The Lineup
(Columbia Pictures, 1958)

Don Siegel’s elegant choreography of violence.

A corpse, a gun, and a suitcase full of heroin kick start the narrative.

Tagline 
“When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty.”

Just the Facts

Hollywood’s penchant for strip-mining classic TV shows as fodder for feature films has been commonplace for decades, but back in 1958 the practice was anything but common. In fact, you can count on one hand the number of small-screen to big-screen transitions during that decade. Jack Webb led the way with the 1954 film Dragnet, the first theatrical movie adapted from a successful TV series, as well as the first film to be released while the original show was still on the air. But while Dragnet the series was a darkly entertaining slice of minimalist noir, Dragnet the film was just a drag.

The Lineup (1958) was a cinematic perp of a much different stripe. It originated as a CBS radio drama centered on a pair of San Francisco detectives that aired from 1950 to 1953 before spinning off into television in 1954. Although overshadowed by Webb’s iconic series, The Lineup’s gritty atmosphere and taut storytelling earned high ratings throughout its six-season run, and its San Francisco setting made it a forerunner to the likes of Bullitt (1968), Dirty Harry (1971) and other Bay Area crime films and TV shows. Warner Anderson as Lt. Ben Guthrie and Tom Tully as Inspector Matt Grebb were the stolid leads who inevitably collared the bad guys at the conclusion of each episode. (Emile Meyer as Inspector Al Quine replaced Tully’s character in the film.) Nothing in the by-the-numbers plots or generic subject matter gave rise to any doubts about the stability of the existing social order or the middle-class assumptions of its viewing audience.

But when Columbia Pictures adapted the program into a feature film, the result was a far edgier beast, thanks to ace action director Don Siegel (who helmed the series’ pilot episode) and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, not yet the household name he would become for the iconic television series Route 66 and films like In the Heat of the Night (1967), but already a seasoned writer with an out-of-left-field sensibility. Producers Frank Cooper and Jaime Del Valle had no such artistic aspirations, expecting merely a faithful facsimile of the series focused on the two police inspectors. Siegel, whose best films were about violent, antisocial loners, was more interested in the cold-blooded criminals Silliphant dreamed up for his subversive, blackly humorous screenplay—Dancer (Eli Wallach in only his second film role), a psychopathic hit man whose natty attire and assiduous pursuit of self-improvement sits uncomfortably with the savagery of his profession; and Julian (Robert Keith), his handler-cum-agent, who schools Dancer on the subjunctive mood and has the bizarre habit of jotting down the last words of his protégé’s victims.

While Lieutenant Guthrie and Inspector Quine stolidly focus on the objective...

Julian and Dancer analyze the subjunctive.

Silliphant’s outré crime partners heralded a new development in the genre, anticipating the Lee Marvin-Clu Gulager pairing in Siegel's 1964 The Killers. As Silliphant noted in Backstory 3, “I was with [Siegel] in San Francisco on location when he shot The Lineup. I remember being somewhat apprehensive about his reaction to my script when it was first given to him. I had created an off-the-wall character (played by Robert Keith, Brian’s father), an agent for Eli Wallach, one of the country’s top hit men. The idea of a killer having an agent appealed to me immensely, since the connection to Hollywood was immediately symbolic. And as Wallach proceeds through my script, blowing people away in successive killings, each time he’d return to the waiting line, the eager agent, Keith, would ask him the inevitable question: ‘Well, what were their last words?’ Eventually, his insistence of knowing last words provokes his client to shoot him—Wallach is fucking fed up with this philosophic shit. Back in the fifties, this was hardly your average screenwriting, if I can be somewhat immodest; and so I was shaky about Don’s reaction. Well, he fucking went out of his mind—hooted with laughter—and shot it all with relish.”

In fact, everything about the script took the TV series’ concept in grittier, darker directions. Heroin wasn’t exactly a narrative staple in fifties films, yet Silliphant’s plot sees Dancer and Julian summoned to San Francisco by “The Man,” a high-level heroin merchant, to recover parcels of smack planted on unwitting travelers returning from overseas. Needless to say, the killers’ brief extends to eliminating any loose ends in the process. Their odyssey of homicide, paranoia, kidnapping and near-child-killing is taken by Siegel/Silliphant to extremes beyond what the small screen dared in the fifties. 

Siegel establishes an edgy tone in the breathless robbery attempt that opens the film. A waterfront porter steals a suitcase from a cruise ship passenger at Pier 41 and tosses it into a waiting taxicab, whereupon the driver immediately speeds away, promptly smashes into a truck and just as quickly strikes a policeman with lethal impact. A lucky shot by the dying cop kills the driver, sending his cab crashing into a barrier. All of this action occurs in the first 60 seconds, testament to Siegel’s terse visual grammar. 

A generation gap separates Julian’s old school professionalism from Sandy McLain’s impulsive immaturity.

