The Beguiled (1971)

The Beguiled, directed by Don Siegel and starring Clint Eastwood, was released in 1971. It’s not at all what you might expect from either Siegel or Eastwood. It’s set during the American Civil War but it’s neither a western nor a war picture. It’s more of a gothic melodrama.

The setting is an estate in the South. Corporal John McBurney (Eastwood) is a Union soldier lying wounded and dying. He is found by a little girl named Amy. Amy cannot bear to leave him there. She drags him back home. Home for Amy is Miss Farnsworth’s school for girls.

(Geraldine Page) is horrified. He’s a Yankee. She wants to turn him over to the Confederate authorities so he will be sent to a prison camp. She is persuaded by the other ladies that she cannot possibly do that in his present condition. Miss Farnsworth and her girls decide to nurse him back to health.

All the men are off at the war. There are only women at Miss Farnsworth’s mansion now.

McBurney is a youngish good-looking very masculine man and as you might expect his presence sets feminine hearts a-flutter. Three of the women find his presence particularly disturbing. Martha Farnsworth is one. The second is young teacher Edwina. Edwina is still young but seems to be settling into a life as a dedicated spinster teacher. Until McBurney awakens her female emotions. The third is one of the pupils, Carol (Jo Ann Harris). Carol is man-crazy. Tensions rise and jealousies begin to fester.

McBurney is in a bad way and he’s helpless. The women’s suspicions of him start to subside. Romantic complications ensue with Miss Farnsworth, with Edwina and with Carol. Suspicions flare up again. Jealousies blaze ever more brightly.

And then the movie takes a perverse turn and becomes steadily more perverse. There are dangerous games being played here and they get way out of control.

One of the pleasing things about his movie is that it resists the temptation to bludgeon the viewer with political messaging. The women are all Southerners. Some are kind and selfless. Some are spoilt and selfish. Some are embittered by life. In other words, people are the same everywhere - some are good, some are bad, most are in-between. There’s a very mild anti-war message to the extent that war makes people afraid and brutalises them. McBurney assumes that household slave Hallie (Mae Mercer) will welcome him as a deliverer but she doesn’t. She likes him but she insists that he’s no more free than she is. That seems to be one of this film’s major themes. We’re all prisoners. McBurney wasn’t free when he was a soldier. Now he’s literally a prisoner of these women. And the women are prisoners of their fears and desires, and in the case of Edwina and Miss Farnsworth, of their pasts.

The Civil War setting is irrelevant, aside from the fact that it provides a convenient explanation for this being an entirely female household with not even a male servant, it explains why outsiders are shunned, it explains why the women must keep McBurney’s presence a secret and why he cannot risk leaving. Any wartime setting would have worked just as well.

There’s plenty of complexity to these characters. Martha Farnsworth is a hard woman with a bitterness stemming from her past but underneath there’s still some humanity.

We’re told that McBurney is a Quaker and was a medic with his regiment, and that therefore he has never actually borne arms against the Confederacy. He doesn’t seem the slightest bit like a Quaker. He’s a nice guy but we wonder how truthful and trustworthy he is. He seems keen to seduce Edwina. He seems keen to seduce Carol as well. And maybe Martha, given half a chance. For a godly Quaker he sure does like chasing skirt.

There are fascinating power dynamics that have nothing to do with gender. The power shifts are caused by circumstances and because the various characters have their own psychological reasons for either gaining in self-confidence and power, or losing self-confidence and power.

It’s interesting to compare Eastwood’s excellent performance here to his equally excellent performance in Play Misty For Me in the same year. In both cases he plays a man brimming with self-confidence and convinced that he knows how to handle women. In both cases he finds out that he’s wrong. He is in fact hopelessly out of his depth and confronted with women who do not behave the way he expects them to.

This is a movie with no political axe to grind. It’s a story of loyalty and betrayal, deceit and manipulation, and jealousy. It certainly does deal with female sexual desire and emotional longing but there’s no political aspect to it. These are just complex people driven by contradictory emotions. Miss Farnsworth and Edwina are desperate for love but confused as to what to do about it. Carol just wants to get laid.

These are not particularly admirable people but mostly they have reasons for their actions.

What I love is that there is so much ambiguity and the fact that the ambiguities remain unresolved is a strength. We never find out exactly what McBurney’s story is. We don’t know what his intentions are because he doesn’t know - he’s just playing it by ear. There’s a very slight hint of an attraction between Miss Farnsworth and Edwina but the two women may not even be aware of it. They’re both desperate for love, and for sex, but they don’t understand their own motivations clearly. Amy’s feelings toward McBurney are confused.

