The Untouchables – ‘The Night They Shot Santa Claus’ (1962)

               Near the end of 1930, Attorney General William Mitchell at the direction of President Herbert Hoover sent a small team of Prohibition agents to Chicago to bring down Al Capone. The head of this team was Elliott Ness, a member of the US Treasury Department. Under the auspices of the DOJ he put together his own team of agents made up on those he deemed to be both brave and incorruptible. This caught the attention of the press, who christened them ‘The Untouchables.’ They managed to severely impact the flow of illegal alcohol to Chicago and assisted with Capone’s conviction in 1931 on tax evasion charges. His band of agents then disbanded, their mission complete. What this tv show supposes is, maybe they didn’t?

              In reality, after Capone went down Ness’ life didn’t go that great. He married and divorced several times and moved from one government position to another. All the while his drinking started to become a problem. He left law enforcement in 1944 but never had much luck with a business career. By the mid-50’s he was near-penniless and reduced to drinking at his local bar, telling stories from his glory days. In 1956 he met reporter Oscar Fraley, who saw an opportunity. Although the book is credited to both of them, from the structure it’s pretty clear that Ness told Fraley a lot of old stories and the reporter cleaned it up and arranged everything into book form. Scholars have argued ever since how much of what’s in the book is accurate, which dovetails nicely with criticisms of the show. Ness died of a heart attack on May 16, 1957, just before publication of the book.

              It was a publishing phenomenon, ultimately selling 1.5 million copies, which directly led to both the tv show and the movie of the same name. A two-episode pilot was made by Desilu productions in 1959 and aired as a part of CBS’s “Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse.” This covered Ness’ activities against Capone and ended with the mobster’s conviction and imprisonment, which is also where the memoir ended. When a full series was pitched to CBS about their further fictional adventures they passed. ABC was interested and picked up the show, where it ran for four seasons and 118 episodes. It starred Robert Stack and was incredibly popular, often featuring prominent guest stars and even getting its own parody episode of ‘Top Cat.’

              I’m going to be much less critical of this show than I was for “Dragnet” for a couple of reasons, the most important being that I don’t consider it to be nearly as influential a show as that was. It’s been said that this was the inspiration for a lot of other subsequent crime shows starring teams instead of a singular hero, and while that might be true for the show as a whole the episode I watched was basically just a showcase for Robert Stack as Ness. In addition the series was explicitly pitched to the audience as a throwback to another time period, a full thirty years in the past. In structure and tone it’s closer to a film noir than any kind of recognizable police procedural, and while Ness and company certainly violate any numbers of rights and laws in their fevered pursuit of colorful gangsters it’s in the context of over-the-top violence in a heightened version of Chicago. People could mistake the cops in “Dragnet” for those in real life, much harder to do that with agents brandishing tommy guns in fancy nightclubs.

              Normally in even an off-format version of a television show you’ll get some idea of the general structure and characters that make up a show. That is not the case with “The Untouchables,” as it operates closer to an anthology show than any kind of ongoing procedural in the modern sense. The cast fluctuated over the course of the seasons, which makes sense, and only Robert Stack as Elliot Ness and Walter Winchell as the breathless narrator appear in every episode. The members of his squad were deliberately diverse for the time, including Nicholas Georgiade as Ness’ right-hand man and Official Italian Enrico Rossi. The early episodes, especially the pilot, leaned hard into an Italian stereotype of the mobsters, to the point where it led to protests and boycotts, so the show toned down the thick accents on the bad guys and made it a point that the second most prominent character on the show was explicitly Italian. There was also Abel Fernandez as William Youngfellow, Steven London as Jack Rossman, and Paul Picerni as Lee Hobson. I say diverse, a couple of the characters were vaguely ethnic. Although they do appear in this episode these characters have very little to do. They mostly complain about working on Christmas Eve and accompany Ness a couple of times as he follows up on leads.

They really make it clear the kids saw everything.

