"Crime's aggressive, and so is the law."

jzappa

The Lineup immediately establishes a distinct, rich setting, evoking the senses with a crescendo that ends before becoming overbearing. The dramatic tension starts right off with the hatching of a significant situation. Interestingly, our protagonist does not show up for quite awhile. But when he shows up, it becomes all about him, and he gives the film a straightforward brutality. It begins as a police procedural and becomes a crime procedural, two pairs on opposite sides brushing against each other in a modernist abyss.

Eli Wallach is very interesting here, more than in other, better films in which I've seen him. There's a perilous balance between living and dying that he brings to his vicious character, and an inventively allusive quality in Robert Keith, who plays his controlling mentor, who calls him "a wonderful, pure pathological study," and corrects his grammar. And it's all made clear through their present actions.

This film is significant for its brutal plot, but what makes it surmount the average B movie is the oddly incendiary dialogue. And it's admirably fast-paced, almost reminiscent of modern filmmakers like Scorsese and Meirelles, Siegel himself having famously said of editing, "If you shake a movie, ten minutes will fall out." Everybody is a dedicated employee in a business, a wry joke appreciated by Don Siegel in a scrupulous study of the San Francisco topography. Siegel likes to move his camera forward down interior hallways. This takes place both in the opera house and the Seaman's Club. He also incorporates pans in the interior of buildings, in addition to exterior locations. His pans occasionally expose entire facets of frontages, which veer into view as he pans. These pans and tracks have a superb characteristic, as substantial, commanding vistas of structural design are shown.

Familiar locales are unexpectedly odd, clubs viewed through thick sauna vapors, a silenced revolver wrapped in towel, panoplies of plane, surging panels surrounding a menacing pick-up. Siegel often coordinates his images into a progression of tight parallel zones that run from one side of the screen to the other. They create a succession of shrill matching streaks, continuing through the entire span of the panning of the camera, so that at any certain moment, the zone exists beyond the borders of the screen. Zone after zone will be coated into a shot. It makes for a dense, multifaceted image, with many diverse sorts of commotion in each. The zone can comprise characters or spectators, as in the early shots of the harbor. It can also contain various sorts of architecture or roadways.

Upon the level streaks, Siegel establishes compelling verticals as well. These can be towers of buildings, masts of ships, poles or posts in front of buildings: Siegel loves such support structures on formal locations. They can also be recurring windows, telephone poles or trees.

Wallach's hopeless defiant impulse segues into the big finale which strikes the pose of the engineered location of the semi-documentary pattern. It concerns a substantially unfinished highway. Siegel's body snatchers are not too alien this milieu, with its carnage and deadpan perversities, like a stash of heroin hidden inside a Japanese doll, and the gangster reaches under her dress for it. Moving in a pattern of tautness and burst, Don Siegel's unsentimental 1958 study of our lack in pure truth or legitimacy, the split but simultaneous world of merely skewed, comparative ideals in line with the disparities of our ailing social order.

score 8/10

jzappa 17 October 2010

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2325357/