New Print!

Many 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 what 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. 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's 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, like the little girl in this film who powders her dollie's face with heroin, or Gloria Grahame in The Big Heat (or any other film), becomes witness to this war - well, he or she must be extinguished. (JB)