Great B flick. Love the location shooting. One error however. It's 9020 Jackson, not 2090. In earlier scene ship side, you'll catch the mistake in dialog concerning the address.. This film grew out of the TV series, Lineup, which also starred Warner Anderson and Tom Tully. Lineup was also tagged San Francisco Beat. In the TV series the detectives drove Fords. In the movie, they drove Plymouths.

Director Don Siegel has a reputation for having done a number of slam-bang crime stories, such as "Dirty Harry," although he hasn't limited himself to that genre. (I don't know what to call "The Beguiled." Southern Gothic?) But this one ranks up there with his better examples.Two hoods arrive in San Francisco to retrieve packages of heroin from three unwitting carriers arriving on a ship. The smack is hidden in various objects, like statues. The hoods are the psychopathic Eli Wallach and the suave Robert Keith. They've been hired to get the dope and leave it at a drop point in the now-defunct Sutro's Baths on a cliff overlooking the beach. The local big wig who controls the dope traffic is known to them, and to just about everyone else, simply as "the man." Nobody seems to know who he is.Roughly the first half of the film is about the police gradually catching on to the smuggling scheme and tracking down the carriers, innocent though the carriers may be. It's not dull. It's just familiar. We've all seen police procedurals. And there's nothing particularly interesting about either Warner Baxter or Emile Meyer as the two cops grimly carrying out their investigation.The two hoods, shortly joined by local wheel man Richard Jaekel, are a different matter. The soft-spoken elderly ("almost 50") Robert Keith seems to be in charge. He teaches the younger Wallach to use the subjunctive mood when speaking. "If I were to do that..." instead of, "If I was to do that ..." Some have found a homoerotic subtext in their relationship but, if it's there, it slipped by my apperceptive apparatus. Keith also reins in Wallach, who has a propensity for using the silenced .38 Smith and Wesson he carries around. A silencer was a novelty at the time and some attention is given to it in inserts and in dialog. The director was to move on to bigger silencers in "The Killers" (1964), and monumental weapons in "Dirty Harry." The first carrier, the one who was paid to smuggle in a statue, has accidentally stumbled across the stash and he tries to extort an additional thousand dollars from Wallach. That was a big mistake.Wallach shows up at the mansion of the second innocent and tells the Chinese house boy that there's been an error in the luggage department and he, Wallach, must now retrieve the cutlery set that the mansion's owner picked up. The houseboy objects strenuously. Another mistake.The third stash has been hidden away in a Japanese doll and brought in by a mother and her little daughter. Keith and Wallach insinuate themselves into the mother's good graces and get into her apartment at the Mark Hopkins, only to find that the girl has used the heroin to powder her dollie's pure white face.The mother and daughter don't get killed. They're taken hostage and driven to the drop site where Wallach will try to explain to "the man" that the third stash is gone for good. And if the man doesn't believe Wallach, he can check with the mother and daughter who are being held in the car outside.Wallach's confrontation with the man is splendidly staged. The man, in a bit of wildly imaginative casting, is Vaughn Taylor, a non-offensive character actor who is usually seen as a postman or office clerk or some young lady's father. He slowly rolls to the drop site in a wheelchair. There are multiple close ups of Taylor's impassive face staring dead ahead as Wallach leans on his shoulder and tries desperately to explain the situation. Taylor sits silently until finally, when Wallach is finished, he has a couple of lines. The first is, "You're dead." And the second includes, "Nobody sees me." This failure to grasp the significance of events outrages Wallach. You may have seen Richard Widmark push an old lady down the stairs in "Kiss of Death." Here you have the opportunity to watch Wallach shove a man in a wheelchair off a balcony and see him drop fifty feet to his death.There's a problem with the casting though. Eli Wallach is a decent enough actor but he's best when he's part of an ensemble or in an ancillary role. Here he's forced to pretty much carry the last third of the film but his pockmarked face and chipmunk teeth fall just short of being interesting enough for the job. A few close shots of Wallach go a long way.The ending involves another car chase around the streets of San Francisco. It's a beautiful little city, only sixty-four square miles, and even its seedier parts are colorful. But this pursuit is in accelerated motion and, after "Bullet", all car chases in the city look a little insignificant.

