LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Robert Stack: Eliot Ness
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Robert Stack was Elliot Ness. The man who singlehandedly brought down Al Capone (at least according to everything network television tells us, and do any of us really want to live in the kind of world where we can't get our knowledge of history from network television?) Beyond that he has ... worked as Optimus Prime's right hand man, the Al Gore of Autobots, Ultra Magnus. Someone who's gone head to head with Al Capone and Galvatron ain't going to even notice Leonard Nimoy and Jack Palance. Then there's John Walsh. He's facilitated the capture of nearly 600 criminals, has a network of informers the KGB would have envied and has friends at all levels of law enforcement. He'll know what Nimoy and Palance are doing before they do.
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Robert Stack re-creates his "Untouchables" role in this action-packed saga that finds Ness coming out of retirement to take on a group of Chicago gangsters jostling for control of their criminal empires after World War II. Charles Durning, Philip Bosco co-star. 94 min. Standard; Soundtrack: English.
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Robert Stack, the handsome, steely-eyed actor who had a long career in films before achieving his greatest success playing legendary crime fighter Eliot Ness in the 1960s TV series "The Untouchables," has died. He was 84.
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The series centered on a greatly embellished version of the real life Eliot Ness, played by Robert Stack, and his incorruptible treasury agents whom Chicago newspapers had dubbed "The Untouchables." Their battles against organized crime served as the source material for the television series. While the fictional Ness and his Untouchables were somewhat lifeless characters, the back-stories and motivations established for the series' criminals were incredibly well-defined. This was due, in large part, to the talented actors, including Robert Redford, William Bendix, Lloyd Nolan, J. Carroll Naish and Peter Falk, guest actors who played the series' criminal kingpins. This, of course, lead to one of the basic problems of the series--the criminals appeared more human than the heroes.
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After John Paul Jones (1959), in which he played the Scots-born "father of the US Navy", Stack got his most famous role by default. Van Johnson was originally slated to play Eliot Ness, but he backed out the weekend before filming over a money dispute. While the show started out as a semi-documentary treatment of the aftermath of the roaring '20s, it quickly moved into more fictionalised stories. "You don't realise how lousy strict documentaries are - plus the fact that you're libelling someone every 37 seconds," Stack explained.
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Stack depicted the crime fighting Eliot Ness in the television drama The Untouchables from 1959 to 1963. The show portrayed the ongoing battle between gangsters and federal agents in a Prohibition-era Chicago. His role on the show brought Stack a best actor Emmy Award in 1960. The Untouchables was one of the first "realistic" cop shows much like Dragnet. Stack ... starred in three other series, rotating the lead with Tony Franciosa and Gene Barry in the lavish The Name of the Game (TV series) (1968-1971), Most Wanted, (1976) and Strike Force (1981).
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Eliot Ness