This was a labour of love for both Don Siegel and Clint Eastwood. Eastwood read the source novel, became obsessed by it and gave it to Siegel to read. Siegel became equally obsessed. This was a movie they just had to make. They were both very proud of it. It was a box-office flop. Siegel felt very strongly that Universal spectacularly mishandled its release. To the extent that Universal promoted it at all they promoted it as a shoot ‘em up Clint Eastwood action war picture which was bizarrely inappropriate.

It has a certain gothic look and ambience. So many candlelight scenes, and a sense of gothic doom.

The Beguiled is an excellent complex, subtle, multi-layered film. Very highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray offers an excellent transfer and there are quite a few extras.

Charley Varrick (1973)

Charley Varrick certainly sounds promising. It was produced and directed by Don Siegel which is a very good start. And it was co-written by Howard Rodman, who also co-wrote the excellent Madigan for Siegel. Rodman’s achievements in television are second to none. He was story editor on Naked City and Route 66 and created one of the best-ever TV private eye series, Harry O. So does Charley Varrick live up to its promise? The short answer is, yes it does.

Charley Varrick is a somewhat battered crop-duster pilot. Earning a living crop-dusting became almost impossible - independents like Charley couldn’t compete with the big combines. Charley started to supplement his earnings by robbing banks, on a small scale.

His latest robbery, of a bank in Tres Cruces in New Mexico, looked easy but didn’t go so smoothly, with a trail of corpses left in its wake. That’s not the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that the robbery netted three-quarters of a million dollars. That was just not possible. A small local bank in a one-horse town in New Mexico would never have even a tenth of that amount of money on hand. Something is wrong. Charley thinks he knows what it is. He is pretty sure that he has inadvertently stolen Mob money. If he and his partner lie low for a while the police will eventually give up the chase. But not the Mob. If you steal money from the Mob they will pursue you to the ends of the Earth even if it takes years.

Charley’s partner Harman Sullivan (Andy Robinson) worries Charley as well. Charley knows that it will not be safe to spend any of the money for at least three or four years. Harman wants to spend his share right away. Harman isn’t interested in listening to Charley’s advice - he’s a young punk and he thinks Charley is a broken-down old man who has lost his nerve.

Charley is not the only one with troubles. Maynard Boyle (John Vernon) is really worried. He’s a fairly senior Mafia guy and he’s one of only two people who knew that all that Mafia money was sitting in that bank in Tres Cruces. He knows his superiors will suspect that it was an inside job, and he knows they’re going to suspect him. He’s going to have to act fast to get that money back. He dispatches hitman Molly (Joe Don Baker) to take care of this.

Charley meanwhile is giving the whole situation a lot of thought. He thinks he may have a plan that will allow him to keep the money and stay alive.

We don’t really think Charley is going to get away with it but we admire him for trying and maybe he’ll get lucky. To find out whether he does get away with it you’ll have to watch the movie.

I had never ever seen this movie until now. The poster and the fact that the star is Walter Matthau gave me the idea that it was going to be a lighthearted semi-comic romp. In fact there’s nothing lighthearted about this movie. It’s a rollercoaster of an action movie and it’s pretty dark.

The action scene with the crop-dusting biplane is inspired. There’s plenty of suspense and Siegel keeps things humming along at a brisk pace.

Matthau proves to be excellent in a rare serious role (the only other such role in which I can recall seeing him is in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three and he’s excellent in that one as well). John Vernon is very good as always. Joe Don Baker adds major creepiness as the brutal Molly.

Kino Lorber as usual have provided a very good 16:9 enhanced transfer and as usual they’ve loaded with disc with entirely worthless extras. I bailed out of Toby Roan’s audio commentary after fifteen minutes when it became clear that he was just going to continue reading out every bit player’s screen credits from the IMDb. The making-of documentary is also very dreary.

Charley Varrick is top-notch entertainment with plenty of excitement and an unlikely hero we can’t help liking. Don Siegel was on a roll at the time, having made Dirty Harry a couple of years earlier. A few years after Charley Varrick he would make the superb spy thriller Telefon.

Charley Varrick is highly recommended.

Madigan (1968)

Don Siegel’s 1968 cop thriller Madigan has most of the strengths one associates with the director but it’s also an intriguingly schizophrenic film.

