The Lineup (1958)
Directed By: Don
Siegel.
Written by: Stirling
Silliphant.
Starring: Eli Wallach (Dancer),
Robert Keith (Julian), Richard Jaeckel (Sandy McLain), Mary LaRoche (Dorothy
Bradshaw), William Leslie (Larry Warner), Emilie Meyer (Insp. Al Quine),
Marshall Reed (Insp. Fred Asher), Raymond Bailey (Philip Dressler), Vaughn
Taylor (The Man), Cheryl Callaway (Cindy Bradshaw).
Don
Siegel’s The Lineup begins with a bang – a shooting and a car chase that leaves
multiple people dead. Siegel had already directed his first masterpiece by the
time he made The Lineup in 1958 (that would be 1956’s Invasion of the Body
Snatchers) – but was still working in B-movies, and doing so in style. While
The Lineup doesn’t quite keep up the breakneck pace of that opening sequences
for its entire 86-minute runtime, its come close – even after it almost
completely shifts focus about 20 minutes into its runtime, and becomes a
forerunner to something like Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs. The Lineup may well
have been a cheap B-movie for Columbia at the time – but it’s still extraordinarily
entertaining.
The plot
of the movie focuses on drug smugglers in San Francisco. They have an
overcomplicated plot to plant drugs on unsuspecting civilians travelling in
Asia, and when they arrive in San Francisco, the gangsters will get those drugs
from the civilians by any means necessary. At first, The Lineup looks like it
will be a police procedural – it follows the cops as they investigate that car
chase and shootout that opens the movie when a porter steals a passengers’ bag.
The cops know what was in it, but the passenger has no idea – or at least
doesn’t act like he does. The cops follow him, and try and trip him up in what
really is more of a misdirection than anything else.
That’s
because about 20 minutes into the film, we are introduced to the real main
characters. Dancer (Eli Wallach) is a young hothead – quick to kill anyone who
gets in his way, and a lot of people get in his way. His partner is the older,
wiser, more subdued Julian (Robert Keith). The pair of them are driven around
from one person to the next by their driver – Sandy (Richard Jaeckel) – as they
collect the drugs. Almost none of those pick-ups goes according to plan.
Siegel is
one of those figures in American movies who seemingly did any kind of genre
picture you could ask him. He ended up with 50 directing credits, ranging for
TV episodes and TV movies, to B Film Noirs like this, to sci-fi classics like
Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and eventually would start making movies with
bigger budgets and stars – like Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry (1971) or John
Wayne’s final film The Shootist (1976) – although that was really only in the
last decade or so of his career. Even when he did those films, you could feel a
B-movie director with immense skill behind the camera.
The
Lineup is a movie of tremendous style. It was shot on location in San
Francisco, and Siegel uses a documentary style at times here to capture the
city, while still maintaining the excitement. The film begins with that short
car chase, and ends with an extended one – one that was innovative at the time,
and even it has been copied ever since, still packs a punch. The film benefits
from Wallach’s performance as the psychopathic dancer – it’s not a performance
filled with nuance, but Wallach does a great job at playing the Dancer who can
go from zero to fifty in the blink of an eye. If you’re looking for deeper
themes in The Lineup, you’re looking in the wrong place. This one is a thriller
that starts with a bang, and never slows down.
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