Putting a baby in danger is often looked down upon by screenwriting critics. It's easy to see why: it's an absurdly obvious way to gain audience investment. But this sequence works for many reasons aside from the baby carriage. It all works because it is so meticulously set up: when ambushing Al Capone's accountant en route, Elliot Ness (Kevin Costner) finds himself in the Union Station stairway with a bunch of gangsters, civilians, and the aforementioned baby carriage. Violence inevitably ensues, but rendered mostly in stylized slow motion. The effect of the slow motion in this scene is to maximize suspense. When you have so many aspects to keep track of in one scene (five gangsters, two lawmen, many civilians, one baby...) it is easy for the audience to get lost if the scene plays in real time. However, Brian De Palma's choice to shoot it in slow motion allows the audience to anticipate the results during the action scene itself, allowing the actions from the protagonists to be that much more impressive when successful. On top of that, the gradual rolling of the Baby Carriage toward the bottom of the stairs works as something of a timer, measuring how much time Ness & George Stone have to accomplish their objective, and still save the baby. This scene walks a very fine line between tense and over the top, fortunately staying on the right side for the most part (the one exception would be the woman melodramatically crying "My Baby!" in slow motion, which comes off as a little funny).
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
