Popular reviews

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★★

  Slick but tough crime thriller from Don Siegel focusing on a drug smuggling ring, whose modus operandi involves planting trinkets stuffed with heroin on unsuspecting tourists. The film gets off to a great start as the police begin to investigate a botched pickup. From there, our attention is split between the efforts of the police and a couple of houdlums on the trail of more hidden dope. The villains are brilliantly portrayed by Eli Wallach and Robert Keith. Their relationship is strange and unhinged - but it is Wallach's sociopathic Dancer character that really lifts the whole film. It's a great performance! He's such a dastardly baddie - it gives every scene he's in a real menacing undercurrent. The Lineup…

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  Review by sakana1 ★★★½ 10

  The Lineup is about 60% bland, formulaic police procedural, 40% strikingly original crime story, and 100% kickass San Francisco locations. Needless to say, the 40% that's interesting (well, that and the location stuff) makes sitting through the rest of it worth it.

  The crime, which is a worldwide drug smuggling ring, is less important than the people carrying it out, a network so broad and powerful that it appears to bring people from the opposite coast to California, simply to make pickups of smuggled heroin. And it's those contract players who matter here: Dancer (Eli Wallach) and Julian (Robert Keith), who fly into San Francisco when the film opens, and spend the rest of the rest of the day getting…

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  Review by RetroHound ★★★½ 6

  Great opening. This is about heroin smuggling by innocent travelers returning from the Orient, and the two guys (Eli Wallach and Robert Keith with Richard Jaeckel as the driver) assigned to retrieve said travelers of their statue or whatever it is hidden in. And the cops trying to find these guys.

  Don Siegel directs the heck out of this. Some great moving shots, lots of motion, and some great scenery of San Francisco. And it finishes with a great car chase.

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  Review by theironcupcake ★★★★ 4

  "When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty."

  A real humdinger of a pick for TCM's Noir Alley this weekend, the 87-minute crime drama The Lineup has many strengths to recommend it: fantastic performances by Eli Wallach and Robert Keith as a pair of psychopaths employed in an operation that sneaks Hong Kong heroin into San Francisco (inside dolls and other figurines like in the later Wait Until Dark), solid direction by Don Siegel in his pre-Eastwood era, veteran cameraman Hal Mohr filming the many Frisco locales with his expert eye and a pace that keeps the cops-and-smugglers tale running smoothly from start to finish. Less dynamic are the by-the-book detectives hunting these criminals down, Inspector Al…

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  Review by Channing Pomeroy ★★★★ 1

  This is an odd hybrid of a film. It feels like two different films braided together. A TV police procedural featuring a couple of earnest “just the facts, ma’m” detectives on the beat trying to catch a ring of heroin smugglers The second, a daylight Noir staring a suited pair of Proto-Tarantino crooks, Julian and Dancer.

  Julian (Robert Keith) is an unctuous uncle who’s gone a long way in this business without getting his hands dirty. It’s not hard, just make sure you show up on time and have a guy like Dancer around.

  Dancer (Eli Wallach in his only his 2nd film) is in Julian’s words “a wonderful, pure pathological study.” Dancer lives by a corollary to Bob Dylan’s…

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  Review by RanchoTuVu ★★★★★

  Don Siegel's tight direction weaves together a great assemblage of characters into a classic example of a crime-driven B movie, shot by Hal Mohr who kind of brings that connection to some of the Hollywood lore of the past practically even beyond the silent era to this riveting masterpiece of slow-burn intensity. There are a couple of lineups in here mostly under the supervision of Emile Meyer as one of the San Francisco detectives investigating an international heroin smuggling ring. He's just fucking great, too. "All right guys, you can all go now" "Let's bring in the next group". Steam room hit with a silencer is pretty tasty violence plus Richard Jaeckel as the wheelman taking some shots out of…

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  Review by Xebeche ★★★★ 1

  Pitch black noir with traces of Mann and Mamet. While it may be imperfect, The Lineup is a pretty sublime prototype for next gen crime thrillers. Don Seigel had such an early lead on grim pictures that it's no wonder he transitioned so gracefully into the 1970's. His catalogue, front and back, is full of rewards.

  I was totally game for the swift-moving procedural with our two morbid police detectives, but the film gets hijacked by the assassins. Eli Wallach and Robert Keith come to town and The Lineup undergoes a radical shift in perspective. I've never seen such a blatant narrative hand-off outside of "interwoven" crime films like Pulp Fiction. The cops are cunning, but Wallach and Keith are…

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  Review by noir1946 ★★★½

  “He pushed me too far!”

  The Lineup, a popular San Francisco-set 1954-1960 TV series, became one of the first shows to have a big-screen counterpart with Don Siegel’s 1958 film version. The result is somewhat frustrating with good and less good components at war with each other.

  The Lineup gets off to a rip-roaring start with a high-energy action sequence, featuring a shootout, before the credits even appear. Afterward, it flags considerably with a half-hour or so of a somewhat sluggish police procedural before introducing the villain, the ironically named Dancer (Eli Wallach). Once Dancer finally appears, things improve considerably thanks to Wallach’s performance in only his second film. Dancer is a psycho with a difference, taking time out during…

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  Review by Carlos Valladares ★★★★½

  Go beyond the plot (as always, surely, but especially here) and you have one of the vilest, most violently beautiful films about self-preservation that the '50s gave us. Hitchcock had to gum up his 1958 San Francisco with garish, vertiginous colors and creepy allegory; Siegel pares down the same 1958 city to a series of death drives, the drivers hollow destroyers who come to represent the truth about our need to survive against any sense of unity, and some pretty unforgettable, bizarre forms: a Japanese doll with heroin as makeup, nuns and their Madelines cutting loathsome-cute silhouettes in an indoor amusement park (the Sutro Baths), spitting fish in an aquarium, sadistic lines set in a distilled deadpan like “Women have…

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  Review by Geoffrey Broomer ★★★½ 1

  Eight years after its radio debut, and two years before its successful television run drew to a close, police procedural The Lineup was brought to the big screen by action maverick Don Siegel. Series stars Warner Anderson and Marshall Reed investigate a homicide that sees them stumble across a drug smuggling outfit. Beverly Hillbillies' Mr. Drysdale (Raymond Bailey) IS drug mule #1 - but before the television vibes can get too strong we abandon our small screen heroes to focus on the villains of the piece. With heroine smuggled into the states on unsuspecting tourists two sociopaths are contracted to collect, the hands on Eli Wallach and hands off Robert Keith. Their misadventures are aided by Richard Jaeckel as their…

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  Review by Will Sloan ★★★★

  What an experience seeing Eli Wallach’s face on Blu-Ray - every pore perfectly visible.

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  Review by James ★★★★

  "When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty."

  Cracking late-era noir, you can really appreciate the blatant disregard for the production code, which was thankfully loosening up by this point.

  This is an early film by Don Siegel and for my money it's genuinely one of his best - both a pitch black crime thriller and a satisfying police procedural, it's a brilliant example of dual storytelling and use of real locations with imaginative staging. The sweeping cinematography is stellar and Siegel's direction propulsive and energetic, the photogenic San Francisco and surrounding coastline becomes a criminal hotbed filled with psychopathic killers, drug paraphernalia and smuggling rings. The two police officers are dry and forgettable in what is…