The Lineup (Don Siegel, 1958)

Eli Wallach and Robert Keith in The Lineupw

Cast: Eli Wallach, Robert Keith, Richard Jaeckel, Warner Anderson, Mary LaRoche, William Leslie, Emile Meyer, Marshall Reed, Raymond Bailey, Vaughn Taylor, Cheryl Callaway, Robert Bailey. Screenplay: Stirling Silliphant. Cinematography: Hal Mohr. Art direction: Ross Bellah. Film editing: Al Clark. Music: Mischa Bakaleinikoff.

The Lineup is a police procedural based on a popular radio and TV series that centers on uncovering a drug-smuggling ring that uses unwitting tourists to bring in heroin concealed in works of art and toys sold to them in Asian countries. The title seems to be a bid to draw in viewers of the TV show: The one lineup in the film is incidental to the procedural part of the story, which is really the less interesting part of the movie. Actors Warner Anderson and Marshall Reed play the detectives in charge of things with the stiff "just the facts, ma'am" manner characteristic of cop shows of the day, but things only begin to get interesting when we meet the villains. Eli Wallach gets top billing as Dancer, a twitchy psychopath under the guidance of the more cerebral Julian (Robert Keith), who doesn't like to get his hands dirty and has never shot a gun, but collects people's last words, reported to him by Dancer. They're joined by Sandy McLain (Richard Jaeckel), the driver supplied to them by the head of the operation, known as The Man (Vaughn Taylor). Sandy is an alcoholic -- Julian refers to him as a "dipsomaniac" -- who keeps a pint handy in his suit pocket, but knows how to drive a car fast through San Francisco streets. And it's those streets that perhaps supply the most interest in the film today, with fascinating location shots including some now-vanished landmarks: the Embarcadero Freeway, which was never finished and was torn down after the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, and the Sutro Baths, a museum and ice-skating rink that was destroyed by an arsonist's fire in 1966. Hal Mohr's camera and Don Siegel's direction make the most of these and other settings. Sometimes the settings seem to drive the plot: There's not much reason to have one of the victimized tourists be an administrator of the San Francisco Opera other than to have a scene shot in the handsome lobby of the Opera House, and Dancer and Julian have a hideout in Daly City that affords a sweeping view of the San Francisco airport and the bay beyond. Still, The Lineup is a swift-moving entertainment with a lot of action and suspense.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (Sergio Leone, 1966)

Clint Eastwood's Man With No Name* may be the movies' most famous picaro, the roguish hero who wanders through an often hostile landscape, surviving by his wits -- and in this case, his skill as a gunman. The picaro's heart is generally in the right place even if he doesn't mind breaking a few laws to get his way. In the first two films of Sergio Leone's "Dollars Trilogy," A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For a Few Dollars More (1965), he is a loner, but in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly he has picked up an unlikely (and untrustworthy) sidekick in Tuco (Eli Wallach), with whom he is working a scam: Tuco has a price on his head, which our hero collects by bringing Tuco in to justice, and then splits with Tuco after rescuing him from a hanging. Tuco is a more vicious Sancho Panza to No Name's more capable Don Quixote. I think it's interesting that The Good.... was filmed in Spain, where the picaresque tradition began with Lazarillo de Tormes in 1557 and produced its most influential analog in Don Quixote. Okay, I'm getting a little pretentious with the literary history here -- though Leone himself once admitted his debt to the picaresque tradition. But who, in the mid-1960s, when Leone was making movies derided as "spaghetti Westerns," would have anticipated such analysis or the veneration those films receive today? Half a century ago, when Leone's trilogy was being released, critics were raving about films like A Man for All Seasons (Fred Zinnemann, 1966), Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965), and Becket (Peter Glenville, 1964): "prestige" movies on high-toned subjects that have dated badly, while Leone's movies still get enthusiastic viewings. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly currently has an 8.9 rating on IMDb and a 97 percent favorable on Rotten Tomatoes -- the only two negative reviews cited on the latter are the ones from Time and Variety at the time of the film's release. My own view is that The Good.... is overlong, especially in its latest restoration, which runs for 177 minutes, and that there's some confusion in integrating the Civil War's New Mexico Campaign scenes with the story of the titular triad. But there are few scenes in movies more dazzling than Tuco's dash through the cemetery and the subsequent three-way standoff. Lee Van Cleef is a suitably scary Bad guy; Eastwood demonstrates the growth as an actor that would continue as his career soared; Wallach gives one of his best performances: and the contribution of Ennio Morricone is breathtaking. Raw and unpolished as The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at times is, it remains memorable filmmaking, while the films more celebrated in its day are mostly forgettable.

*Actually, he picks up a name in each of Leone's "Dollars Trilogy" films: In A Fistful of Dollars he is called "Joe," which is a generic name for an americano. In For a Few Dollars More he is known as Monco, the Italian word for "one-armed," in reference to his tendency to use his left hand while keeping his gun hand under his poncho. And in the third film he is dubbed "Blondie" by Tuco. (The color of Eastwood's hair seems to me like a minor characteristic, but I guess "Tall Guy Who Squints and Smokes Cheroots" would have been a mouthful.)