It was based on a 1962 book called The Commissioner, which as its title suggests dealt mainly with a police commissioner. For the movie the decision was made to add a new character, Detective Daniel Madigan, and to shift the focus to this new character.

Commissioner Anthony X. Russell (Henry Fonda) is very much a do-it-by-the-book sort of cop, scrupulously honest to an almost pathological degree and a great believer in the idea that police officers have to maintain the highest possible standards of ethics. 

Detective Daniel Madigan (Richard Widmark) is a very different sort of cop. Madigan doesn’t even know there is a book to go by and even if he did know he wouldn’t read it. He’s a street cop. Everything he knows about being a cop he’s learnt on the streets. Madigan has rather flexible ethics. He’s quite happy to accept freebies and in fact can see no problem if people want to do favours for cops. That’s the sort of behaviour that Commissioner Russell instinctively mistrusts - he sees it as dangerously close to corruption. Madigan doesn’t see it that way. He knows where to draw the line. He would never actually act corruptly but he can’t see any reason why a cop needs to be obsessive about such things.

Commissioner Russell used to be Madigan’s captain back in the days when Madigan was a rookie detective. There has always been tension between the two men, based on their wildly different attitudes and personalities.

Chief Inspector Charles Kane (James Whitmore) is Russell’s oldest and closest friend, but Kane has become involved in some dealings that could be interpreted as unethical.

Detective Rocco Bonaro (Harry Guardino) is Madigan’s partner.

The structure of the movie is rather interesting. There is a central plot but it’s not very important. Mostly the movie simply takes a look at a few days in the lives of four very different New York cops, following them though both professional and personal crises. These crises are really just everyday life to a policeman. The interest comes from seeing how four very different men approach the job and how they try to juggle the life of a cop with some sort of personal life.

All four men are, despite their radical differences in temperament and style, good cops. They represent different ideas of what it means to be a good cop and the differences between their ideas lead to inevitable clashes.

As for the main plot, it concerns a hoodlum named Barney Benesch (Steve Ihnat). Benesch is a dangerously unstable and violent individual and the problems start when Madigan and Bonaro try to pick him up and he escapes from custody in circumstances which are rather embarrassing to the two harassed detectives. They thought it was a fairly routine matter but it transpires that Benesch is wanted for murder. It’s made fairly clear to the two detectives that if they hope to continue their careers in the NYPD they had better find Barney Benesch, and find him quickly.

Madigan is married but his marriage is not running all that smoothly. Julie Madigan (Inger Stevens) is fed up being a cop’s wife. She wants a real husband, not a guy who is married to the job. Commissioner Russell has his own domestic problems caused by his affair with a married woman.

Given the film’s structure the performances are crucial, and all the leading players deliver the goods. Fonda has the most thankless part, Russell being a very distant sort of man who has repressed his emotions almost completely. Fonda plays the part very effectively but Russell’s cold-fish personality means that he is almost inevitably overshadowed by Widmark and Whitmore who play much more larger-than-life characters.

Whitmore was a fine reliable character actor and makes Chief Inspector Kane colourful while just managing to avoid making him a loveable Irish cop stereotype.

Widmark has the most demanding rôle, Madigan being a naturally abrasive character. The challenge was to keep the abrasiveness whilst also making him sympathetic. Widmark succeeds pretty well in doing this. Madigan is a guy trying his best. He wants to be a good cop and he’d also like to be a good husband. He just hasn’t figured out how to do both at the same time.

What makes this an odd film is that by the standards of 1968 it’s both very modern and very old-fashioned. It’s modern in its emphasis on the men behind the badges and in its very loose narrative structure. But it looks very old-fashioned. Visually it could have been made ten or even twenty years earlier. Seeing this movie you would never know that the 60s had ever happened. You would never know that rock’n’roll had ever happened, or that the previous year had been the Summer of Love or that Woodstock was just around the corner. The detectives still wear hats and could have stepped right out of a 1940s crime movie. Even though it’s in colour everything is grey and very 1940s film noir. 

It’s fascinating to compare this movie with Dirty Harry, which Siegel made just three years later. They look like they were made decades apart. This is especially interesting because the two movies have definite thematic affinities, both dealing with cops close to the edge.

Siegel had done quite a bit of television work and Madigan, despite being shot in Cinemascope and despite the location shooting in New York, has something of the enclosed look of a TV cop show. Dirty Harry on the other hand has a much more cinematic feel.

Madigan is a tough but intelligent cop movie from a director who did that sort of thing particularly well. Highly recommended.

