THE LINEUP

I normally avoid finding out anything about a film I am going to watch.  So when I had finished this 1958 crime picture directed by Don Siegal I had a few unanswered questions.  

Why were the San Francisco police detectives so dull?  

Why was the SFPD shown in such a positive light that the film seemed like a promotional video?  

Why the title when the only line-up was shoehorned in and was completely irrelevant to the plot?

The answer to all these questions came courtesy (yet again) of Wikipedia. This film was a spinoff of a successful TV series, called 'The Lineup', so naturally the actors from the series get to play the same parts in the film (although that didn't happen in the case of 'Miami Vice'), and naturally there has to be a line-up.

So anyway the first half-hour or so is fairly oh hum as we follow the dull detectives getting to grips with a plot whereby tourists from the Far East are unwittingly smuggling drugs into the US.

Things only pick up when Dancer (played by Eli Wallach) jets in à la Tom Cruise in 'Collateral' to carry out a quick assignment:  track down three such tourists, recover the drugs and drop them off at a prearranged location.

If the assignment means killing a few innocent people along the way then so be it, Dancer is clearly a bit of a psycho.  He's accompanied by an older man, Julian, who is a kind of handler / father figure who is trying to smooth off some of Dancer's rough edges.  Their relationship is entertainingly odd  - for example, Julian likes to make a note of the last words said by each of Dancer's victims.

The assignment is going well (albeit a couple of people get killed) until we get to the third tourist, a woman with a young daughter.  Most inconveniently they have gone sightseeing at an aquarium.  Rather implausibly Dancer tracks them down, and then charms the woman sufficiently that he and Julian get taken back to her hotel room.

We then get a really funny moment when it turns out that the daughter has discovered the drugs (hidden inside an oriental statuette) and has used them as face powder for her dolls.

This creates a real problem for Dancer and Julian in that their employer (known as 'The Man') will automatically assume they have taken the drugs for themselves. 

Their solution is to take mother and child with them to the drop-off point to help argue their case.  It's a cunning plan with several flaws: the drop-off is in a very public place, Sutro's Museum, 'The Man' doesn't like to meet his employees, and the super-efficient SFPD are hot on their tails.

Inevitably Dancer and 'The Man' don't hit it off, with the latter getting killed (the fact that he's in a wheelchair puts him at something of a disadvantage), leading to a car chase, and then Dancer getting shot and falling to his death, but not before killing Julian.  Mother and child emerge safe and sound though maybe a bit traumatised.

The big surprise is that Dancer's chauffeur-for-the-day, a brash young guy who Dancer instantly dislikes, manages to survive the mayhem. 

Siegal does the best he can to keep the story lively, and provides some nice visuals in the museum.  In fact the film benefits greatly from the location shooting in San Francisco.  

But it may say something about the film (or about me) that the moment of greatest excitement was when I recognised the hotel where mother and child are staying as being the very same building that Madeleine emerges from in 'Vertigo' when Scottie starts trailing her (the Mark Hopkins Hotel according to Wikipedia).  

RATING: x Curb Your Enthusiasm