The Lineup (Columbia, 1958)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film on last night’s Turner Classic Movies “Noir Alley” show was The Lineup, a combination police procedural and crime thriller made at Columbia Pictures in 1958 and based on a TV series, originally also called The Lineup when it first aired on CBS from 1954 to 1960, though when it was sold in syndication after its network run was over it was retitled San Francisco Beat. The show was basically a knock-off of Dragnet set in San Francisco instead of Los Angeles, and both the show and the movie acknowledged the cooperation of the San Diego Police Department in the closing credits. Like Dragnet, The Lineup was supposedly based on actual crimes that had been reported in its city, and its stars were Warner Anderson as Lt. Ben Guthrie, Tom Tully as Inspector Matt Grubb, and Marshall Reed as Inspector Fred Ascher. Anderson and Reed both appeared as the same characters in the film, but Tully wasn’t in the movie and he was replaced by a different actor, Emile Meyer, playing a different character, Inspector Al Quine. (I wondered if that was an in-joke tribute to one of Columbia’s top directors at the time, Richard Quine.) Producer Jaime del Valle obviously thought there would be a market for a feature-film version of his TV show, as there had been for a feature-film version of Dragnet four years earlier (whose star, Jack Webb, had directed the film himself, and whose script contained one unwittingly funny line referring to an “eyeball witness” – both my husband Charles and I jumped on that and joked at almost the same time, “What did the ‘eyeball witness’ see the eyeball doing?”), though he was unable to get Columbia to give him enough of a budget to make the movie in color.

But he got quite compelling help behind the camera: the director was Don Siegel (13 years before he would make another, much better-known policier set in San Francisco, Dirty Harry); the screenwriter was Stirling Silliphant (who had written some of the early episodes of the Mickey Mouse Club before branching out into crime thrillers though his experience at Disney might have stood him in good stead writing for the child who appears as a key character in the film), and the cinematographer was Hal Mohr. Mohr had actually been born and raised in San Francisco, and as a boy had personally witnessed the 1906 earthquake and fire that nearly destroyed the city – which stood him in good stead in 1927, when he was assigned to a film about the quake called Old San Francisco. The film is full of San Francisco landmarks – many of which I remember from my own life in the Bay Area from 1953 to 1979, and quite a few of which no longer exist (Sutro’s Museum, the Steinhart Aquarium, the Cliff House and the Embarcadero Freeway – the Cliff House lasted until the pandemic permanently closed it in 2020, Sutro’s _ originally built as a public bathhouse in 1894 and later converted into a skating rink and 19th century museum – burned down in 1966, the aquarium and adjacent De Young Museum were torn down and replaced in the 2000’s, and the Embarcadero Freeway – famously unfinished when protests from San Franciscans led the California Department of Transportation to abandon it in 1958 – was finally torn down in 1990 after the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989 made it structurally too dangerous to survive).

But what makes it worth seeing today is Siegel’s taut, high-energy direction and the audacious conception of Silliphant’s script. A drug cartel led by a mysterious figure known only as “The Man” (Vaughn Taylor, who two years later played the banker Janet Leigh embezzled from in Hitchcock’s Psycho) hides quantities of uncut heroin in knickknacks and sell them to unsuspecting tourists in Japan, Taiwan aHong Kong, thereby unwittingly turning ordinary, innocent civilians into the cartel’s mules. In the opening, a cab driver who’s a heroin addict himself (no doubt the cartel promised to pay him in “product”) snatches a bag at the San Francisco docks from a San Francisco opera official named Phillip Dressler (Raymond Bailey). Then the driver is spooked when a truck cuts right across his getaway route; he ends up crashing his cab and dies from the attack, but not before he ran over and killed a uniformed cop who was trying to get him to stop. The cops seize the bag stolen from Dressler and inventory its contents, realize the doll Dressler bought at a curio shop in Hong Kong for $20 contained heroin, and give the bag back to Dressler after confiscating the heroin and replacing it with a similarly wrapped package of milk sugar. Uncertain whether Dressler was part of the smuggling operation or an innocent victim, they give him back his bag but trace him for the next few days.

Then we cut to the first scene in the movie that really interested Don Siegel – a United airliner flying into San Francisco with a two-person hit team, Dancer (Eli Wallach, in his second film) and Julian (Robert Keith, Brian Keith’s father). Though the relationship between them lacks the homoerotic overtones between Lawrence Tierney and Elisha Cook, Jr. in their similar roles in Born to Kill (1947), Siegel once again used a pair of hit men in his 1964 version of The Killers. Siegel said that at no time during the making of The Killers did he realize how similar it was to The Lineup, but later on re-seeing both films he caught the resemblances – not only the two-man hit-person team but details like the murders inside steam baths that occur in both films, and the lead killer’s preferred weapon: a silencer-equipped pistol he carries in a briefcase. Dancer and Julian have come to San Francisco to reclaim the heroin Dressler was unknowingly carrying (the cops put Dressler through a lineup – well, ,there had to be a justification for the title! – but he’s unable to recognize the porter who grabbed his bag and threw it into the cab driver’s taxi) and also get it back from the other people who had been the cartel’s unwitting mules. One of them is a rich man named Sanders who had bought an elaborate set of Asian flatware in Singapore with heroin concealed in the handles – he and his wife escape but Dancer shoots his Asian houseboy when he tries to keep the pair from stealing the flatware set – and Julian asks Dancer what the victim’s last words were so he can inscribe them in a notebook in which he writes the last words of everyone Dancer kills. Later Dancer and Julian trace a member of the crew of the liner the unwitting mules came to San Francisco on, the Pacific Princess, who stumbled on the heroin concealed in an antique Chinese horse and wanted to sell it himself – bad move.