The Killers (1964)

Don Siegel’s The Killers was ostensibly a remake of Robert Siodmak’s 1946 film noir classic of the same title. Both were based, very very loosely, on a 1927 Ernest Hemingway short story. Siegel’s movie in fact was originally released as Ernest Hemingway’s The Killers, much to Siegel’s disgust. He considered the title dishonest because the movie’s connection with Hemingway’s story is extremely tenuous. The Hemingway story is extremely short, dealing with two contract killers who are puzzled by their victim’s apparent willing acquiescence in his own death. While it’s an important theme in both movies, it’s the one element in the story that is retained. Both movies then add a detailed backstory which has no connection with Hemingway’s tale.

Siegel’s film was made in 1963 and was originally intended as a television movie. In fact it was one of the first modern made-for-TV movies. Ironically NBC decided it was too violent and Universal released it theatrically instead, in 1964.

The movie opens with two hitmen arriving at a school for the blind. Their target is one of the teachers, Johnny North (John Cassavetes). When they find him he offers no resistance whatsoever. This greatly upsets Charlie Strom (Lee Marvin), one of the hitmen. It becomes something of an obsession with him. He has to find out why a man would willingly choose death. In the course of obsessing over this problem Charlie recalls a rumour that Johnny North had been mixed up in a million dollar mail van heist. The money disappeared without trace after the robbery. Charlie is prone to philosophical musings on the nature of his job but he also has a keen interest in more pragmatic matters, such as the possible whereabouts of that missing million dollars.

Charlie and his partner Lee (Clu Gulager) start digging around in Johnny North’s past and we now get Johnny’s story in the form of three lengthy flashbacks that occupy most of the movie’s running time.

Johnny had been a racing car driver, and a good one. That was before he met Sheila Farr (Angie Dickinson) and before his crash. These two disasters were inter-related. Sheila, as Johnny found out too late, was the girlfriend of wealthy gangster Jack Browning (Ronald Reagan).

The crash leaves Johnny with slight eye problems, but these are enough to have him banned from competitive driving. He pretty much hits the skids. Then Sheila makes him an offer he can’t refuse, although he would refuse it if he had any sense. All he has to do is the driving in a mail van robbery planned by Jack Browning. Browning is willing to use Johnny’s driving talents but their common interest in Sheila leads to a good deal of tension and sets the stage for the double-cross that you know has to come eventually. 

Charlie Strom will get the answer to his question but in this movie finding the answers is not necessarily a good thing.

The Killers was made on a very tight budget and most of the movie’s problems (and it has some serious problems) stem from this. There’s an excessive use of stock footage, the sets are limited and not always impressive and there’s a huge reliance on process shots. Most of the process shots are done reasonably well but some are quite poor. There’s one brief sequence where Johnny takes Sheila go-karting. It’s a sequence that really should have ended up on the cutting room floor - the process shots in that sequence are embarrassingly clumsy.

While the action of the movie takes place in various locations all the locations look the same because they’re all shot on the Universal backlot or on a sound stage. The lighting most of the time is the overly bright and overly flat lighting one associates with television.

The other major problem is that John Cassavetes is hopelessly miscast, and he’s also clearly not interested in anything but his pay cheque. It’s a hopelessly unconvincing performance. To me Cassavetes always comes across as a stage actor who hasn’t really adapted to film. He’s over-intense when he needs to be subtle and his acting is often irritatingly mannered. Mostly though he’s just hopelessly miscast.

Angie Dickinson on the other hand is quite solid in the femme fatale role. She’s certainly a 

very convincing gangster’s moll. Dickinson had the ability to be both brassy and classy at the same time. At times she seems like she’s too good for Johnny and at other times she seems like she’s too bad for him.

Ronald Reagan is the pick of the actors in this film. Jack Browning is a new style of 1960s gangster. He approaches crime strictly as a business. It’s about cash flow. He’s smooth but he’s tough. When he’s introduced to us he could be a successful lawyer or an accountant or a government official. It comes as a surprise that he’s a mobster. Reagan makes Browning menacing in a bland pin-striped suit sort of way. It’s a nicely judged performance and Browning is one of only two characters in this movie who really engage our interest.

The other character that we’re interested in is Charlie Strom. Lee Marvin is in tough guy mode, but he’s (mostly) a controlled sort of tough guy. He’s vicious but it’s a calculated viciousness. It’s almost as if he’s vicious because he’s a hitman so he’s supposed to be vicious. Marvin manages to make Charlie’s philosophical ponderings seem convincing rather than a gimmick. It’s easy to see that this movie and this performance had a considerable influence on Tarantino. Clu Gulager as Lee is amusing and occasionally disturbing but he’s a more obvious psychopath than Charlie.

