I only recently became acquainted with “The Lineup”, a 1958 crime drama from Columbia Pictures set in San Francisco. Many have described it as film noir, while others have refuted that label. I’m not going to enter that argument, other than to say, in my book, it would certainly stack up with another, similar type of film (and personal favorite), “The Naked City” (1948). This film was directed by Don Siegel and was based on a TV series at the time, The Lineup (1954-1960), a crime drama that ran on CBS and seemed to be that network’s answer to Dragnet on NBC. Siegel had directed the pilot episode of the series and perhaps other episodes, as well. The film is an expanded version of an episode of the TV series. Whether or not Siegel directed that same episode is not clear. He had reportedly wanted the title of the film changed to something else, like “The Chase” or “The Score”, to better signify what the story was about, but the producers wanted a tie-in to the police television show to help guarantee an audience for both mediums, so the final title remained The Lineup.
The film starts out with a beautiful shot of San Francisco bay and passengers getting off an ocean liner at Pier 41. A porter quickly dashes out to grab a patron’s steamship trunk, shoves it into a cab that pulls up and speeds off as the porter also high-tails it from the scene. The cab driver is so panicked that he hits a truck. Attempting to flee the scene, a nearby police officer whistles for him to stop, but subsequently gets run over by the anxious cab driver. Before the policeman dies, he manages to fire his weapon, killing the cab driver, whose car crashes into a freight car on some rail tracks. And now the opening title and credits start to roll.
If those first scenes don’t grab you, you don’t have a pulse!
To continue with the synopsis, the movie starts out as a typical, almost mundane crime drama as two San Francisco police detectives (Warner Anderson and Emile Meyer) try to solve what just happened that resulted in the death of a police officer. The movie continues on for a while like a typical TV episode with the police (and audience) soon realizing what was so precious in the trunk case: an Oriental statuette filled with a kilo-bag of heroin. The detectives begin thinking the trunk case’s owner, Philip Bressler (played by Raymond Bailey of “The Beverly Hillbillies” fame), is the illegal importer and mastermind of a drug smuggling operation. Then about one-third of the way into the film, it takes a left turn and becomes something more. Enter the fabulous Eli Wallach as the gun-for-hire ‘Dancer’ and Robert Keith as his handler (in more ways than one), ‘Julian’. They are flown in from Miami, saddled by ‘the Man’ with a squirrelly driver with a drinking problem named Sandy McLain (played by Richard Jaeckel of “The Dirty Dozen”, “Spenser for Hire”, and the original “3:10 to Yuma”) to get the heroin smuggling operation back on track after the earlier public fiasco. The mob is using unsuspecting travelers to the Far East on the Pacific Princess to bring in their shipments of heroin. Two days after the previous debacle with the innocent Dressler, Dancer and Julian’s job is to retrieve the next three shipments of heroin that are being smuggled in, by three different groups of unsuspecting tourists as carriers (or ‘mules’), kill anyone who gets in their way, and deposit all three shipments at a drop point that afternoon by 4 PM. The first two shipments are retrieved with some minor difficulties, resulting in the deaths of two people, and leaving the police with a trail of corpses that they have almost no idea where the whole case will end. The third shipment is carried in an Asian doll by a little girl, Cindy, who is traveling with her mother Dorothy (Mary LaRoche). When Dancer and Julian manage to get close enough to mother and daughter to retrieve the doll, they find their package is missing. In a very tense scene, Dancer interrogates the little girl and learns she found the package inside the doll and used it to powder the doll’s face. At that point, Dancer is prepared to kill the two women. But Julian stops him and proposes they go to their pre-arranged meet with ‘the Man’ to insure he understands the third shipment is missing due to an error, and not the two hired men trying to cut themselves in on the score. They will take the women as hostages and also to help corroborate their story.
What follows are some beautifully played out and photographed scenes of a concerned Dancer meeting ‘the Man’ (Vaughn Taylor) at a now, long-gone entertainment establishment called “Sutro’s”, a kind of part arcade, part indoor water park, part ice-skating rink. Dancer shows up to meet with ‘the Man’, who uses a wheelchair, and provide his explanation of why the heroin count is short. At first, ‘the Man’ remains silent and almost aloof as Dancer talks. Finally, when Dancer becomes so enraged he shouts at the Man to say something, the wheelchair-bound mob boss’s first words are “You’re dead.” The Man is less interested in the shortage of heroin and more in the fact that Dancer has now seen him. “Nobody sees me,” says The Man. Now it is the Man’s turn to yell, and he punctuates it with a slap across Dancer’s face. That sets off the final spark which launches Dancer’s pent up rage, sending calm and reason over the edge along with the Man and his wheelchair. In a scene reminiscent of another noir film, “Kiss of Death”, Dancer shoves the Man through the railing and down on to the ice-skating rink. Panic at Sutro’s follows with a bus-load of Catholic school kids and their nun teachers sent running and screaming.
