The Lineup Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

The Lineup Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman October 22, 2019

Note: This film is available as part of Noir Archive Volume 3: 1956-1960.

Kit Parker Films and Mill Creek Entertainment continue their deep dive into what might be thought of as the substratum of film noir with this third collection culled from the Columbia catalog. The fact that this latest offering supposedly spans the years of 1956 through 1960 may give some indication of just how deep this particular dive is, since many film fans will probably (rightly or wrongly) feel like the late fifties and first year of the sixties are decidedly past the heyday of film noir. (That "supposedly" is in the previous sentence because the earliest actual release date for the films in this set seems to actually be 1957, not 1956, which perhaps makes my point even better.) Still, as with the first two collections, there are some really interesting films in this set, and genre aficionados will most likely find at least a few titles in this set, including some more British productions, that may well spark interest.

For an overview of the previous two releases in this series, please click on the following review links (which, like this one, will contain links of their own pointing to reviews of the individual films in the set):

Noir Archive Volume 1: 1944-1954 Blu- ray review

Noir Archive Volume 2: 1954-1956 Blu- ray review

I mentioned in my The Case Against Brooklyn Blu- ray review (published in conjunction with this one) how television was a kind of “uncredited” character propelling parts of that film’s story, but if you look at the advertising for this film (as represented by the poster above), The Lineup was being promoted as “too hot” and “too big” for the “small” (and apparently cool) screen. This often viscerally exciting film was a relatively early effort on the part of Don Siegel (Dirty Harry), and it has the added benefit of featuring Eli Wallach and Richard Jaeckel as two of a trio of sociopaths (the third is essayed by Robert Keith, whose name may not be completely familiar but whose face will certainly be recognizable to many film fans - see screenshot 10). The story is, like several others in this third set of Noir Archive films, centered around illicit drugs, but if the story is more than familiar, the machinations of the bad guys and some kind of cool location photography in and around San Francisco give this film a very distinctive flavor.

The Lineup Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Lineup is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Kit Parker Films and Mill Creek Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. This is another generally nice looking transfer, one with good contrast, often excellent detail levels, and an organic looking grain field. As with several other films in this third volume of Noir Archive, there are noticeable variances in clarity and sharpness, many of which are due to what I assume were the vagaries of location shooting versus in studio sequences. Some of the rear projection can look pretty ragged at times, and there is occasional mottling that kind of crawls through the frame, but no other significant damage. My score is 3.75.

The Lineup Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Lineup features a workmanlike DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track that gets the job done well enough, albeit with an obviously narrow quality, though with some perhaps surprising energy with regard to sound effects like crashing cars or bullets being fired. Dialogue is rendered cleanly and clearly throughout, and I noticed no distortion in any of the music cues.

The Lineup Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

None of the three discs in this set feature any supplements.

The Lineup Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm kind of a trivia junkie, especially when it comes to films and television, and so I was kind of surprised that I either hadn't heard of or at least remembered an apparently pretty long running television series called The Lineup, which was an inspiration for this film (the television series ran from 1954 - 1960, and so would have been airing when this film was released). That said, even some of the more nefarious aspects of the bad guys in this probably could have been aired on broadcast television in the late fifties, and so in that respect, anyway, the marketing hype above is perhaps not that well deserved. Technical merits are generally solid, and The Lineup comes Recommended.