Don Siegel Was Tops Even Before "Dirty Harry"

zardoz-13

Long before "Thunderball" director Terence Young made his first-rate thriller about vicious drug dealers terrorizing blind, helpless Audrey Hepburn in her apartment after she brought back a doll stuffed with heroin in the 1967 Warner Brothers' release "Wait Until Dark," director Don Siegel made the minor league crime thriller "The Line Up" (1958) about American tourists returning from Hong Kong with souvenirs in their luggage that contain heroin. The catch is none of these unsuspecting tourists know that they are being used as mules by narcotics smugglers. Mind you, one of them is a sailor who knows that he has a ceramic horse filled with heroin. Anyway, the syndicate has hired a couple of out-of-town hoods, Dancer (Eli Wallach of "The Magnificent Seven") and Julian (Robert Keith of "The Wild One"), to retrieve the narcotics from the tourists without either arousing their suspicions or alerting the authorities. However, nothing goes according to plan, and our anti-heroic protagonists find themselves wading through hot water. Siegel makes great use of many authentic San Francisco landmarks (see other user comments) in this gritty, realistic, but modestly made melodrama. A gay subtext pervades this thriller. The two thugs behave like a teacher and his student, and a scene is set in a steam bath room in the Seamen's Club.

Two flat-foot San Francisco cops, Lt. Ben Guthrie (Warner Anderson of "Objective, Burma!") and Inspector Al Quine (Emile Meyers of "Paths of Glory"), investigate this puzzling case. The clues gradually fall together. Meanwhile, our chummy out-of-town thugs run into trouble at virtually every turn after they receive their instructions from a dockside informant in a trench coat. Dancer is a trigger-happy psychopath with little patience for his victims, and his older, level-headed partner Julian likes to record the last words of their victims. Unlike Dancer, Julian doesn't pack a pistol. Instead, he works at keeping Dancer in line. They have to track down three tourists and retrieve the heroin from them. "Dirty Harry" director Don Siegel does as good a job as can be expected from the contrived screenplay by advertising writer turned scenarist Stirling Silliphant who later wrote "The Towering Inferno" and received an Oscar for penning "In the Heat of the Night." Unfortunately, Silliphant didn't do enough research into firearms. The revolver that Dancer totes with a silencer is incredibly lame. Silencers cannot mute the discharge of a revolver because—unlike automatic weapons--revolvers have too many additional holes in them to vent the sound of the gun being charged. I guess that it looked good, but it isn't really practical as a weapon, but then why let a little misinformation ruin an atmospheric flick. Dancer invades a luxurious, upscale, San Francisco home and guns down a foreign butler to get the heroin stashed in a cutlery collection.

Later, they approach a ship worker who brought in a consignment of drugs. Predictably, he refuses to hand it over until he gets some more cash. This is the notorious scene where our lead antagonist lugs a revolver with a silencer into a steam bath and shoots the ship worker then recovers the junk. The toughest part for the villains comes when they have to locate a statue filled with heroin from a single mother and her daughter. Complications occur when Dancer and Julian learn that the daughter discovered the packet of dope wedged up into their exotic doll. The innocent little girl used the heroin to power her doll's face. Julian warns Dancer that they cannot come up light on their deliveries. At the rendezvous where Dancer is supposed to deliver the narcotics, Julian suggests that he wait for 'the man' (played by Vaughn Taylor of "The Professionals") to explain what happened. Julian doesn't like the idea that Dancer and he will become as hunted as their prey if they don't explain the shortage. Unfortunately, the Man isn't impressed with Dancer's story and calls him a dead man. An infuriated Dancer throws the Man—who pushes himself around in a wheelchair—off the second story at their rendezvous at a popular skating ring onto the ice. What distinguishes this brutal scene is the wheel chair guy strikes another guy on the skating rink below! You can see this when the crowd gathers around the two men. The scene is reminiscent of Henry Hathaway's thriller "Kiss of Death" where psychotic Richard Widmark pushes an old lady in a wheelchair to her death down a flight of stairs.

The chief flaw in "The Line Up" lies in its lack of closure concerning the show-stopping opening scene at San Francisco Airport. An upscale opera employee (Raymond Bailey, later of CBS-TV comedy series "The Beverly Hillbillies") watches a porter steal his luggage and cram it into a cab. The frantic cabbie peels out of the airport, runs down a cop who manages to get off a lucky shot that kills the driver. Later, Siegel establishes that the cabbie was a junkie. Richard Jaeckel turns in a memorable performance as a local hood with a drinking problem who serves as their wheel man. The climactic car chase through San Francisco qualifies as pretty hair-raising stuff considering how old this police procedural is and it may represent one of the earliest usages of an unfinished freeway by the villains to escape their pursuers. Interested film buffs should peruse author Stuart Kaminski's 1974 monograph "Don Siegel: Director" to learn more about the chase. Despite being in black & white, this thriller contains scenes where Dancer's wounded victims leak blood on their hands and in the carpet. "Bullets or Ballots" lenser Hal Mohr, who was a San Francisco native, composes some scenic shots of the City by the Bay. One of the coolest compositions occurs when Dancer guns down an Asian butler on a staircase. Dancer appears in the foreground shooting off screen at the butler who we see reflected in a mirror in the background as he charges up the stairs.

score 8/10

zardoz-13 16 June 2007

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw1675410/