The Lineup (1958)

☆ ☆ ☆ ½

The Lineup (1958) – D. Siegel

Crisp, police procedural (bringing a then-current TV show to the screen) from Don Siegel (subsequently Clint Eastwood’s favourite director).  As he would later do in his remake of The Killers (1964) and Dirty Harry (1971), Siegel takes a special interest in the psychopathic tendencies of his characters.  Eli Wallach (in his second film) plays the central baddie who is a contract worker for “The Man” who is using innocent tourists as mules to bring heroin into the USA.  Once they disembark, their luggage is stolen and the stuff is extracted and given to The Man.  Wallach and his partner/mentor, played by Robert Keith, arrive in San Francisco (where the film was shot on location) to retrieve the luggage/drugs from three passengers on a docking ship.  However, things don’t go too smoothly – because Wallach’s character is a psychopath.  Because the police have been tipped off, we see them closing in on the killers as well as what the killers are doing (in parallel).  Siegel is far more interested in the killers and the police procedural scenes play like the rote TV episodes they’re drawn from – they are kept purposefully brief (and thus taut).  So, there’s nothing particularly extraordinary here but solid crime show fare, with a few nods to past films noir (murder in a stream room, a person in a wheelchair gets offed, the same aquarium that Welles shot in The Lady from Shanghai is used).  San Francisco does look great.