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Don't listen to the negative reviews

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Also love all the characters that show up on tv, in years to come Mr Drexler is Mr Drysedale on Beverly Hillbilly's As a car guy, great selection of cool 50's cars JT: Orlando

With its emphasis on realism, action that takes place in the daylight and location work, this crime thriller bears all the hallmarks of a docu-noir and the "police procedural" style of its opening scenes reinforces this impression. The movie begins with some fast action and a couple of fatalities which are soon found to be linked to the activities of an international drug-smuggling operation.At San Francisco's Pier 41, a ship's porter suddenly snatches a passenger's bag and throws it into the back of a waiting taxicab which drives off at great speed and runs down a police officer. The cab driver, who is shot by the dying cop, then dies at the wheel and his vehicle comes to a sudden halt when it collides with a steel-fence barrier. Detective Lieutenant Ben Guthrie (Warren Anderson) and his partner, Inspector Al Quine (Emile Meyer), discover that heroin had been concealed in a statuette that was being carried in the stolen bag and so question its owner. From their investigations, it soon becomes clear that unsuspecting tourists are being used to smuggle heroin into the United States from the Far East and that later, members of the criminal organisation are being used to recover the drugs from the innocent mules.After the financial loss incurred by the fiasco at Pier 41, the smugglers bring in a couple of hit-men from Miami to ensure that the next three consignments are collected promptly and efficiently. Dancer (Eli Wallach) a volatile psychopath who travels to San Francisco with his mentor, Julian (Robert Keith), makes his first two collections without too much trouble (despite having to kill two people in the process). The third collection involves a woman called Dorothy Bradshaw (Mary LaRoche) who had just arrived back in the U.S. with her daughter Cindy (Cheryl Callaway). The heroin in this case had been hidden in the little girl's Japanese doll, but when the inside of the doll is checked, it's found to be empty. It subsequently comes to light that Cindy had found the packet inside the doll and assuming that it was make-up, had powdered the doll's face with it. Julian persuades Dancer not to kill Dorothy and Cindy because they can be used to convince their employer that they weren't responsible for the loss of the valuable consignment.Having kidnapped Dorothy and Cindy, the two hit-men make their way to Sutro's museum where they're due to drop off the drugs at a pre-arranged location for subsequent collection by their crime boss who's known simply as "The Man" (Vaughn Taylor). Dancer, in a departure from the instructions he was given, waits to meet "The Man" who is completely uninterested in listening to any explanations for the non-delivery of part of the heroin consignment and this leads to a shocking incident before Dancer leaves the building and then immediately finds himself in a frantic car chase as he, Julian, Dorothy, Cindy and their wheel-man Sandy McLain (Richard Jaeckel) are all pursued at high speed by the cops who have finally tracked them down."The Lineup" contains a surprising number of memorable scenes. Examples of this are the ways in which three of the killings are staged as two involve victims who fall spectacularly to their deaths and another involves a servant who tries to escape a hit-man by running up a flight of stairs. When the shooting takes place, the hit-man is seen at ground-level and simultaneously, the reflection of his victim is seen one floor higher. Impressively and despite the distance between them, both men are captured in the same shot by courtesy of a strategically-placed wall mirror.The meeting involving Dancer and "The Man" provides another standout sequence which gets incredibly tense when the violent thug (Dancer) starts to feel tremendously threatened by the wheelchair-bound crime boss and of course, the car chase that brings the movie to its climax is exciting, well-choreographed and illuminated by some special moments (e.g. when the criminals narrowly avoid a fall of about 50 feet when their car unexpectedly reaches the end of an unfinished, elevated highway).There's a sharp distinction between the cops and the criminals in this movie because the detectives are rather grim-looking and world-weary whereas the criminals (especially Dancer and Julian) are full of eccentricities that make them far more interesting to watch. Predictably therefore, it's the performances of Robert Keith and especially Eli Wallach that make the greatest impact and in so doing, add tremendous colour to this fine, fast-moving and violent thriller which must've been pretty edgy for the period in which it was made.

