The Screengrab

Everyone’s talking about all the comic book movies infesting theaters this summer, but there’s another pop culture invasion afoot – from Speed Racer to Sex and the City to Get Smart! and the second X-Files movie, small-screen fare is taking over the multiplex. This is nothing new, of course, but it is a handy excuse for your friendly neighborhood Screengrabbers to look back at the history of TV-to-movie transitions and pluck a few diamonds out of a deep, dark mine.

THE UNTOUCHABLES (1987)



Technically, Brian De Palma’s stylish, iconic film version of The Untouchables isn’t based on the hit TV show from the early 1960s; it’s based on incorruptible federal agent Elliot Ness’ book of the same name. But the TV show and the movie both sprang from the same source material, and that’s good enough for us. Besides, DePalma adapted many of the same narrative tropes as the television show: the morally inflexible Ness, his wise old streetwise mentor, and his diverse band of wisecracking cops aping the stock players in WWII movies. What DePalma did with them, however, is what made the movie great: elevating the entire conflict beyond the simple good guy/bad guy cops and robbers drama of the TV show, he turned it into grand opera, nothing less than an epic, tragic conflict between Al Capone as a smiling Satan and Ness himself as a tortured Jesus. And because it’s sly postmodernist Brian De Palma behind the camera, he couldn’t help winking at the audience from time to time, whether he was blatantly ripping off – er, paying homage to – the Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin in the thrilling train station shootout or tipping the hand of his entire approach with Capone ordering a brutal execution as he tearfully watches Pagliacci at the theater. Gone are the cramped sets and gritty feel of the series, replaced by grand, chasm-like buildings and swooping outside shots; gone is the cocky, confident Ness of Robert Stack, set aside by a tortured Kevin Costner in what would be one of the last coherent performances of his career. Capone is a jolly Lucifer, and Frank Nitti (played by the sallow, vampire-faced Billy Drago) is his lizardlike assassin. Adding, on top of the whole thing, a classic, catchy, percussive score by none other than Ennio Morricone, and De Palma – the director so many people love to hate – had finally scored the first major blockbuster hit of his career.

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Monday was Guy Fawkes Day. What the hell is Guy Fawkes Day, you may be asking if you are not British, or the product of an inferior educational system? The Fifth of November is what it is, the anniversary of the Gunpowder Plot by one Mr. Fawkes to blow up Parliament. Americans, comic book fans, and people who were hung over in their Survey of European History classes may remember it best from V for Vendetta, where the eponymous terrorist V decides Guy Fawkes Day is the perfect time to throw his own fireworks display at the Houses of Parliament, touching off a popular revolt against the tyrannical government of a future England (not entirely without similarity to modern America). Hollywood films have always had a bit of a, shall we say, delicate constitution about films that portray violent revolution, which, despite the circumstances of our own founding, seems to smack a bit of pink. Other countries haven’t been so squeamish; here’s some good films to watch when you’re ready to stick it to the Man.

BRONENOSETS POTYOMKIN [THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN] (1925)

A classic in every sense of the word, Sergei Eisenstein’s phenomenal silent movie about an uprising of sailors against the czarist regime virtually invented the modern art of montage, gave us the endlessly influential “Odessa Steps” sequence, and stood as a towering achievement of Soviet cinema, even outlasting its censors and detractors in Russia itself. But one of the most astonishing things about it is that it was made less than eight years after the Russian Revolution, arguably the most important upheaval of the 20th century. The notion that such gorgeous and powerful art could be put the service of the purest propaganda would haunt writers and critics for decades – and would be put to the test again when Leni Riefenstahl began work on her Triumph of the Will.

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