An international drug-smuggling racket plants heroin on unsuspecting American tourists traveling from Asia, so that the dope can pass through customs undetected. A psychopathic killer, Dancer, led by his mentor Julian, and their driver McLain then collect the contraband. Lt. Ben Guthrie leads the police hunt for the criminals. The head of the heroin ring is a person known only as "The Man".
The story begins when an American tourist disembarking in San Francisco from a cruise ship returning from Hong Kong has his bag stolen by a porter, throwing the bag into a cab. As the cabbie takes off at high speed, he runs deadly on a police officer, still able to fire his gun at the fugitive. Cab driver is hit, crashes and dies. A police investigation discloses that the cab driver is a heroin addict, and attention is drawn to a heroin smuggling ring.
Dancer and Julian have instructions to retrieve the heroin from the unsuspecting tourists and deliver it to a drop point at Sutro's Museum (a real San Francisco location until it burned down in 1966) where the bag containing the heroin is to be left inside an antique ship's binnacle. Dancer and Julian are instructed by their contact, Staples, that they must make the drop and be gone before 4:05 pm. Dancer kills three people along the way (the porter, a seaman demanding his share, and a suspicious chinese servant, refusing to hand out a drug container). But when it turns out that two of the tourists—Dorothy Bradshaw and her young daughter, Cynthia—had unknowingly disposed of the heroin, Dancer and Julian are in a bind; if they drop off the bag with a large portion of the heroin missing, their lives may be in danger. Dancer and Julian decide that instead of leaving the bag and departing the premises by 4:05, Dancer will stay, meet The Man and explain why the shipment is short. Dancer and Julian kidnap Dorothy and Cynthia and bring them to Sutro's so they can back up the story. Dancer should meet The Man.
When Dancer meets The Man in the museum, it turns out that the mastermind is disabled and wheelchair-bound. Dancer explains himself, and The Man has an unexpected reaction; he tells Dancer that "nobody ever sees me," and that because Dancer has seen him, he "is dead". The Man slaps Dancer across the face with the bag of heroin and Dancer, enraged, pushes The Man off a balcony, killing him.
Meanwhile, the San Francisco police have spotted the getaway car with Julian, McLain, and the kidnapped Dorothy and Cynthia. When Dancer exits Sutro's, a high speed car chase ensues, filmed in the area of The Embarcadero. When the car becomes trapped at a barrier on the Embarcadero Freeway, Dancer first shoots his accomplice to death, holding the girl hostage, then tries to flee. He is shot by the police and falls down the bridge.
In the film, Warner Anderson and Marshall Reed reprise their roles as Lieutenant Ben Guthrie and Inspector Fred Asher from the TV series. However, Tom Tully's character, Inspector Matt Grebb, is replaced by Inspector Al Quine, played by Emile Meyer. Tully, the series co-star, was not in the film. Anderson, the series star, was given co-star billing instead of star billing; star billing was given to Wallach, who played the movie's main villain.
Reception
Variety's review called it a "moderately exciting melodrama" that spends too much time on the police procedural aspects.[1]Time Out described it as "more brutal, sadistic and threatening" than The Killers.[2]Dave Kehr of the Chicago Reader called it "a major B movie by one of Hollywood's most accomplished craftsmen".[3]
“Siegel gets at least one scene, in The Lineup, as sensitive as Robert Frank’s still shots. What is so lyrical about the ending, in San Francisco’s Sutro Museum, is the Japanese-print compositions, the late afternoon lighting, the advantage taken of the long hallways, multi-level stairways in a baroque, elegant, glass-palace building...It’s a minor masterpiece of preplanning and an extensively structured pictorial tour by Siegel...”—Film critic Manny Farber in Farber on Film (2009)[5]
Film critic Manny Farber comments on Siegel’s cinematic approach to The Lineup:
The Siegel touch is always apparent in the excessive number of viewpoint shots, the nice feeling for an eroded structure with awkward angles, and especially with the fascination with a somewhat mannered athleticism seen from above, in which a body is poised or moving against background action that is a violent contrast in space, tone and movement.[6]
Farber notes Siegel’s “sad reliance on edgy Broadway acting” in particular “Eli Wallach overworking his nervous leering eyes.”[7] Biographer Judith M. Kass observes that The Line-up “embodies all the characteristics” informing Siegel’s assessment of the “normal” world.[8] Kass writes:
“The ‘normal’ world—the terrain Siegel usually works in—is depicted as not at all normal...the characters are counterpoised against an environment which is as deranged as they are. The straight world is as phony, dishonest and evil as the criminal’s, without the one qualification which may be an improvement on the normal: they [the criminals] are honest about their lawlessness...”[9]
In popular culture
The film contains the line, "When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty," of which Jonathan Lethem writes that "Bob Dylan heard it…, cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into 'Absolutely Sweet Marie'" (as "To live outside the law you must be honest.").[10]