The Region 4 offers a very good transfer. The movie was shot in the Academy ratio for its intended television transmission. The DVD includes an odd commentary track by a film historian named Paul Harris. I’m still not sure whether this guy liked the movie or hated it.

Despite the serious budgetary constraints and the poor central performance by Cassavetes The Killers is an interesting movie from the point of view of film history. In content it’s very much film noir while in style it looks forward to neo-noirs like Point Blank. Given the fact that it’s a remake of a 1940s film noir classic it can almost be described as being itself more neo-noir than noir, with a characteristic neo-noir self-awareness. Even with its problems I still recommend this one.

The Verdict (1946)

The Verdict, made by Warner Brothers in 1946, was Don Siegel’s first feature film as director. It was based on Israel Zangwill’s classic 1891 locked-room mystery The Big Bow Mystery. Although some have classified The Verdict as film noir its claims to that status are  rather dubious, although it does have some rather dark moments. It’s one of the many memorable movies that Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre made together during the 1940s, and this time they share star billing.

The movie is set in London in the 1890s. Superintendent Grodman (Sydney Greenstreet) gets a nasty surprise right at the beginning of the film when he discovers that a man who was hanged a few hours earlier at Newgate Prison was in fact innocent. Grodman’s case against the man was based on circumstantial evidence although at the time the case seemed convincing enough. It was certainly enough to persuade a jury to convict. 

Grodman’s distinguished career is now in ruins. He is forced into retirement and to rub salt into the wound his arch-rival, Chief Inspector Buckley (George Coulouris), gets his job.

Grodman has certainly not forgotten the case. He continues to investigate the matter as a private citizen, with some help from his friend Victor Emmric (Peter Lorre), a rather dissolute but engaging artist.

The murder victim had been Hannah Kendall and when her nephew is murdered it seems obvious enough that the crimes are linked, although the exact nature of the linkage remains uncertain. Discovering the link proves to be beyond the meagre powers of the newly promoted Superintendent Buckley. Grodman however is confident that he can solve both crimes.

This is not just a locked-room mystery but also a psychological murder mystery, an aspect of crime in which Grodman has a particular expertise.

There are plenty of red herrings although the ultimate solution is really the only possible one. Screenwriter Peter Milne made quite a few changes in Zangwill’s story but his script is still satisfying as both locked-room puzzle and psychology mystery.

The setting provides the opportunity for the movie to indulge rather lavishly in the fogs for which London was famous (famous in detective stories at least). The gaslight and fog atmosphere works well. The movie comes across as a gothic mystery with a hint of film noir.

This was Don Siegel’s first feature but he already seems very assured.

Sydney Greenstreet gives one of his best performances as the indefatigable Grodman. Peter Lorre is in full-on Peter Lorre mode and his performance is as always delightfully offbeat. Both great actors who were even better when working together - they played off each other so well. The slightly unlikely friendship between Grodman and Emmric is one the movie’s great strengths. They’re both ambiguous and complex characters, and both actors were extremely good at portraying ambiguity and complexity in nicely subtle ways.

In 1946 Greenstreet and Lorre were at the height of their popularity and had by this time made the transition to full-fledged stardom. Warner Brothers considered them (quite rightly) to be capable of carrying an A-picture.

Joan Lorring has fun as a music hall singer who may (or may not) hold the key to the solution.

The Warner Archive made-on-demand DVD offers a fairly good transfer, without extras. 

The Verdict is one of those movies that should appeal to just about all fans of classic movies. If you enjoy murder mysteries, if you enjoy gothic movies, if you enjoy film noir - this one has all bases covered. Add to that Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre at their top of their form and you have a surefire winner. Highly recommended.

The Lineup (1958)

Don Siegel’s crime thriller The Lineup was based on a popular television series of the same name, and shares the TV series’ San Francisco setting. It was released by Columbia in 1958.

This is a movie that really hits the ground running. The opening sequence is violent, exciting and spectacular. In fact it’s so good you wonder if the rest of the movie will be able to maintain the same standard. The good news is that it does.

