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.

Shane (George Stevens, 1953)

I had forgotten how important the sexual tension between Shane (Alan Ladd) and Marian Starrett (Jean Arthur) is to the texture and motivation of the film. It's obvious from the moment when she watches him, shirtless and glistening with sweat, help her rather dull (and fully clad) husband, Joe (Van Helflin), uproot a tree stump, and it plays like a low bass note throughout the film, until it becomes the main reason why Shane feels he has to move on at the end. After all, he has just humiliated Joe by knocking him unconscious and taking on the role Joe assumes is his rightful duty, thereby reducing him in the eyes of his wife and son, Joey (Brandon De Wilde). It also doesn't escape the notice of the bad guys, one of whom taunts Shane with the fact that Joe has a pretty wife. (The filters used on some of Arthur's closeups are a giveaway: She was 50 when she made Shane, her last film, but she's plausible as a character 10 or 15 years younger.) It's to George Stevens's credit that he plays all of this as low-key as he does. It would have been much too easy to move the eternal triangle to the center of the film's structure. Shane is an intelligent film, though to my mind it gets a little heavy-handed with the introduction of the black-hatted Wilson (Jack Palance) as the potential nemesis to the knight errant Shane. As fine as Palance's performance is, I wish his character had been given a more complex backstory than just "hired gun out of Cheyenne." Otherwise, the screenplay by A.B. Guthrie Jr. does a fair job of not making its villains too deep-dyed: The chief tormenter of the sodbusters, the cattleman Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer), is given a speech justifying himself as having gotten there first and settled the land -- we haven't yet reached the point in historical consciousness where the claims of the Native Americans are taken seriously. And Shane's first opponent, Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson), eventually has a change of heart -- not an entirely convincing one to my mind, considering Calloway's behavior in his first encounter with Shane -- and warns Shane that Joe's appointment with Ryker is a trap. Stevens uses Jackson Hole, Wyoming, almost as effectively as John Ford used Monument Valley, and Loyal Griggs won a well-deserved Oscar for his cinematography, even if Paramount's decision to trim the original images at top and bottom to make the film appear to have been shot in a widescreen process resulted in some oddly cropped compositions. Shane is undeniably a classic, but I think it takes itself a little too seriously: The great Western directors, like Ford and Howard Hawks, knew the value of a little comic relief, but in Shane even Edgar Buchanan plays it straight.