The Good
Robert Stack set the standard for Eliot Ness and other crimefighters.
The Bad
No extra features, really. Also, only half the season on this release.
The Untouchables: Season One, Vol. 2 gives us 14 episodes of Eliot Ness’s elite crime fighting unit going up against the biggest and baddest that Prohibition-era Chicago had to offer. This new installment of episodes sees Ness battling Frank Nitti, assassins, madams, stool pigeons and everybody he can get his hands on. Some of the episodes in this new set include “The Star Witness,” which has Ness and his team working around the clock trying to keep a former mob accountant from getting clipped before trial. In “The Big Squeeze” Ness is up against a master bank robber but the Federal Agent wants to get him on a bigger charge to put this robber in the cooler for a long time. “The Doreen Maney Story” has Ness pitting a woman against her boyfriend so that he can bring them both down. Lastly, “The Frank Nitti Story” finds Nitti back up to his old tricks as he gets into the movie business and begins leaning on theater owners. As you can guess Eliot Ness isn’t going to sit idly by and let this happen.
MOVIEWEB VIDEO OF THE DAY
The Untouchables: Season One, Vol. 2 is one of the best shows that was ever on television. It really set the stage for police dramas and it showed just how gritty, intriguing and entertaining the procedural could be.
Features
They have included the episode from The Lucy Show titled “Lucy the Gun Moll.” At first glance this really doesn’t have anything to do with The Untouchables: Season One, Vol. 2, but Robert Stack is on this show (and in character) and the whole thing follows Lucy’s character getting caught up with the mob. Normally, I wouldn’t review something like this but it was cool to see the shows get mixed up in this way, and even better was seeing the radiance of the colors from that show as The Untouchables is in black and white.
Video
Full Screen Format. All in all Paramount has done a pretty solid job with this release. The blacks and whites appear to be pretty solid. Most amazing to me was the clarity of the images. I don’t recall there ever being a fuzzy moment on the screen. I wouldn’t be surprised if Paramount had remastered these episodes but I can’t see anything on the packaging that indicates that. Fans of this show will be delighted to see these “new” versions on DVD.
Audio
Dolby Digital: English Mono/Spanish Mono. Subtitles: English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese. The audio here was also quite sharp. I didn’t notice any points where there were drops or where things didn’t sound right. Sometimes I could hear audio pops but when you realize that these shows are from 1960, it would stand to reason that the audio assets might get beat up a tad by the compression process. Other than these audio snafus here and there (and they aren’t a big deal), this release seems to be in it’s perfect sound order.
Package
This color front cover features a lot of green and a lot of blues and grays from the suits men are wearing. Ness is showcased on this front cover with two of his men behind him. The back features another touched up shot of Robert Stack as Ness, as well as two black and white images from this show. There is a well written description of what The Untouchables: Season One, Vol. 2 is about, a Special Feature listing and technical specs. All four discs are economically housed inside an amaray case with episode listings, descriptions and airdates lining both walls.
Final Word
As I am sure you can probably guess, I loved going through The Untouchables: Season One, Vol. 2. While I could rail against Paramount for not including bonus features, or not putting out only a complete first season of this show (they obviously had all the episodes, right?), I am going to leave that alone. I do this out of respect for just how great of a show I think this is. The characters we are dealing with are so rich but the standout is honestly Robert Stack. This guy was Eliot Ness and he really played the part perfectly.
Also, I don’t know who cast this show but I really liked the way the bad guys came off on screen. These characters were paramount to the believability of this show. As viewers we had to believe that Eliot Ness was going up against some pretty bad people. There was never a moment in watching The Untouchables: Season One, Vol. 2 that I was disabused of that feeling.
The Untouchables was released .
