Siegel's most successful films express the doomed peculiarity of the antisocial outcast. ... the final car chase in The Line-Up and the final shoot-up in Madigan are among the most stunning displays of action montage in the history of American cinema.
--Andrew Sarris
Like many of the great directors of the classical era Don Siegel worked his way up, eventually doing montage (small editing jobs) on Warner Brothers films --including Casablanca --before he started directing. Most of his movies were low-key efforts done under the radar, often between television jobs. He got the job directing The Line-Up because he had done the pilot for the TV series, which ran on CBS from 1953 to 1960.
The Line-Up movie has an impressive script by veteran Sterling Silliphant and excellent location (San Francisco) cinematography by Hal Mohr, who worked with Sam Fuller and Fritz Lang, among many others. The film comes at the end of the film noir cycle, bringing the genre out of the physical night and darkness (the film takes place entirely in the daylight) into the psychological darkness of Dancer, played by Eli Wallach as a subtle and ingratiating psychotic. Dancer's job is to retrieve the heroin inadvertently smuggled in by unsuspecting steamship travelers from Hong Kong, who thought they had simply gotten a good deal on some Chinese art. Dancer and his partner, played by Robert Keith, have something of a homoerotic relationship, with Keith even at one point saying "women have no place in society" because they are too weak.
Siegel made one of his best films, Madigan, in 1968 before he teamed up with Clint Eastwood and eventually lost his way. American films began to require bigger budgets and bigger stars and the relatively modest virtues and craftsmanship of a film such as The Line-Up have mainly survived on TV, if they have survived at all.
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