An underworld contact bemused by Dancer’s hostility proffers intel on the unsuspecting drug mules.

Guthrie and Quine are first on the scene, and quickly tumble to the existence of the narcotics ring, thanks to their discovery of a statuette inside the suitcase with enough heroin to fix every junkie in the city for two weeks. For the first 20 minutes the film pays lip service to their investigative efforts—badgering witnesses, gathering forensic evidence, submitting law-abiding citizens to the degrading ritual of a police lineup. It’s all pretty generic, although Guthrie’s sour, truculent persona proves entertaining, and there’s some fun to be had watching Quine’s bulldog suspicion of Philip Dressler (Raymond Bailey), an Opera House functionary whose stolen bag contained the illicit drugs. Never mind that Dressler is innocent; Quine looks as if he’d like nothing better than to take him behind closed doors and beat a confession out of him. The hulking cop also delivers some sardonic one-liners. When Dressler says it’s unfortunate they have to meet under such awful circumstances, Quine quips: “We meet a lot of people under unpleasant circumstances, Mr. Dressler.”

The requisite police procedural scenes are further enlivened by Siegel’s knack for always knowing where to place the camera for visual impact and narrative clarity. Taking full advantage of Hal Mohr’s crisp, documentary-like cinematography, Siegel evokes San Francisco’s unique character through such locations as the Embarcadero, Mission Rock Terminal, the War Memorial Opera House, Land’s End and many others. He even manages to imbue the obligatory lineup sequence with a sense of the mistrust and antagonism that exists between suspects squirming under the bright lights and police detectives coolly observing them from the darkness.

Unlike the TV series, the film eventually eschews interest in the cops and focuses instead on Dancer, Julian and their wheelman as they attempt to retrieve the heroin from the unsuspecting drug mules: a merchant seaman, a rich businessman and a single mother with a young daughter. Things go according to plan at first, abetted by Dancer’s readiness to test the ballistic qualities of his silencer-fitted revolver. But the final pickup proves more complicated, with one of the heroin packets having disappeared, leaving Dancer and Julian with the unenviable task of convincing The Man they haven’t tried to cut themselves in on the action. By this time, Guthrie and Quine and a regiment of San Francisco’s finest have finally caught up with the team, leading to a blistering car chase through the city’s streets (a decade before the tire-shredding acrobatics in Bullitt) and a spectacular, existential denouement high atop an overpass of a deserted, unfinished freeway. 

An overconfident schemer tries to grab a piece of the action.

Dancer soon puts him straight.

Summary Judgment
The Lineup is, even for its time period, a remarkably aggressive crime thriller, a quality manifest in the extreme antipathy of Dancer and Julian for nearly everyone they encounter. Dancer in particular is one of the most unsettling criminals in fifties cinema, thanks to the barely restrained feral quality Wallach brought to his characterization. The actor was initially leery about the role—having debuted in the prestigious Baby Doll (1956) under Elia Kazan’s direction, he viewed The Lineup as an artistic comedown. During the filming, I wasn't happy, and he [Siegel] sensed it," Wallach wrote in his autobiography. I felt I'd made a Faustian deal. I was compromising. The money seemed more important than the challenge of acting in a worthwhile project." 

But Wallach soon entered into the spirit of the film once he realized the complexity and creative possibilities of his character. What makes Dancer so compelling are the unresolved tensions in his basic makeup: His quest for personal and professional growth is compromised by a hair-trigger temper that frequently precipitates rash behavior. Even at his most controlled, the slightly crazed gleam in his eye bespeaks an unbalanced id. More interesting perhaps is the palpable insecurity in Dancer that constantly gnaws at him. He seems to realize that he hasn’t yet risen to the top of his profession, that he’s still reliant upon the sage counsel and calming influence of his father figure/mentor Julian. This dynamic is hinted at early on when Dancer is asked by one of The Man’s emissaries what makes him tick. “I had an old man once,” Dancer replies tersely. “Well, most people do,” the contact responds, uncomprehending. “I never met mine,” Dancer snaps, and strides away. The short, revealing exchange is pure Silliphant.

Played by venerable character actor Robert Keith, Julian is a smoother, more stable personality than his partner. His respectable façade notwithstanding, there’s something unpleasant in his appearance and manner, something ghoulish and cadaverous, like a creepy uncle at a family reunion. While not a killer himself, Julian in some ways is even more twisted than Dancer. He takes perverse enjoyment in each of Dancer’s hits, recording them in a little black book for some kind of sick posterity. He’s also a deep-dyed misogynist. While this regressively masculine trait was far from unusual in the fifties, Julian’s readiness to rudely foist his views on members of the fairer sex was. To add further subversive subtext, his fussing over Dancer and the manner in which the two men bicker like a married couple suggests that their relationship may not be strictly platonic.

When diplomacy fails.