A porter throws a suitcase into the back of a cab and the crazed cab driver then proceeds to run over a cop and then crash his cab. The suitcase belongs to a passenger who has just arrived in San Francisco on an ocean liner. The suitcase is impounded as evidence and when it’s examined it proves to contain an ancient Chinese statuette packed with heroin. The owner of the suitcase certainly doesn’t fit the usual profile of a dope smuggler. Philip Dressler is prosperous and middle-aged and has a high-profile and very respectable job with the city’s opera company. He seems to be completely unaware of the surprise package hidden in the statuette. He could be telling the truth. The police decide to cut him loose and tail him in the hope that he might, either knowingly or unknowingly, lead them to the big man behind the drug smuggling.

The scene then switches to an aircraft landing at San Francisco airport. On board the aircraft are two middle-ranking members of the drug syndicate. Dancer (Eli Wallach) is a vicious sociopath who wants to improve his mind; Julian (Robert Keith) looks like a kindly middle-aged uncle but in his own way he’s every bit as crazy as Dancer. The relationship between this unlikely pair of syndicate heavies is the real core of the film and is its greatest strength.



The drug smuggling operation makes use of innocent tourists. They are sold trinkets and curios in various Asian cities. The heroin is hidden inside the curios. When these luckless tourists return Stateside their luggage will be stolen in order to retrieve the drugs. It seems like a clever operation, and the way in which it goes wrong is delightfully bizarre. So delightfully bizarre that I’m not going to tell you anything about it.

The movie switches continuously between the activities of Dancer and Julian as they criss-cross San Francisco collecting the drugs, with the wildly unstable and totally deranged Dancer leaving a trail of corpses behind him. That trail of corpses will provide the police with most of their crucial leads. At the end of the day Dancer has to deliver the drugs to the big boss, a mysterious and anonymous character known only as The Man. And if he wants to live Dancer will have to sell The Man a totally unbelievable story that happens to be entirely true.



Don Siegel has a reputation for handling action sequences with considerable skill and that talent is seen to superlative advantage in this movie. This is one of the most adrenaline-charged crime action movies of the 50s, and compares very favourably indeed to the action movies of any decade.

Anyone who thinks irony was invented in the 90s or that Quentin Tarantino defined criminal cool will have to think again after watching this movie. The dazzling repartee of the two psychotic hitmen, combined with some very black comedy, makes Pulp Fiction seem rather redundant. And Dancer and Julian are far more interesting and complex (and disturbing) than any characters in a Tarantino movie. The two hitmen’s wheelman, Sandy McLain (Richard Jaeckel), provides the perfect third component of one of the most extraordinary trios of hoodlums you’ll encounter in any movie.



The scenes showing the police investigation are done in a kind of quasi-documentary style that neatly counterpoints the surreal scenes involving dancer and Julian.

Siegel uses some classic San Francisco locations and uses them brilliantly. The aquarium scenes, the crucial sequences in the extraordinary (and gigantic) Sutro’s Museum amusement arcade, the nail-bitingly tense wait for The Man in this amusement complex, are all done with consummate skill. Hal Mohr’s cinematography is impressive throughout. This really is a great-looking movie. The scenes in the apartment of the unwitting drug courier with the woman and child being menaced by the increasingly crazy hitmen must have been deeply unsettling to audiences in the 50s. They’re steel deeply unsettling today. The whole sequence involving the doll is disturbing, paranoiac and shocking.



To cap it all off Siegel ends the movie with a terrific car chase. Amazingly enough, even though he uses process shots, it’s a car chase that still stands up superbly today.

It’s not a perfect movie. It has a few pacing problems very early on but it’s a movie that just gets better and better as it goes, especially when the plans of Dancer and Julian start to unravel and desperation starts to creep into their actions as they realise it’s all getting hopelessly and catastrophically out of control. Siegel builds the tension relentlessly.

Emile Meyer makes a wonderful bull-necked hardbitten detective. Robert Keith is superb as Julian. At first Julian seems to be the sane partner, the one in control, but as the movie progresses we realise he’s a full-blown psycho as well. Eli Wallach delivers a magnificent sucker-punch of a performance.



This movie is one of five in the Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics I boxed set. It’s an excellent anamorphic transfer (the movie was filmed in widescreen format) and the extras include one of the most bizarre commentary tracks ever recorded with Eddie Muller and a totally deranged James Ellroy.

Whether The Lineup can be considered true film noir or not could be debated. It doesn’t really have the required plot elements or the right visual style but it does have the right feel. And while the visual style might not be pure noir it’s undeniably stunning. This is a turbocharged roller-coaster of a thriller and is very highly recommended.