BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared on Edward Copeland's blog.
Coming early
on in his career, The Lineup (1958)
is the kind of no-nonsense crime film that director Don Siegel excelled at and,
in some ways, anticipated the same approach he took to his remake of The Killers (1964) years later. He
wastes no time as The Lineup starts off with an exciting chase as a taxi
cab driver tries to get away from a pier full of disembarking passengers with a
stolen suitcase, runs over a cop and is shot and killed. Inside the case is a
statuette containing $100,000 worth of heroin. The two detectives investigating
the case – Lt. Ben Guthrie (Warner Anderson) and
Inspector Al Quine (Emile Meyer) – return the case to its owner in the
hopes that he’ll lead them to a narcotics ring.
For the first
22 minutes of the film, Siegel does a good job showing us the nuts and bolts of
a police investigation: inspecting the crime scene, questioning witnesses, the
forensics lab, and organizing line-ups of potential suspects. Guthrie and Quine
soon discover a rather elaborate heroin smuggling ring. The first third of The Lineup has the look and feel of an
episode of Dragnet as we follow
around these two just-the-facts cops. This changes once we are introduced to
Dancer (Eli Wallach) and his partner Julian (Robert Keith) – two hitmen. They
soon meet up with Sandy McLain (Richard Jaeckel), their wheelman who replaced
the dead cab driver.
Eli Wallach
plays Dancer, a sociopathic hitman who figures into the drug deal. He’s a
consummate professional judging from the way he questions McLain about the job
at hand. The beauty of Wallach’s performance is how Dancer gradually becomes
unraveled over the course of the film and embodies Julian’s observation, “He’s
a wonderful pure pathological study. A psychopath with no inhibitions.”
Veteran
character actor Robert Keith (The Wild
One) plays well off Wallach. He’s got a fantastic froggy, weathered voice
that you imagine got that way from years of smoking and drinking. He’s the
elder, cultured counterpart to Dancer’s younger vulgarian. Richard Jaeckel is
excellent as the alcoholic driver who talks big and is always trying to scam a
swig of booze, much to Julian’s chagrin. In a nice touch, Emile Meyer plays one
of the investigating detectives, the straight arrow counterpoint to the corrupt
cop he played a year earlier in Sweet
Smell of Success (1957).
The Lineup was based on the popular television
series of the same name. The show’s producers had hired Siegel to direct the
pilot episode and then Columbia Studios asked him to direct the film version.
Siegel convinced the producers to hire Stirling Silliphant (In the Heat of the Night) to write the
screenplay. The screenwriter started writing a story about two hitmen. He and
Siegel felt that the film should not be named after the show because audiences
would be confused and suggested The Chase
instead, which, not surprisingly, the studio did not go for.
Siegel makes great use of all kinds of San Francisco locations, which
really gives a sense of place, from the scenes at a pier to the Steinhart
Aquarium where Julian and Dancer trail a mother and daughter who unwittingly
are carrying a packet of heroin to the Sutro Baths with its ice rink and
observation deck, the start of the film’s exciting climax. The Lineup’s most memorable sequence is an intense
car chase that takes place on the then-unfinished Embarcadero Freeway,
anticipating another insane West Coast car chase, To Live and Die in L.A.
(1985).
Siegel’s
film is a stripped-down film noir devoid of any narrative fat with a fairly
simple, crime does not pay message, but within that structure is a pretty
fascinating relationship between Dancer and Julian who carry on, at times, like
a bickering old married couple – again a dynamic that Siegel would revisit in The Killers.
SOURCES
Siegel, Don. A Siegel Film: An Autobiography. Faber
& Faber. 1996.
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