Many of the late fifties' noirs eschewed the shadows and rain-drenched streets of their urban sites for blinding daylight--the kind in which no one can hide. The Lineup is one of these, and one of the best, making inventive use of San Francisco locations well before this was fashionable, and building to a climax that is still considered by many to be the most exciting car chase ever filmed. The plot keeps time to a beat-the-clock dope bust involving drugs that have been unwittingly smuggled into the country by returning tourists. Eli Wallach stars as Dancer, a hired gun whose job it is to clean up for the cops who are always one step behind him. Dancer is the quintessential Siegel "anti-social outcast," to borrow Andrew Sarris' phrase; like Baby Face Nelson before him, Dirty Harry after him, he is a workaholic in his own particular field, a pure psychopath. Siegel joins Lang (and Fuller in Underworld U.S.A.) in suggesting that, within our society, there is a kind of bubble world where the syndicate and the cops battle to death in a never-ending war. If, as sometimes happens, an innocent becomes witness to this war, he or she must be extinguished. In The Lineup, a little lecture to the mother of a child who has just powdered her dollie's face with heroin is meant as a word to the wise: "Women have no place in (this) society. Women are weak. Crime is aggressive...and so is the law. You don't understand the criminal's need for violence."