Dancer and Julian’s co-dependency allows no room for outsiders, even among the underworld fraternity. When their mob-appointed driver Sandy McLain (Richard Jaeckel) shows up, they greet him with hostile suspicion until he establishes his bona fides. Their attitude remains contemptuous, especially when they discover he has a drinking problem. McLain betrays his lack of professionalism by taking their criticism personally, like one ousted from a coveted social clique. His eagerness to earn their respect causes him to take chances behind the wheel that will have fateful consequences for all concerned. The character flaws of all three men contrast and collide in fascinatingly destructive fashion, both to themselves and others.

In addition to these caustic characterizations is an equally sharp aggression directed against the era’s conventional morality. This is expressed both in the screenplay and, more particularly, in the direction, no surprise given the long list of antisocial protagonists in Siegel’s canon: Neville Brand’s ruthless convict in Riot in Cell Block 11, Mickey Rooney’s sociopathic gangster in Baby Face Nelson (1957), Lee Marvin’s terminator-like hit man in The Killers. Siegel himself was an avowed antisocial outcast, and his films were routinely critical of the creeping conformism of society, most pointedly in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). The criminal environment in his films was always more vibrant and compelling than the straight world, which was presented as drab, unimaginative, emotionally barren. Guthrie and Quine, representing the established order, slot neatly into this dull dynamic with their predictable, clichéd personas. Dancer and Julian, in contrast, are from another world—hipper, more liberated, more dangerously seductive. It’s interesting to speculate how audiences at the time perceived such dissident attitudes.

As always, Siegel’s moral subjectivism is never obtrusive, but deftly embedded in his staging and treatment. Dancer’s meeting with seaman Larry Warner to recover the first drug parcel takes place in the steam room of a men’s athletic club, a setting then notorious for same-sex liaisons. As Dancer turns up the steam, Warner says, “You like it thick, don’t you?” Dancer replies: “Who likes it thin?” For a moment it seems as if the scene could veer away from the business at hand into an uncharted direction, as the two men are nearly sitting in each other’s laps. Dancer seems amused, or aroused—or a combination of the two—by the situation. But when Warner, having discovered that the Tang Dynasty horse he purchased abroad contains real horse, attempts an ill-advised extortion, Dancer pulls out his piece and rewards the seaman with a decidedly unhappy ending.

Dancer violates Cindy’s doll in search of the missing heroin.

Even with children, Dancer goes very dark very quickly.

Siegel next conjures an unsettling home-invasion vibe during Dancer’s visit to the Pacific Heights abode of Mr. Sanders, whose new set of flatware, acquired in Bangkok, contains a fortune in H. Posing as an acquaintance, Dancer bluffs his way inside with thinly veiled malevolence and attempts to “borrow” the flatware under the disbelieving gaze of the butler. The latter quickly sees through his BS, but Dancer’s unspoken aggression is palpable and hypnotic, like a cobra facing its prey. Siegel plays out the suspense just long enough to elicit sympathy for the hapless servant, who manages too late to break the spell and yell out to his employer, underestimating the quickness of Dancer’s strike.

Siegel is at his most provocative when Dancer and Julian seek out single mother Dorothy Bradshaw and her daughter Cindy, who’ve brought back from Tokyo a porcelain doll stuffed with junk. Having trailed them to the Steinhart Aquarium, Dancer flirts with mom while “uncle” Julian picks up little Cindy to give her a better view of the archerfish tank. There’s something sinister in Julian's laughter as he shows the girl how the fish spit water into the air (with marksmanship rivaling Dancer’s) to bring down insects for their food. Unlike the Sanders’ butler, Dorothy Bradshaw doesn’t see through Dancer’s mask, and unwisely accepts his offer of a ride back to their hotel. 

Once there, Cindy shows her doll to Julian, who searches it in vain for the heroin. Dancer then grabs the doll and violently tears at its dress as Cindy starts bawling, then terrifies her into revealing that she powdered her doll’s face with the “powder.” Stunned at this revelation, Dancer automatically reaches for his gun to shoot mother and child on the spot. Julian intervenes—on practical rather than moral grounds—arguing that they’ll need mom’s testimony to convince The Man they aren’t holding out on him. Siegel knew the effect this sequence would have on filmgoers. “Of course, violating the doll, and with the child being in extreme jeopardy, means in a sense violating the child,” he told Peter Bogdanovich in Who the Devil Made It. Decades later, the sequence and its implications remain deeply disturbing.

None too pleased with Dancer’s failure, The Man pronounces his death sentence.

Dancer, predictably, doesn’t take it well.

