The Lineup

Director: Don Siegel

1958 / 86min / 35mm

Two decades before he hit the Bay Area with Clint Eastwood in Dirty Harry, Siegel made another shot-on-location chef-d’oeuvre of San Francisco crime cinema, a tough, tense, nasty little number about two hit men—gleeful psychopath Eli Wallach and effete, speechifying mentor Robert Keith—leaving a trail of bodies across the city… and the cops trying to catch up with them. A slow-burn tour de force that reaches dizzying heights with a bungled drug drop at Sutro’s Museum and a pedal-to-the-metal high-speed pursuit onto a then-incomplete Embarcadero Freeway, the whole shebang memorably described by Chicago Reader critic Dave Kehr as a “study in pathological relativism.”

Distributor: Sony Pictures Entertainment