Al Capone The Untouchable Legend (1998)

Al Capone: The Untouchable Legend is a new one-hour biography of the most notorious gangster in history. On January 17th, 1999, Al Capone would have celebrated his 100th birthday. His exploits in the early part of the century have inspired authors, journalists and filmmakers. Myths have always been woven around the figure of Al Capone. Born in Brooklyn, he began his career in crime as protege to New York underworld boss Frankie Yale in the early 1920's, and then moved to Chicago where he made himself a multi-millionaire from the protection business, gambling, brothels, and speakeasies. He is most infamous for planning the massacre of seven members of a rival gang on Valentine's Day in 1929. This was also the year the Justice Department named Eliot Ness to form a special crime-busting squad which came to be known as "The Untouchables." In 1931 Alphonse Capone was convicted on income tax evasion and began an eleven year sentence in the Federal Prison on Alcatraz Island. Capone died in 1947 and is buried in Chicago's Mount Carmel Cemetery.

But who really was this man? How did this child of Neapolitan immigrants become the most legendary gangster of the "Roaring Twenties." Using historical film footage, movie scenes, and dramatic recreations filmed on location in Chicago, Brooklyn, Ellis Island, Florida's Palm Island, and Alcatraz, Al Capone: The Untouchable Legend not only depicts the rise and fall of "Scarface," but also looks behind the myths at the private family man. Interviews with Capone's nephew Harry Hart, and with Capone experts John Binder, Dennis Hoffman and William Balsamo all help to illuminate the social and economic milieu of the '20s and '30s that led to the rise of the "Mafia."

A good introduction to the life of Capone

This documentary was informative to me, I had been paying more attention to Dillinger and now I want to learn a little more about Capone. The film on this DVD was produced in 1998, I don't know if the bus tours are still operating but I will look for them next time I visit Chicago. The film shows some of the actual places, back at the time and as they are nowadays; to me that makes this and any other biography more interesting. I don't know if my DVD is a bootleg, since I only payed $1.00 at a Wally World store, they have not restocked more. You can see a lot of $1.00 DVDs around at many places, pharmacies and dollar stores, this one was a pretty good find. Maybe it is a bootleg, since it was about Capone, hehe that was not funny... March 20, 2008

Al Capone DVD

I expected more from the DVD. It was ok, just not cinematic quality. I think the price was more that it should have been. January 22, 2007

Not So Great

I gave this product an extra star for the occasional interview segments involving Capone historians Dennis Hoffman, John Binder, and William Balsamo, and for the especially interesting segments with Harry Hart, Al Capone's nephew and son of Al's lawman brother Vincenzo, a.k.a. James "Two-Gun" Hart, and with George E.Q. Johnson's son. For the most part, however, the show is boring and silly, consisting largely of dull re-enactments, almost-as-dull crowd scenes on the Untouchables Tours bus, repetitive clips from a couple of Capone movies, plus occasional plugs for the now long-defunct Merry Gangsters Literary Society (headed by Mr. Binder when this program was filmed back in the late 1990s). The history is shallow and the narrator's errors include having Johnny Torrio shot after the Hawthorne Hotel attack. Better research, more historical photos and films, and trimming some of the excess nonsense might have produced a real Capone documentary. July 19, 2006

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