In San Francisco, two police inspectors (Marshall Reed and Emile Meyer) are on the case when a rogue taxi driver, with the help of a rogue porter, manages to steal the suitcase of an antiques collector before running down a cop, whose dying gesture is to shoot the cabbie dead. The inspectors discover that a statuette in the suitcase contains heroin. Meanwhile, a psychopathic gangster (Eli Wallach), his malignant mentor (Robert Keith) and their dipsomaniac driver (Richard Jaeckel) have the job of picking up the other heroin shipments, hidden in the luggage of unsuspecting travelers. All goes well until they attempt to retrieve the heroin stuffed in a Japanese doll. A little girl and her young mother (Cheryl Callaway and Mary LaRoche) have the doll, but when the crooks take possession of it, they find that the heroin has mysteriously vanished.Don Siegel, working from a script by Stirling Silliphant, does a bang-up job directing this explosive crime thriller, which is filled with violent action, surprise plot twists, a spectacular murder in an indoor ice rink and a great climactic car chase. The characters of the police inspectors are carried over from the same-titled TV series, but unlike the show, the movie is mainly concerned with the criminals. Wallach is the star, brilliantly portraying a dangerous man who can be calm, even genial, but reveals his true nature when others try to push him around. The cadaverous Keith is properly ghoulish, especially while taking note of the day's victims' dying words. Callaway proves to be a very adept child actress, while her lovely screen mother, LaRoche (who also had trouble with her daughter's doll in a "Twilight Zone" episode), ably performs the difficult task of remaining in a perpetual state of panic.The plot requires a fairly high suspension of disbelief, especially considering the general air of realism, but few will gripe about plausibility in this exciting action drama.

Dark crime drama about heroine smuggling into the US from China that shows the gritty streets of San Francisco in a different light than normal. It appears that unsuspecting passengers have stashes of heroine placed in the nicknack's they have purchased abroad, and hoodlums such as Eli Wallach and Robert Keith are sent out to retrieve them. One such person is a toupee-less Raymond Bailey ("The Beverly Hillbillies") who dominates much of the first half of the film as a possible suspect in the heroine ring. Another attempts blackmail and is murdered in a sauna; A manservant refuses to allow the gangsters to take the package (to apparently switch it with another package) and looses his life. Finally, a single mother and their daughter are victimized by the gangsters and end up in terror as the gangsters ride them all over SF and the general area (including a newly built freeway) after the little girl uses the powder hidden inside her porcelain doll on its face.There are some really graphic violent scenes. The set-up for the shooting in the sauna is really suspenseful. Robert Keith is cast against type, and in one scene gives an interesting assessment of the gangster's life compared to normal people's life towards the single mom. Eli Wallach is excellent as the most dangerous of the drug ring. When he is told by the boss of the heroine ring he is dead, his reaction is priceless, leading to one of the best shots of violence since "Kiss of Death's" notorious old lady on the staircase sequence. Later, there is another graphic demise in which the viewer cannot help twitch in agony over the psychological feelings of pain.I thought that the use of the single mother and young daughter was well handled; It could have been done with more manipulation by the kid being too cutesy pie, but that doesn't happen here. The writers do a good job in preventing those segments from being too cloying.Columbia's Film Noirs tended to be more violent than others, especially as the cycle of that genre began to cool off in the mid-late 50's. Along with "The Garment Jungle" and the later "Experiment in Terror", "The Lineup" has a realistic horror to it that would later be used in many classic crime shows of the 60's and '70's. However, I didn't find that the title was appropriate for the film; Other than one scene of the line-up of ship's porters in the beginning, it had nothing to do with police line-ups. "Heroine Smuggling" would have been a more appropriate title, although that might sound more exploitive than mainstream.