Standard-Examiner staff
There's a chilling scene in "The Untouchables" in which Al Capone's hit man, Frank Nitti, sits in a car outside G-man Eliot Ness' home, smoking cigarettes. Ness isn't home, but when he does arrive, after dark, Nitti expounds on the virtues of family life.
It's Nitti's way of letting Ness know that if Capone continues to be harassed, Ness' wife and child will be murdered. It would be easy, Nitti intimates by his presence outside the home, for him to have walked in and snuffed out their lives.
In the movie, Nitti is a dastardly, evil character. But in reality, the actor who played him -- Billy Drago -- is soft-spoken and unassuming. And Drago says he's loving the attention the movie has given him.
"I have literally not been able to go on the street one day since the picture opened without somebody coming up, or being in a restaurant and having someone say something to me," Drago said last week during a telephone interview from his Los Angeles home. "It happens everywhere I go."
