The Screengrab

Back in the early 1980s, a new kind of movie hero appeared onscreen, a dashing international man of mystery pitted against historical bad guys. Now that the actor who played that role is in his sixties, there was some trepidation expressed in some quarters that he might be getting, as they say, too old for this shit. But now that the smoke has cleared, it seems clear that, yes, this has truly been the summer of Gandhi. Or at least of the actor who played him, Ben Kingsley. Things got off to an inauspicious start with the Mike Myers train wreck The Love Guru, where he made funny faces. More recently, he appeared in Brad Anderson's indie thriller Transsiberian, where he made with a funny accent. And in between, there was Jonathan Levine's The Wackness (also known as I Love the '90s: The Motion Picture), where he made out with an Olsen twin. (I forget which one--they do look alike, after all--but I'm guessing that it was whichever one was on Weeds. She seems to be the one with the wild-child gene.) Now Kingsley has a full-on starring role in Elegy. directed by the Spanish-born filmmaker Isabel Coixet from Nicholas Meyer's adaptation of the Philip Roth novel The Dying Animal.

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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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