Series Overview
The stories often revolved around Ness' enmity with the criminal empire of Chicago mob boss Al Capone, and many focused on crimes related to Prohibition. The show stars Robert Stack as Eliot Ness and was narrated by Walter Winchell. Neville Brand played Al Capone in The Desilu Playhouse episodes, and in a few episodes of the regular series.
The pilot for the series - a feature length TV movie later marketed as "The Scarface Mob"—was first broadcast on January 22, 1959. It dealt with Ness's crusade to put Al Capone in prison. The weekly series first began broadcasting on October 1959, with the plotline commencing from the power struggle within the mob to establish the new mob boss in Capone's absence (for the purpose of the TV series, the new boss was Frank Nitti, although this was contrary to fact). In the pilot movie the mobsters generally spoke with a Chico Marx-style Italian accent, but this idiosyncratic pronunciation was dropped when the series itself debuted. Early in the first season of the series, perhaps also in response to some public criticism, the character of "Agent Rossi", identified as a person of Italian extraction, was added to Ness's team as a driver, despite Rossi having no previous training or experience in law enforcement. Rossi was given a back-story— that of a barber who was deeply traumatized when one of his customers, and a young co-worker, a manicurist named Tessie DiGiovanna, were machine-gunned by mobsters.
Read more about this topic: The Untouchables (1959 TV series)
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