Dancer manages to make it back out to the car, where the police are already waiting. A high-speed chase ensues that ends in the, then, unfinished Embarcadaro highway (ala’ Speed (1994) or even The Blues Brothers (1980)). Julian meets his end with a bullet in the back, courtesy of Dancer’s .38 revolver. Then Dancer ultimately meets his own end from the policemen’s bullets and a long fall as he tries to leap across the highway guard-railing to escape.
Don Siegel was known for most of his early career for taking grade B pictures and adding touches that would ‘up’ the quality of the film. The earlier part of his directing career is exemplified by such films as “Riot in Cell Block 11” (1954), “Baby Face Nelson” (1957), and the original “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” (1956). He also directed episodic television back in the golden era of TV. Although his films seemed originally intended for the drive-in movie or sub-grade second-feature crowd, Siegel always managed to bring more to the picture than was originally required. He did this in a variety of ways. In some cases, it was the cast (Steve McQueen in “Hell is for Heroes”, Kevin McCarthy in “Invasion …”, or Eli Wallach in this movie), but in many cases, it was his cinematography. For one thing, Siegel knew montage scenes, probably because he headed up the montage department at Warner Brothers during most of the 1940’s. The opening scene in “The Lineup” is a clear example of how well he knew how to shoot these types of scenes (although he reportedly tried to get that scene cut without success). He also knew how to use his environment. Siegel was an urban director, to be sure. Besides being a crime story like “The Naked City”, Siegel’s “The Lineup” also uses the city (in this case San Francisco) as a kind of character to the film in a similar way as “The Naked City” did. He would return to the Bay area again in films like “Dirty Harry” and “Escape from Alcatraz” - each time using the city as a canvas and then some.
By watching this film, not only does Siegel and his crew treat the viewer to some beautifully photographed black-and-white traveler’s guide shots of late 1950’s San Francisco, but one also gets to see just what the Bay area looked like before the summer-of-love, hippies, gay parades, the Zodiac killer, and a host of other things came along to change the landscape. Coit tower, the St. Francis (Drake) hotel, Steinhart Aquarium, the piers with their cargo ships and passenger liners, the Golden Gate Bridge – they are all there, along with some time-capsule items like the Presidio, Sutro’s, and the unfinished Embaracadaro. Sutro’s near Cliff House proved to be an interesting choice of location. It had started out as a ‘bath house’ (a name which would have a different connotation in later years) that actually served as kind of a series of indoor swimming pools, complete with different ways to enter the pools. The ownership was passed along over the decades until the pools became too expensive to maintain. Some of them were shut down and an ice rink was put in, along with various carnival sideshow and arcade attractions. It suspiciously burned down in1966.
Although “The Lineup” TV series starred Warner Anderson as Lt. Ben Guthrie, the same role he played in this film, Eli Wallach was the true star of “The Lineup”. Coming off of critical acclaim for his first film role in “Baby Doll”, Wallach was exceptionally cast as the hired killer Dancer. He brings facial expressions and body language to the role that would serve him well in subsequent bad-guy roles such as in “The Magnificent Seven” and “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”. Others have said that Wallach was not happy with the role, while some say he later changed his mind during the filming of The Lineup when he realized it was more than a standard crime drama/thriller. Hopefully over the years, Wallach has come to embrace this part because he does as good of a job as a killer for hire than any actor before or since.
Robert Keith (Julian) was an established actor well before this film. His role as Dancer’s mentor, advisor, and handler is well played. He not only handles Dancer’s business affairs, he handles Dancer in such a way as to keep him controlled and focused for the jobs they get (until the end of the film, of course). The use of famous last quotes from Dancer’s victims for a book he is writing is an excellent bit of the bizarre that adds to the oddity of these two men, making one feel more wary of them both. Keith was the father of actor Brian Keith.
Later crime films like “Bullit” and “Dirty Harry” would also make use of the city and put their own stamp on the genres of crime films and car chases, but “The Lineup” came before all of them and helped to set the standard. The Lineup is not readily available on DVD or VHS. Occasionally it will pop up on Turner Movie Classics or Encore’s Mystery cable channel. I recommend searching for a copy because if you’re like me, you’ll keep going back to it as a reminder of what good movies used to be.
Don Siegel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Siegel
http://mikegrost.com/dsiegel.htm
http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/04/siegel.html
The Lineup
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0051866/
http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=81457&atid=52641&category=overview
http://www.blogger.com/www.tcm.com/mediaroom/index.jsp?cid=186031
http://obscureclassics.wordpress.com/2008/07/04/the-lineup-by-john-greco/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLFUXfUb2kw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgkh-nei9hw
http://www.noiroftheweek.com/2007/10/lineup-1958.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lineup_(TV_series)
Sutro’s
http://www.outsidelands.org/sutro_baths.php
Eli Wallach
http://www.cinematical.com/tag/Eli+Wallach/
http://www.cinematical.com/tag/Eli+Wallach/
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