Dirty Eli

The Lineup (1958) is a police procedural that’s about as brutal as they come - also full of beautiful old San Francisco locations.

It starts on the docks. A porter takes a suitcase off the top of a luggage cart and tosses it into a cab, which speeds off. The cab knocks over a policeman and finally  crashes. The policeman is dead. They call in Homicide.

When they check out the luggage, they find some heroin in a statue. They brace the businessman who owned the luggage, but he seemed to know nothing about it. Maybe he’s involved, but maybe he was an unwitting accomplice.

We then meet the crooks: Eli Wallace plays Dancer, a nerveless psychopath. Julian (Robert Keith, Brian Keith’s dad) is his older mentor and handler. Richard Jaeckel is their driver and contact to The Man. The caper is: Several tourists have unknowingly brought heroin into the country. Dancer will have to recover it. It is to be delivered to the Sutro Museum no later than 4:05 PM. Dancer recovers two of the bindles - killing someone every time. But when he gets to Mary LaRoche and her daughter, he discovers that the dope is gone. The girl thought it was face powder for her doll and it all blew away. So they take the mother and daughter hostage - so they can tell The Man what happened.

Eli Wallace is terrifying in this, like Richard Widmark in Kiss of Death. The mother and daughter don’t get kidnapped until about half way through, but by that time you know he’s a killer. It’s pretty tense stuff.

Of course, it’s all filmed on location in San Francisco - the San Francisco of the later 50s. We see Pier 39, the old Aquarium and DeYoung Museum, the Sutro Baths, now a museum and ice skating rink. Russian Hill, Nob Hill, and the Mark Hopkins. Even the Embarcadero Freeway, under construction. But even that’s tense, because the bad guys just about drive off the end.

There isn’t much of a lineup - it turns out this is based on a TV series, The Lineup, so they had to include it. Director Don Siegel (Dirty Harry) worked on the show, but here he wanted to dump the police procedural and concentrate on the crooks. Which he sort of does - the cops are a mile behind all the way.