The director’s dark humor also pervades the penultimate scene at Sutro’s Baths and Museum, where Dancer goes to meet The Man as Julian and McLain sit in the car with their kidnap victims. Dancer, nerves starting to fray, waits in the maritime exhibition gallery peering through seaview binoculars at the Pacific and trying to appear nonchalant as a group of schoolgirls bustle into the room. One of them—about the same age as the child he almost knocked off—asks for Dancer’s help with the binoculars. The scene goes further off the wall with the arrival of The Man, at first glance an innocuous-looking gent in a wheelchair, but who assumes a kind of supernatural aura as he listens in icy silence to Dancer’s ludicrous-sounding story. We’re almost in Harold Pinter territory, where the pauses between words are more menacing than actual speech. Siegel’s framing enhances the minatory mood—the underworld figures occupy the foreground while skaters glide across the ice rink two floors below, oblivious to the impending irruption of violence into their world. The Man’s lofty position also underscores the character’s godlike presence, which for Siegel represented the inflexibility of organized religion in the face of reason—another thematic depth charge lurking beneath the narrative surface.

The Man’s peremptory dismissal of Dancer, symbolically consigning him to the next world, proves injudiciously timed, triggering as it does the most spectacular wheelchair homicide since Richard Widmark pushed grandma down a staircase in Kiss of Death (1947). The subsequent high-speed pursuit through the streets of San Francisco provides an appropriate bookend to the vehicular manslaughter that opened the film. Despite the use of rear-projection, it’s an exhilarating sequence, thanks to its breakneck pace, rapid cutting, brilliant reaction shots and the mounting desperation of people hurtling toward unwelcome destiny. As McLain avoids police roadblocks and mother and child provide a soundtrack of screams, Julian scolds Dancer for wasting The Man. “Not him! Not after I told you what would happen to us.” Dancer, unraveling at speed, snarls in response: “Maybe you want to go back and look at what’s left of him on that ice. He pushed me too far! So I pushed him just far enough.”

The figurative cul-de-sac toward which the partners been heading assumes literal form on the then still-under-construction Embarcadero Freeway, thanks to the panicked reactions of their dipsomaniac driver, who nearly sends them into vehicular free fall before wedging the car into a lane with converging crash barriers. As the police close in, Dancer, his dark figure isolated against ribbons of empty concrete, makes a final crazed protest against fate, noting Julian’s last words (“No, Dancer, no!”) while terminating their association, leaving Dorothy and Cindy Bradshaw with permanently traumatized psyches and, finally, embarking on his own nihilistic plunge into the abyss.

Siegel’s subversive imagery evokes child endangerment to a startling degree.

Fingering the Fifties

• The famous Sutro’s Museum and ice rink was still standing in 1958, but was completely destroyed by fire just eight years later.

• The Embarcadero Freeway was unfinished at the time of filming. Damaged in the 1989 earthquake, it was taken down in 1991.

• San Francisco’s working class atmosphere, all but obliterated now by relentless gentrification. 

Quotable

DANCER: “Julian, you take this whole business about the subjunctive. I dunno...”

JULIAN: “All right, Dancer, all right, what’s so difficult about the subjunctive?”

DANCER: “Well, you take this for instance: ‘If I was you.’ You know? That’s all wrong. It says here, ‘If I were you.’ How far can you go with this special stuff?”

JULIAN: “It sets you up, Dancer, it sets you up. Remember that. How many characters you know hang around street corners can say, ‘If I were you.’ How many, huh?”

DOROTHY BRADSHAW [tearfully]: “What kind of men are you?”

JULIAN: “See, you cry. That’s why women have no place in society. Women are weak. Crying’s aggressive, and so is the law. Ordinary people of your class, you don’t understand the criminal’s need for violence.”

JULIAN: “Dancer is an addict, an addict with a real big habit.”
SANDY MCLAIN: “‘H’ like in heroin, huh?”
JULIAN: “‘H’ like in hate.”

SANDY MCLAIN: “I knew a guy like that once.”

JULIAN: "No, you didn’t. There’s never been a guy like Dancer. He’s a wonderful, pure pathological study. A psychopath with no inhibitions.”

THE MAN: “Nobody ever sees me. That’s gonna make you dead. Maybe you’ll make it to the airport, maybe you won’t. But your time is borrowed.”

DANCER: “He pushed me too far, so I pushed him just far enough!”

Innocence in harm’s way.

The abyss beckons.

Credits

Director: Don Siegel; writer: Stirling Silliphant; executive producer: Frank Cooper; producer: Jaime Del Valle; cinematography: Hal Mohr; editor: Albert Clark; music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff

Cast:

Eli Wallach (Dancer); Robert Keith (Julian); Richard Jaeckel (Sandy McLain); Mary LaRoche (Dorothy Bradshaw); Warner Anderson (Lt. Ben Guthrie); Emile Meyer (Insp. Al Quine); Raymond Bailey (Philip Dressler); William Leslie (Larry Warner); Vaughn Taylor (The Man); Cheryl Callaway (Cindy Bradshaw); Robert Bailey (Staples)