The Lineup

The
Lineup

Don Siegel's The Lineup is
an interesting noir with an unusual structure, starting with the cops
investigating the death of a cop during a drug smuggling ploy gone
wrong, then midway through making a pair of out-of-town killers the
protagonists instead. The film's opening seconds are a burst of sheer
adrenaline as a porter throws a piece of luggage into a cab, which
promptly speeds away, crashes into a truck, runs over a cop, and finally
crashes again, killing the driver. All this happens in a rush before
the film's title appears onscreen, but after this the story slows to a
crawl as inspectors Quine (Emile Meyer) and Asher (Marshall Reed) show
up to investigate the aftermath. Their plodding, careful investigation
never really kicks into gear: as passionate as they are about finding
out who's responsible for the death of a fellow officer, their efforts
reveal just how routine, how dull, real policework can be. There's a
sense that Siegel is trying to infuse a certain realism into his film,
capturing the forensics, the slow process of gathering evidence, the
frustrations of not having any leads. Even the titular lineup is a
disappointment, not to mention a red herring: their sole witness to the
incident, Dressler (Raymond Bailey), can't identify the porter who stole
his luggage, and the cops half-suspect that Dressler's not so innocent
anyway. Moreover, the porter soon winds up dead anyway; this story isn't
about him any more than it's about Dressler or the cops. Siegel shoots
these scenes with panache — the lineup itself, taking place on a
strikingly bright set, is visually compelling — but can't disguise the
fact that realism, at times, is kind of boring.

That's why it's
so thrilling when, without ceremony, Siegel discards the story of the
frustrated cops and instead switches focus to new arrivals Dancer (Eli
Wallach, in only his second feature film after his electric debut in Baby
Doll) and Julian (Robert Keith). They are quite an unusual pair.
Dancer is a sociopath, a killer who perhaps enjoys his job too much; he
sneers and delivers a chilly, unhinged stare that unnerves anyone who's
on the receiving end of it. Julian, in contrast, is an older man,
cultured and reserved, who keeps Dancer just barely reined in. He is, as
their wheelman Sandy (Richard Jaeckel) observes at one point, like a
"coach" to Dancer, encouraging him and making sure he doesn't go
overboard. He encourages Dancer to learn good grammar, too, saying that
it's the route to success. He seems to be of a literary bent himself: he
records the "famous last words" of Dancer's victims, gathering material
for a book, a psychological study of those facing death. Obviously,
these are two Hollywood bad guys, with stylized eccentricities and
exaggerated menace; their portrayals rub uncomfortably up against the
bland stolidness of the police in the earlier scenes. It's as though the
film really comes alive once they step onto the scene, trading weird
banter and radiating a nearly Lynchian menace; they would fit in
comfortably as a pair of outlandish thugs in one of Lynch's films.

After
these two killers are introduced, the film becomes about their attempts
to gather some drug shipments that had been placed in various
knick-knacks carried into the country by unsuspecting tourists. This is a
contrivance of the first degree, a needlessly convoluted plot that
provides the engine for Dancer and Julian's sinister shuttling around
town. They visit their marks in sequence, with Dancer calmly going about
the business of getting the drugs and killing anyone who gets in his
way. There's a casual brutality to Dancer's rounds that makes him a very
disconcerting figure, especially when juxtaposed against the
professorly Julian.


Each of these sequences is meticulously
designed. When Dancer goes to see a seaman (William Leslie) who
knowingly brought in the heroin, the two meet in a sauna where Dancer
turns up the steam so that he remains obscured, a shadowy silhouette
drifting through the fog. Later, he shoots a house servant while
stealing a set of flatware with heroin stored away in the handles, and
the shooting is captured in a mirror, the servant stiffening, his body
at an oblique angle to the diagonals of a stairway. Siegel has a sharp
sense of place and location that constantly informs the film, which uses
its San Francisco settings to dramatic effect. The characters are
continually framed in closeups with the scenery looming behind and below
them, hills and valleys majestically framing the characters. When Sandy
first appears at a remote hotel where Dancer and Julian are staying, he
is poised on the edge of a cliff leading down to a valley below, where
clusters of geometrically rigid buildings create patterns in the
background. As he walks up to the hotel, the pillars outside the rooms
divide the background into slim rectangular sections receding into the
distance. Siegel has a keen eye for such geometric patterns and
divisions, like a window that segments the San Francisco skyline into
semicircles and polygons as two cops discuss their case.

The
final car chase is another perfect example. It's a thrilling sequence
that relies on the geography of the terrain, particularly a highway
under construction where the criminals, confused by their circular turns
and the road blocks erected in their path, are forced to flee. The
final showdown takes place on this road that ends literally in midair,
overlooking a massive drop, and then in a narrow cul-de-sac where Siegel
plays with perspective: at first the road looks like an entry to a
freeway and a clean getaway, but then the path narrows down to a point
and it's revealed as a dead end. Scenes like this, where the raging
insanity of Dancer plays off of Siegel's fascinating visuals, make the
film worthwhile far beyond its rather ramshackle plot and uneven pacing.
At times, the script falters and plods. It is front-loaded with some
dull and preachy speeches obviously designed to teach the public about
the horrors of drug use and drug smuggling, and its psychological
characterizations of Dancer are sometimes far too on-the-nose. At one
point, when someone asks him what makes him "tick," he responds,
apparently without irony, that he never knew his father, a pat
explanation that hardly accounts for the psychosis in his character.

Maybe
that's the point. Wallach's performance as Dancer is startling in its
intensity and brutality, his eyes flashing with lunacy. It's a truly
unhinged performance, one that makes a mockery of the script's periodic
stabs at psychological profiling. Dancer's confrontation with the
mysterious criminal leader known only as "The Man" (Vaughn Taylor)
reveals what happens when Dancer slips off his leash, when he can no
longer control his violence or his rage. When The Man, a quietly creepy
figure in a wheelchair, refuses to give Dancer the validation he asks
for, and instead gently insists that Dancer is now a dead man, the
killer can't control himself, can't hold back the rage constantly
boiling beneath the surface. Siegel subtly encloses Wallach's
performance within the film's hard lines and rigid separations between
foreground and background, suggesting that Dancer is raging and fighting
against the entire world, against the bounds of society. There is no
better metaphor, then, than that climactic sequence in which what had
seemed to be an open road closes down to an unpassable trap, closing off
all exit for the criminal who wishes to push his way outside of the
law. There is no way out from here, nothing left to say, and it's
appropriate that Siegel doesn't have anything more to say either: the
cops leave the scene afterward in silence as the camera pans away to
take in the skyline in the background.