CREDITS THE UNTOUCHABLES, 1987 dir: Brian de Palma Kevin Costner Sean Connery Robert de Niro Andy Garcia Charles Martin Smith

“I want this guy dead. I want his family dead.! I want his house burned to the ground. I want to go there in the middle of the night and piss on his ashes.”

A terrific return to form for Brian de Palma, and deserved Oscar nominations for production design and costumes as the film recreates Prohibition Era Chicago on real locations.

The café blown up by the protection racketeers’ bomb at the opening was under the ‘el’ (elevated train) in Wrigleyville, north of town at the junction of West Roscoe and North Clark Streets. Just a couple of blocks south of Wrigley Field, the same location can be seen as John Candy’s home in the John Hughes-Chris Columbus comedy Only The Lonely (you can see John Candy's house from the movie – at 930 West Roscoe Street – in the background of the shot).

The Untouchables: the bomb in the cafe: West Roscoe and North Clark Street

The police HQ of upright Eliot Ness (Kevin Costner) is the Rookery Building, 202 South La Salle Street. Built in 1886, its lobby was remodelled in 1907 by Frank Lloyd Wright. It’s recently been renovated. South La Salle Street, with its vista leading down to the Chicago Board of Trade Building, is prominently featured, and is the image used on the movie poster.

The Untouchables: Eliot Ness' HQ: the Rookery Building, 202 South LaSalle Street

The liquor raid on the ‘US Post Office’ is here, opposite the Rookery, at the Continental Illinois Bank and Trust Company, 231 South La Salle Street.

The Untouchables: Ness meets Malone: Michigan Avenue Bridge, Chicago

Ness meets up with incorruptible Irish cop Malone (Sean Connery) on the lower pedestrian deck of the Michigan Avenue Bridge, another familiar location you can also see in Rent A Cop and The Package. Malone’s apartment is an in unchanged block of terraced houses on South Racine Avenue at West Harrison Street.

The ‘Lexington Hotel’, where Al Capone kept a suite, is no longer in its original state. For the movie, the interior is a conflation of two different locations.

The Untouchables: Capone's ‘Lexington Hotel’: Chicago Theater, 175 North State Street, Chicago

The first view of the ‘Lexington’, with the newspaper being delivered to Capone (Robert de Niro) in bed, is the upper foyer of the Chicago Theater, 175 North State Street at East Lake Street. The exterior of this movie house, with its convenient ‘Chicago’ sign, is the ubiquitous scene-setting shot for countless Windy City movies (it’s briefly glimpsed in Oscar-winner Chicago (which was almost entirely filmed in Toronto), but The Untouchables utilises its lavish Baroque interior.

The Untouchables: Ness confronts Capone at his hotel: Roosevelt University, 430 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago

The ‘Lexington’s’ lower lobby is the foyer of Roosevelt University, 430 South Michigan Avenue – you can peek inside at the grand staircase, where Ness confronts Capone after the murder of his fellow Untouchables.

The banquet scene, where Capone gives a pep talk on teamwork before braining a freelancer with a baseball bat, was filmed in the ballroom of the 1910 Blackstone Hotel, 636 South Michigan Avenue at East Balbo Drive (tel: 312.427.4300) overlooking Grant Park.

The ‘opera house’ lobby, in which Capone pleads his innocence to the press, is the Grand Staircase of the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center, 78 East Washington Street. The staircase, of white Carrara marble inlaid with multi-coloured glass mosaic work, can be seen inside the main southern entrance on Washington Street (tel: 312.269.2900, free admission to the public daily except Sundays).

It leads up to the Preston Bradley Hall on the third floor, with its spectacular 38-foot glass dome – supposedly the largest Tiffany dome in the world, renovated in the 1970s and worth an estimated $35 million. This is the spot where Capone tearfully toasts Pagliacci after the murder of Malone.

The Untouchables: Ness and Frank Nitti: Grand Army of the Republic Rotunda, Chicago Public Library Cultural Center

The Center houses another grand glass dome, in the Grand Army of the Republic Rotunda, located on the second floor of the northern entrance on Randolph Street. The Rotunda walls are of Knoxville Pink Marble from Tennessee, the dome Renaissance-style stained glass. This is the courtroom lobby where Ness finds Malone’s address in Frank Nitti’s matchbook. The subsequent chase leads up to the Cultural Center’s roof, from which Nitti is finally thrown.

The Untouchables: the bravura shoot-out: Union Station, 210 South Canal Street

The set-piece shootout, with De Palma paying homage to the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's silent classic Battleship Potemkin, was staged in Chicago’s imposing Union Station, 210 South Canal Street.

A non-Chicago location is the shootout with the rum-runners at the bridge, which uses Hardy Bridge, near Great Falls on the Missouri in Montana.

The real Eliot Ness, by the way, operated out of Room 308 in the Transportation Building, 608 South Dearborn Street, still standing but now converted into stores and apartments.