La ronde du crime

Heroin from Asia is flooding into San Francisco, carried in souvenirs and curios packed by unwitting mules. When the mules arrive home to kick back after their peregrinations around the Pacific Rim, they are paid an unexpected and usually unpleasant visit by a team of psycho-killers named Dancer and Julian (Eli Wallach and Robert Keith, respectively), who collect the precious narcotic. Wallach is forever on the edge of detonation, so it takes the patient ministrations of Keith to soothe him down and keep him on task; their relationship suggests that of an old queen dealing with rough trade. (Their young driver, Richard Jaeckel -- best remembered as the young Turk in Come Back, Little Sheba -- adds to the homoerotic tone, as does a violent scene in a steambath). Don Siegel goads the action along and knows what he's doing every step of the way. The Lineup marks a no-man's-land between classic film noir, which had pretty much ground to a halt, and the flatter, faster and more sensational thrillers that the early 1960s would bring; in its more modest way, it foreshadows later movies like The Detective, Bullitt and The French Connection.