** This review may contain spoilers *** Awesome old film noir that boasts an impressive collection of bad guys (Richard Jaeckel as a dipsomaniacal wheelman, Eli Wallach as a psychopathic bagman enforcer). A mysterious heroin kingpin called "the man", Robert Keith as a vicious but intelligent mentor to Eli Wallach (Robert Keith, you'll know as Richard Kimble's father in "The Fugitive" and episodes of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents") he likes to write "last, or end quotes" from the people Eli Wallach murders in a little black book.), a suave trench coat wearing fingerman, and a couple of really dry and boring, but procedural, head cops.This is a "daytime" film noir. Eli Wallach is superb as a bad guy.Good locations as well in the San Francisco area, a city where I lived. The Veterans Building (opened in 1932) in the Civic Center Historic District, the Mark Hopkins Hotel (1926) on Nob Hill, Cliff House and Sutro Baths (swimming pool complex but ice skating rink in film, torn down), The Legion of Honor museum, the elevated double-decker Embarcadero Freeway (demolished after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake), the Seaman's Club (YMCA of San Francisco Building), Steinhart Aquarium (California Academy of Sciences - damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, torn down), De Young Museum (damaged in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, torn down), United States Customhouse, the Presidio, Golden Gate Bridge Highway and plenty of old docks and piers.Has some silly stuff like a cop in the Golden Gate Park picking out the car of bad guys based on the driver having a "tan", and a cop on the north end of Ocean Beach (Cliff House and Sutro Baths area) picking out the car of bad guys again, but still a wonderful film.

The Lineup immediately establishes a distinct, rich setting, evoking the senses with a crescendo that ends before becoming overbearing. The dramatic tension starts right off with the hatching of a significant situation. Interestingly, our protagonist does not show up for quite awhile. But when he shows up, it becomes all about him, and he gives the film a straightforward brutality. It begins as a police procedural and becomes a crime procedural, two pairs on opposite sides brushing against each other in a modernist abyss.Eli Wallach is very interesting here, more than in other, better films in which I've seen him. There's a perilous balance between living and dying that he brings to his vicious character, and an inventively allusive quality in Robert Keith, who plays his controlling mentor, who calls him "a wonderful, pure pathological study," and corrects his grammar. And it's all made clear through their present actions.This film is significant for its brutal plot, but what makes it surmount the average B movie is the oddly incendiary dialogue. And it's admirably fast-paced, almost reminiscent of modern filmmakers like Scorsese and Meirelles, Siegel himself having famously said of editing, "If you shake a movie, ten minutes will fall out." Everybody is a dedicated employee in a business, a wry joke appreciated by Don Siegel in a scrupulous study of the San Francisco topography. Siegel likes to move his camera forward down interior hallways. This takes place both in the opera house and the Seaman's Club. He also incorporates pans in the interior of buildings, in addition to exterior locations. His pans occasionally expose entire facets of frontages, which veer into view as he pans. These pans and tracks have a superb characteristic, as substantial, commanding vistas of structural design are shown.Familiar locales are unexpectedly odd, clubs viewed through thick sauna vapors, a silenced revolver wrapped in towel, panoplies of plane, surging panels surrounding a menacing pick-up. Siegel often coordinates his images into a progression of tight parallel zones that run from one side of the screen to the other. They create a succession of shrill matching streaks, continuing through the entire span of the panning of the camera, so that at any certain moment, the zone exists beyond the borders of the screen. Zone after zone will be coated into a shot. It makes for a dense, multifaceted image, with many diverse sorts of commotion in each. The zone can comprise characters or spectators, as in the early shots of the harbor. It can also contain various sorts of architecture or roadways.Upon the level streaks, Siegel establishes compelling verticals as well. These can be towers of buildings, masts of ships, poles or posts in front of buildings: Siegel loves such support structures on formal locations. They can also be recurring windows, telephone poles or trees.Wallach's hopeless defiant impulse segues into the big finale which strikes the pose of the engineered location of the semi-documentary pattern. It concerns a substantially unfinished highway. Siegel's body snatchers are not too alien this milieu, with its carnage and deadpan perversities, like a stash of heroin hidden inside a Japanese doll, and the gangster reaches under her dress for it. Moving in a pattern of tautness and burst, Don Siegel's unsentimental 1958 study of our lack in pure truth or legitimacy, the split but simultaneous world of merely skewed, comparative ideals in line with the disparities of our ailing social order.