I managed to dig up a few of these great oldies. Here is a review of one of them.Warner Anderson and Tom Tully play a pair of San Francisco Police detectives in this 50's standard. The two are assigned to find who is behind a string of armed robberies. The bandits simply walk in, calmly stick a gun in the clerks face and ask for the cash. The victims are so frightened that not one of them can give the police an accurate description. The police catch a break though when a witness catches the plate number off the get-away car. They trace the car to a rental outfit. They then follow the leads to a less than sober woman who tells the detectives her new boyfriend had borrowed the car. This info leads them to a seedy rundown hotel. A talk with the desk clerk gets them a room number. A quick boot to the door and the detectives catch a man laying out the doings for a drug fix. As they are slapping the cuffs on the first suspect, the second shows up with the heroin. A gun is stuck in his face for a change as he is relieved of the drugs and his pistol. The two are drug addicts and the string of hold-ups were to feed the habit. This episode was directed by Felix Feist who did the noirs DEVIL THUMBS A RIDE, THE THREAT, TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY and THIS WOMAN IS DANGEROUS. A DRAGNET style police procedural with the added bonus of great location shooting.

I grew up on San Francisco Beat. It was a family event each week. It was the precursor to Streets of San Francisco, Dirty Harry, and Ironside. Besides Perry Mason (back in the day)it was the only compelling crime series on at the time. Shot in B&W it and mono it delivered fast passed gritty episodes on a weekly basis.With local location shots as a SF native it delighted all who watched it. Although predictable story lines lead to obvious conclusion given the era the scenes along with the plot kept the audience captivated.As the original San Francisco crime show it paved the way for the next generation of S.F. police dramas such as the aforementioned Raymond Burr series Ironside, The Streets of San Francisco with Karl Malden an Michael Douglas and Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry Series.As a testimony to how well this movie/series was cast, many of the actors went on to perform in some of the later Crime Drama series on television. Warner Anderson as the hard driving Lt. Ben Guthrie delivered grounded performances as he did throughout his extensive career.Marshall Reed as Inspector Fred Asher went on to roles in Dragnet, and Adam 12.Does anyone know where I can get it on DVD?

To this day, fifty years later, I can never go by one of those still-standing Gamewells (the old police call boxes which used to stand on seemingly every other street corner in town) without expecting to find Lt. Ben Guthrie or Inspector Matt Greb leaning into it. Perhaps it's the fact that so much of this series was shot on location -- rather than on soundstages -- and perhaps it has to do with the fact that the producers used a great deal of "local talent" (sportscaster Sandy Spillman seemed to spend as much time in uniform here as he did doing the nightly sports roundup); whatever the reason, "The Lineup" managed to weave itself into the fabric of daily San Francisco life in that era. If you lived here, you grew used to seeing their production van -- with its distinctive silhouetted "Lineup" on the sides -- pulling up to ready another shot. You never knew but that you might end up in a scene. It happened to me once, waiting in line for a 'kiddie matinee' outside the Paramount theatre, only they edited the scene just before the camera panned over me. Ah well, fame is fleeting, or so they say . . ."The Lineup" owed its inspiration to the success of "Dragnet," of course, even to the characterizations of Guthrie and Greb (while Warner Anderson's stern asceticism could make Jack Webb's Joe Friday look like Chuckles the Clown, it's not hard to imagine Tom Tully's Matt Greb and Ben Alexander's Frank Smith knocking back a few rounds and swapping lies at a cop bar together); this is where the similarities ended. "The Lineup" was tighter, its pace more in keeping with that of daily SF life, and the dialogue was refreshingly free of the "natural speech" um's and ah's in "Dragnet." Fictional as it was, it nonetheless became a fairly faithful chronicle of its time and placeThat time has long since passed, and so much of the sights and the sounds of the place have changed. Yet interestingly enough, a large number of those old Gamewells still stand . . . almost as though they're waiting for Guthrie and Greb to return.Neither of those guys, after all, would ever carry a cell phone!

This series is a nostalgic monument to Old San Francisco;i.e., before the development of high rise buildings. One can hear the old fog horns and feel the dampness as Inspector Grebb and the Lt. walk about in Top Coats and Fedoras. They also frequently use the old Police Call Boxes(dedicated phone lines on the street), painted blue of course. After all, portable two-way radios were still less than reliable. The series also makes use of the old Hall of Justice building on Kearney Street. This elaborate old building was torn down to make way for a new hotel. It is a very different city depicted in this series than was shown in "The Streets of San Francisco" or the Harry Callahan/Clint Eastwood movies.