The Lineup

The first 20 or so minutes of Don Siegel’s The Lineup is pretty standard Dragnet-style procedural fare with monotone police officers discussing the trend of oblivious ship passengers unknowingly smuggling in heroin from Asia, but the moment Eli Wallach appears on screen, the film comes wildly alive. Wallach plays Dancer, a psychotic hit man hired to collect the drugs and eliminate certain characters along the way; he’s flanked by Julian (Robert Keith), his fey, adoring partner whose obsession with Dancer’s psychopathic greatness (“If he continues to listen to me, he’ll be the best”) seems to have a sexual flavor, and dipsomaniac driver Sandy (Richard Jaeckel) who needs booze to drive. Based on a CBS television series that ran for much of the 50’s, The Lineup makes effective use of unusual settings: a marine life aquarium, a roller-skating rink, a museum arcade, and a steam room, in which Dancer fatally shoots a man using a silencer. Even by noir standards, the film is violent: a wheelchair-bound man is pushed off a platform, a little girl is used as a human shield, a manservant is shot in the back as reflected in a mirror, and the climax features one of the most satisfying fatal falls of the cycle, the body smacking concrete no fewer than three times on the way down.