              Episodes of the show would hop around chronologically and events in previous episodes almost never affected later ones. There were recurring villains of a sort in mobsters Frank Nitti and Joe Kulak, but just as often they’d feature a one-off character that Ness would claim to have a long and deadly rivalry with who had never been mentioned before and would never be mentioned again. In this episode he claims that he’d known the main murder victim for ten years even though Ness would’ve only been 27 at the time. They simply did not care about factual accuracy if it got in the way of a script. Despite being the first episode of the show’s fourth and final season this is set relatively early in the activities of The Untouchables, Christmas of 1930. This would mean that although it’s never mentioned Capone would have still been a free man at this point.

              This episode works very well as a nihilistic little b-movie. It spends the entire runtime proving what a gullible sap Elliot Ness is and ends with he and his men realizing that everyone involved in bootlegging, no matter how tangential, can never be trusted. Near the end a gangster openly laughs in his face at how naïve he is and the ending narration basically advises the audience that he was correct to do so. I really shouldn’t have been shocked at how dark a show this was considering that I’d already seen “Dragnet” really linger on the face of that dead kid.

              The episode opens strong. We see a Santa handing out presents in an orphanage. The camera focuses on the two kids who are going to have lines later and then he takes his remaining presents and leaves, waving goodbye to all of the good little boys. The moment he’s outside he gets gunned down by a passing car and the camera pans over to the orphanage window to show that the two boys witnessed everything.

              Ness soon arrives at the scene, having been alerted by local law enforcement. It turns out that the dead Santa was an old friend of his, Hap Levinson. From the framing and the musical sting that accompanied the reveal of the character’s face beneath the false beard I assumed that this was a recurring character on the show and his death was the whiz-bang opening to the season but no, brand new character. Ness briefly reminisces with the cops about how everyone knew Hap and what a great guy he was. Ness mentions that even though Hap was on the other side of the law, being in the long-term employ of mobster and nightclub owner Mike Volny, they still played cards regularly and hung out. He talks about a ‘treaty’ he’d had with Hap, how when he went through the front door as a Fed it was understood that Hap would sneak out the back door through the kitchen. Apparently kitchens in these clubs were considered neutral territory of a sort. Ness goes on to say that although they’d been friends for a long time and Hap had never asked him for a favor. The cop agrees that everyone liked him and he was just a harmless little guy. Ness finds only one present left in his Santa sack, addressed to someone named Renee.

The sets in this show!

              The rest of the episode is Ness going from person to person and getting his mind blown about just how much he didn’t know his friend Hap. While everyone at the orphanage agrees how swell a guy Hap was they swear they don’t know anyone named Renee. He goes to see Hap’s widow Bertha, played by the always dependable Ruth White. She’s very over the top in both her grief and the way she swears that Hap never brought any of his work home and claims she has no idea what might have gotten him killed. It’s mentioned that Hap might have witnessed a murder done by his boss Volny, but she swears he didn’t. She also says she doesn’t know anyone named Renee.

              Back at the office the others have brought in one of Volney’s gangster rivals named Brikka. He swears he had no reason to off Hap but does point them in the direction the girl he had on the side. Ness gets angry at the implication but the gangster doesn’t care. Ness then goes to Volny’s nightclub, and this must have been established earlier in the show but Ness strides past table after table of people openly drinking and makes directly for the kitchen and nobody pays him any mind. I guess they were picking their battles in those days? He has a guarded conversation with one of the cooks in the kitchen on what they both refer to as neutral ground. He doesn’t get anything from him so he goes to bother the showgirls in their dressing room. They also all swear they don’t know anything, that Hap was a great guy and he wouldn’t have a girl on the side.

              As Ness is walking back to his car an older woman from the dressing room pulls him aside and starts to destroy Ness’s image of Hap. She tells him his friend was no angel. She says Renee used to work there but stopped showing up after she hooked up with Hap. She gives him a name, which gets him an address. We cut to an apartment where we see Renee in a near-frenzy tearing the place apart. Ness shows up and gives her the present from the Santa sack. She clutches at the present and admits they were an item. She refuses to open the present while he’s there and stonewalls him until he leaves. The moment he’s gone she tears it open and screams in frustration when it’s just a necklace. She immediately gets on the phone and calls Volny’s nightclub in a tizzy.