The last shipment was carried in by a mother, Dorothy Bradshaw (Mary LaRoche), and her daughter Cindy (Cheryl Callaway – see, I told you there was an important role for a child in this film!), who were carrying the heroin in a doll Dorothy had brought Cindy. Only Cindy unwittingly discovered the heroin concealed in her doll and used it all to powder her doll’s face. Dancer and Julian discover her in the Steinhart Aquarium – one wonders if writer Sillliphant was inspired by the similar scene in Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai a decade earlier (also a Columbia production), in which the characters played by Welles and Rita Hayworth are caught illicitly kissing in the halls between the fish tanks – and they offer the two a ride back to their hotel. Apparently Dorothy’s relationship to Cindy’s father is in an uncertain state – they were hoping he would be there to greet them when they arrived on their trip but he wasn’t, and there’s a part of her that really isn’t all that surprised – and that’s why they accept Dancer’s and Julian’s invitation. Once inside Dancer grabs the kid’s doll – in the film’s most frightening scene – and destroys it before he finally realizes that the kid really did waste all that high-priced dope powdering her doll’s face. Worried that “The Man” is going to order him killed if he turns in a short quantity of the drugs he was supposed to retrieve, he takes mom and daughter hostage and drags them along to the meeting place at Sutro’s. He corners “The Man” and realizes he’s just an old guy in a wheelchair, and “The Man” tells Dancer, “You’re dead. No one ever sees me.” Siegel told interviewer Stuart M. Kaminsky that he meant “The Man” as a metaphor for God, and as a non-believer he staged this scene to ridicule the whole concept of an all-powerful entity ruling over human behavior and dishing out dire, eternal punishments for the slightest transgressions against his arbitrary rules.

Dancer, who was hoping he could bring the Bradshaws with him so they could explain to “The Man” what they did with the heroin, gets frustrated when “The Man” dismisses him and tells him he will die for actually seeing him, pushes the wheelchair-bound “The Man” over the railing at Sutro’s to his death on the floor of the ice rink below. (It seems likeliy that Silliphant was influenced here by Richard Widmark's murder of Mildred Dunnock by pushing her and her wheelchair down a flight of stairs in the 1947 Kiss of Death, which started the trend for villains in films noir to murder people with disabilities in particularly bizarre and cruel ways.) Then he, Julian, their driver Sandy McLain (Richard Jaeckel) and the Bradshaws drive away, with the police in hot pursuit, and end up in a spectacular car chase which Noir Alley host Eddie Muller hailed as the greatest car-chase scene ever filmed until Steve McQueen’s Bullitt (also set in San Francisco) in 1969. The car chase features some spectacular stunt driving – Jaeckel’s stunt driver was a man named Guy Way, who enlisted his wife to be in the scene as well as Mary LaRoche’s double. The script called for him to drive right to the edge at which the uncompleted Embarcadero Freeway abruptly ended in a sheer drop to the road below, then make a sudden and severe turn to avoid falling off – and apparently Mrs. Way was so spooked by what her husband put her through that she had nightmares for three days. But a lot of the chase is done with process screens (pretty obvious process screens, at that) and it’s not as exciting now as it no doubt was in 1958.

The Lineup ends with Dancer and Julian caught in a trap – a V-shaped barrier designed to keep cars from going off the end of the unfinished freeway – and the cops gun down the bad guys and rescue the Bradshaws. The Lineup has quite a few felicitous touches, including one sequence in which Dorothy Bradshaw asks Julian point-blank why he and Dancer do what they do, and he answers with a surprisingly admiring description of Dancer as “a pure psychopath.” It’s not very often in a film noir (which this definitely is thematically, though less so visually – by the 1950’s movie equipment had become more portable and this encouraged companies to go on location and actually shoot films in the locales where they were set, which gained in verisimilitude but at the expense of losing the carefully constructed chiaroscuro studio-bound visuals of classic noir; despite the advantages of location shooting, I still think the greatest crime film set in San Francisco is the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, even though aside from a few second-unit establishing shots of the Ferry Building not a frame of it was shot there!) that an ordinary human being asks a denizen of the noir underworld just why he or she does what s/he does!

According to Siegel’s interview with Kaminsky (which I read first in a 1971 film magazine and then, in a longer version, as a full-length book), Eli Wallach came to the project with a chip on his shoulder because his first film had been a prestige production, Baby Doll, directed by Elia Kazan, co-starring Karl Malden and Carroll Baker (in her film debut, too) and with an original screenplay by Tennessee Williams. Wallach felt that after such a promising debut his agents had let him down by booking him for a routine thriller as his second film – until midway through the shoot he realized he was actually playing a complex role in a well-written script that was far more than just a cops-and-robbers movie. Then he became far more cooperative and easier for Siegel to work with. Since the character was called “Dancer” he tried to move like one (though he wasn’t about to keep Gene Kelly awake nights worrying about the competition), and there’s a chilling matter-of-factness about his portrayal that reflects this film’s position in between the out-and-out raving Lawrence Tierney had done in his psycho roles and the boyish innocence concealing his homicidal mania Anthony Perkins brought to his part in Hitchcock’s Psycho in 1960. The Lineup is a quite interesting and entertaining film, one of those classic-era Hollywood products that manages to scare far more with the threat of violence than the on-screen presentation of it, and while Siegel said he was uninterested in the police-procedural aspects of the story (only one scene shows the famous round window in Warner Anderson’s character’s office that was a trademark in virtually every episode of the TV show) he actually keeps the cops’ and the crooks’ stories well balanced, as Raoul Walsh had done in White Heat (1949) and Siegel would do again in Dirty Harry.