ness arrives at Malone's house, when Malone answers the door it appears that Ness has a black eye on his right eye. Yet, when he is inside the black eye seems to have disappeared. [There's no black eye visible.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
During the scene where a public official visits Elliot Ness in hopes of bribing him, the office is empty. When they enter it is only Elliot Ness, the official and the young cop they recruited. As Elliot kicks out the official, we see Sean Connery sitting within the office on a chair next to the door. [Nonsense, when the official visits, all four are in the office and Ness asks them to leave. When he realises what is happening, he asks them all back but the camera follows Ness into the room so we don't see Connery enter because he is out of shot.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
In the famous scene on the train station stairs, you can clearly hear two babies crying, in spite of the fact that there is only one baby being carried by the mother. [Audio problem in a train station, whoever heard of such a thing? The second baby (which I was unable to hear) is an echo due to the high ceiling.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
The RCMP officer at the rendezvous is a captain. But the Mounties (in common with other Canadian police forces) have always used British-style police ranks. He would actually be an inspector. [The RCMP officer never refers to his rank, Ness refers to him as a captain which is a character mistake.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
In the shot from the POV of the killer, as he comes in through the window of Sean Connery's apartment to kill him, the crew is briefly visible in a window reflection as the killer opens the windows. [It's not the crew, it's the killer, it's intentional.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
Ness watches his buddy get on the elevator with the hit man, on the upper floor. The door closes and in the next shot (same hall) he looks out the window and sees the elevator open to the alley/loading dock with his buddy dead inside and the hit man escapes. The top of the elevator and the bottom are in a different vertical space (the elevator went down and then made two 90 degree turns to a different wing of the building). [Hopelessly wrong. Firstly Ness is not there to see his buddy enter the elevator which is why he asks where he is and looks worried for a brief moment when told and secondly the guy who looks out at the escaping hitman is the senior police officer and he's not able to see the elevator, just a dead policeman and the hitman.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
In the scene where Elliot Ness comes to meet Jimmy Malone for the first time at Malone's apartment, Malone answers the door wearing a simple shirt and vest. After he invites him in and serves him tea, however, he's wearing a policeman's uniform. [No he's not, that is simply not true.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
After the Untouchables charge the bridge at the USA/Canada border, Ness chases one of Capone's cronies to the shack. Ness kills him with a shotgun blast through the doorway, making the body land on the porch with his feet at the door jam. Later, when Malone steps out to 'interrogate' the body, it is laying across the porch in an entirely different position. [It's a different scene quite some time later. There was more than enough time for the body to be moved so that it wasn't blocking the door.]
Edit Corrected by tw_stuart
The film shows government agent Eliot Ness throwing Al Capone's right-hand man, gangster Frank Nitti, to his death from the roof of the Chicago courthouse in 1929. It never happened. Frank Nitti died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in 1943. [The movie was not meant to be exactly like real events. The movie was loosely based on the events (aka "inspired by actual events"). There are a lot of differences between the movie and the real events, these were done on purpose, to make an exciting movie.]
Edit Corrected by Bruce Minnick
The film was set in 1930, and Eliot Ness is shown as having a wife and children. Eliot Ness didn't marry until the 1940s - by which time, Ness had moved to Cleveland. [The movie was not meant to be exactly like real events. The movie was loosely based on the events (aka "inspired by actual events"). There are a lot of differences between the movie and the real events, these were done on purpose, to make an exciting movie.]
Edit Corrected by Bruce Minnick
When the untouchables bust all alcohol from Canada, the boxes all have the Canadian maple leaf on the side. However this only became the Canadian national symbol in 1965, making the film about 40 years ahead of its time. [Although officially the maple leaf became the Canadian emblem in 1965, it was the "unofficial symbol" of Canada long before that - as early as mid-19th-century.]
Edit