              There’s been a plotline percolating in the background of the entire episode that takes center stage here. Nightclub owner Volny was accused of shooting someone after hours in his bar and all of the suspected witnesses have been killed one by one. Hap was one of them, although he’d sworn he hadn’t seen anything, and even if he had he was such a harmless and loyal guy that none of the cops could believe that Volny would off him. Ness gets word that the last of the witnesses has resurfaced and turned himself in for protection. When Ness arrives at the police station Hap’s widow is there to admit that she’d lied during their earlier conversation. Ruth White is much better in this scene when her character is telling the truth. She admits that not only did she know about the affair she also knew that Hap was the real bookkeeper for Volny’s operation and was involved in everything that was going on. He’d even witnessed the murder.

Already stressed about Mary Richards.

              Ness then hears the story of the shooting from the last witness. It’s a decent little scene, with an incredibly young Ed Asner playing low-level mobster Jimmy Canada. The camera holds tight on his face, completely uninterrupted, for almost two minutes as he monologues about the murder. He confirms that Hap was there and admits he expects to be the next one killed and only turned himself in to the police in order to make it until Christmas. While he’s still reeling from the news about his old friend Hap, Ness and the police are happy they finally have a witness against Volny. They start to form plans but are interrupted by a call from that older lady from the club, telling them a hit’s been put out on Renee.

              The agents rush over to the apartment in time and manage to fight off the assassin sent to kill her, although Renee is wounded in the process. In the aftermath she admits that she’s a junkie, thus explaining her earlier actions, and says that Hap was a junkie as well. Turns out Volny knew about Hap’s addiction and tolerated it for a while, but once he became a witness to murder he just couldn’t take the chance that his bookkeeper would crack. One of the agents calls in the incident and finds out that while they were rushing over to save Renee the clocks ticked past midnight and their only witness hanged himself in his cell.

              A furious Ness goes back to the nightclub, where Volny has resurfaced now that all of the witnesses are dead. He openly mocks Ness to his face, and when the agent threatens to bring him in laughs and says since all the witnesses are dead he’s got no case. Ness loses his temper and smacks him across the face a couple of times, which makes the gangster laugh even more. He sneer at Ness, “When you came through the back door to the kitchen, you thought you were on neutral ground, but you weren’t. Hap Levinson was using you! Oh no, there was no fix, nothing like that. But your friendship, your friendship with Hap was his passport with every cop on the streets of Chicago. He was using you!” Ness hauls him away, and the episode ends as Walter Winchell grimly informs us that Volny stood trial for both murders and was found innocent both times. The last line of the episode is “Elliot Ness and The Untouchables now knew there could be no neutral ground in their war against organized crime.”

Guy just humiliates Ness. On Christmas no less.

              As an episode of television I think this is pretty great. The budget for the time must have been extraordinary, considering the number of extras, sets, costume changes, and how crisply everything was shot and edited. When I said this could have been a solid B-move I wasn’t kidding, I’ve seen studio releases that weren’t constructed as well. I’d be much angrier at the actions of the cops in the episode if I thought it was trying to be realistic in any way. The show is so obviously historical nonsense, from the age of Ness to the idea that this gang of agents just ran around Chicago for half a decade doing whatever they wanted, that I don’t think it was viewed at the time as anything other than pure entertainment. It certainly inspired later television shows and got Stack his later gig with “Unsolved Mysteries,” but it didn’t get approval from any law enforcement for its storylines and certainly didn’t claim to be educating the public. I’m happily surprised at how well the show’s held up and how much it used the Christmas trappings of the episode to throw the nihilistic message into sharp relieve. I can easily recommend it to anyone who can look past the black and white photography and appreciate a nice little retro slice of stylish nihilism.