How Accurate?

lol Zero!

Ness did not bring down Capone

Not only did Ma Barker apparently not plan or be involved in any crimes bar the last shoot-out..... son Lloyd was in jail the entire time!!!

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Extremely Late to The Party, But: For an authoritative and accurate overview of Ness's life, read "Eliot Ness: The Rise and Fall of an American Hero," by Douglas Perry. Interesting that Ness's best work in law enforcement came AFTER prohibition, when he was public safety direction in Cleveland. Another book, that deals more directly with THE UNTOUCHABLES, is Kenneth Tucker's "Eliot Ness and the Untouchables: The Historical Reality and the Film and Television Depictions," 2d ed.(2011).

I really loved this show as a kid (when I was allowed to stay up and watch it), but a recent traversal of the entire cycle on MeTV left me less impressed. Although the recreation of time and place was pretty good, the rather clumsy efforts to make Ness and his band into a national police force doing battle with every celebrated criminal of the era got to be tiresome after several episodes. I'm surprised they didn't do shows about John Dillinger or the Lindbergh kidnapping or the K.C. Massacre (well, both Charles Lindbergh and J. Edgar Hoover were still alive and perhaps Desilu didn't want to cross them). However, my favorite episodes (which, unfortunately, were not shown as part of MeTV's cycle) was the fanciful two-part depiction of an assassination attempt on Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak by the Capone mob, an interesting takeoff on an actual event. Ness foils the mob, only to see Cermak shot by a "lone assassin" who was actually after President-Elect Franklin D. Roosevelt. I would like to catch that one again.

Great question. They're now "binging" on The Untouchables on Decades TV, --this is 1 2017 post, ten years after the first one in the thread--and I've been wondering not so much about the show's literal accuracy, as in did "did Eliot Ness do this" or 'did Eliot Ness do that"; nor the fact that Ness in all likelihood never met even 10% of the real life figures who appear in the highly fictionalized series.

For instance: this past night I was watching some first season eps, such as The Tri-State Gang. I have no doubt that Ness never went up against such a gang on the east coast, but the ep got me to wondering if such a gang existed, even under another name; and whether such a cold blooded sociopath as the William Bendix character portrayed was based on the actual leader of such a gang. Okay, so Ness was never involved in such a case. What I'm asking: did such a gang exist?

Then there was the somewhat atypical, at times creepy The Underground Railway, which also featured a sociopath as "guest villain", this one famously ugly. It's a tense, dramatic entry, exceedingly well acted by the usually (and in real life) handsome Cliff Robertson and the gifted Virginia Vincent. What I'm wondering here, too, is "was there a real life Frank Hollaway?" (the name of Robertson plays), or someone like him who may or may not have got his face fixed. The incidentals are probably pure fiction, yet I can't help but wonder if the central character is "true", so to speak, as distinct from the story The Untouchables told.