Ensemble effort in ‘Bobby’

The Life After: Director-writer-actor Emilio Estevez attracted a veritable who’s who of Hollywood, including dad Martin Sheen, former girlfriend Demi Moore and her husband, Ashton Kutcher, Anthony Hopkins, Lindsay Lohan and William H. Macy, to star in “Bobby,” set for release Tuesday on DVD.

The drama offers a fictional account of the assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel through the eyes of more than 20 characters at the hotel that day.

“Bobby” received a standing ovation last year at the Venice Film Festival and before its November release was heavily touted as an Oscar contender. But the box office was just $11.2 million domestically.

Though “Bobby” didn’t receive any Oscar nods, the ensemble piece was nominated for a Golden Globe for best motion-picture drama as well as best original song, and a Screen Actors Guild nomination came for outstanding performance by a cast in a motion picture.

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Post-JFK malaise

Artful Arkin: Though he’s best known as an actor, Alan Arkin, who won an Oscar for best supporting actor this year for “Little Miss Sunshine,” also has worked behind the camera as a director. But there is little sunshine to be found in his feature directorial debut, “Little Murders,” a 1971 comedy, which arrives Tuesday on DVD.

The darkly uncomfortable film is based on Jules Feiffer’s play starring Elliott Gould, which flopped on Broadway in 1967. Another production was mounted with more success at the Royal Shakespeare Company in England, and in 1969 Feiffer brought the play back to New York, where it opened off Broadway with Gould, Linda Lavin, Vincent Gardenia and Donald Sutherland.

Feiffer has said that he wrote the film as an “essay on what I perceived to be going on in America in the mid-1960s ... ‘inspired,’ if you will, by the assassination of JFK and the shooting of Oswald.... The post-assassination climate of urban violence made me realize this country was in the process of having an unstated and unacknowledged nervous breakdown.”

Gould, Sutherland and Gardenia star in the film version, which also features Marcia Rodd, Doris Roberts and Arkin.

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Fighting the mob

G-Men: The violence was over the top with bad guys being riddled with bullets from tommy guns; it was often historically inaccurate; the Italian American community was angered that so many of the mobsters had Italian surnames; and even the family of Al Capone sued the series for $1 million for using the mobster’s name and likeness for profit.

But the bad publicity just seemed to fuel interest in the gangster series “The Untouchables,” which aired on ABC from 1959 to 1963 and inspired Brian De Palma’s 1987 film version.

Robert Stack starred in the series as the famed 1930s Chicago Treasury agent Eliot Ness, who enlisted a small but “untouchable” squad of brave men to bring down various hoodsAdding a bit of grit to the series was the narration from famed columnist Walter Winchell.

“The Untouchables,” based on Ness’ autobiography, actually got its start on CBS in April 1959 as a two-part episode on the popular “Westinghouse Desilu Playhouse.” The installments, directed by Phil Karlson, were later edited together as a feature film, “The Scarface Mob.” The DVD set features “The Scarface Mob” and the original “Desilu Playhouse” with introductions by host Desi Arnaz and Winchell.

-- Susan King