The Lineup

She’s good in this, even though it makes no sense that this careful, protective mother would allow a couple of obvious creeps pick her up at the aquarium and drive her and her child home and then invite them in.



One of the more unintentionally laughable moments is when Dancer & Company take her and her daughter hostage on a high-speed escape from the cops. Eventually they go down the wrong way of a freeway-to-nowhere and are trapped. Dancer kills his partner for trying to escape. I don’t remember what happened to the driver.

But they’re trapped and eventually even Dancer figures out that his hostages are now of no use to him so he tries to run, jumping from one freeway, and over a deep gap, to another freeway. He’s shot in the back by the cops before he can finish the leap so he falls backward into the the abyss. It’s really a dangerous place for a normal person to be in a normal time. You could easily fall down a 100 feet or more onto the pavement below, which is what happened to Dancer.

And while this is going on, the child and the mother bail out of the car, each going in different directions in the chaos. The child is somewhat near Dancer when he fell and is near the edge of the freeway on the edge of the abyss.

So after shooting Dancer and watching him plunge over the edge, what do the cops do? Do they run to the little girl and secure her? No. They run right past her and look down into the abyss between the freeways and ponder the fait of yet another criminal who got what he deserved. And I’m sitting there screaming at the TV, “Grab the little girl, you dolts.”

Then, of course, she fell over the edge of the freeway and was killed. Then there was a big protest by the “Little Girls Lives Matter” movement and the two cops were suspended but soon reinstated with back pay.

Okay, I did make that last bit up. After pondering the fait of Dancer and admiring the view into the freeway abyss, they eventually did go to the little girl after a little while. But, sheesh, it is this kind of bum writing that makes you wonder what medication the script writers were on.

Wouldn’t that be a hoot.

I did finish Nightfall which I mentioned above somewhere. You’ll be glad to hear that it wasn’t ruined by a bad finish. It was already ruined. But the finish was indeed bad. However, the film was not bad enough that a terrific ending couldn’t have saved it.

But the ending was like throwing an anchor to a drowning man. The bad guys are hot on the trail of Aldo Ray who has now teamed up with Anne Bancroft and the insurance investigator who had been tailing him for months, James Gregory. They’re all looking for the money.

Most probably associate Gregory with the TV show, Barney Miller. But he will always be Ursus from Beneath the Planet of the Apes to me. And he’s very good in the role although his part is relatively small.

Anne Bancroft, for some inexplicable reason, falls for a guy (Aldo Ray) who is on the run from both the bad guys and the cops. They try to play it off humorously as in “I just keep falling for the wrong men” but they never sell it. McGuffin.

Note that I’m watching all these on The Criterion Channel and I must have stumbled onto a batch with some commonality. Many of these awful scripts were written by a guy called Stirling Silliphant. Could you make up a name like that? Maybe you would want to in order to hide your identity. His scripts have gotten awful silly.

The coup de grâce for this movie was when Aldo Ray, Anne Bancroft, and James Gregory partner up and return to the scene of the crime looking for the money. The rather stupid plot point is that Aldo Ray had simply dropped the bag of money somewhere while he was making his escape from the bad guys (who thought he was dead and who in the meantime had grabbed the wrong bag — the one belonging to the Doc, the friend of Aldo Ray).

So we have a strong “misplaced bag” McGuffin driving this ridiculous plot. But it’s just ridiculous enough to want to see the entertaining ways that silly Silliphant will likely compound his errors. I was not disappointed. Knowing that the bad guys are surely right behind them, they venture out into the woods, retracing the path taken by Aldo Ray and are looking for the money that he must have dropped somewhere. They make a point to note that none of them is armed. This isn’t foreshadowing as much as it could be called fore-stupiding. That’s a new word for you.

Of course when they come upon the small shack out in the middle of nowhere that Aldo remembers as a landmark, the bad guys are inside and surprise them. They tie them up. But there’s a change in character. The psychopath of the two, played convincingly by Rudy Bond, wants to kill them all, but not before roughing up Aldo Ray a little. (At this point I am cheering in my seat). But Brian Keith, the “nice” bad guy, says no. Just tie them up and leave them alone. If you shoot them, the shots will be heard.

Well, in about the same place (they are only seemingly a few hundred yards away), Keith was not so particular about shots being heard when he let Rudy Bond kill Aldo’s camping buddy, the Doc, who just happened to have his doctor’s bag with him — the one that was involved in the unintended switcharoo.

So the ending of this becomes like a ticking time bomb of stupid. It’s been ticking for a couple minutes already at least. There is now a confrontation between Keith and Bond over whether to kill the hostages or just leave them tied up. Both are now pointing guns at each other and basically saying “You put yours down first.” Bond puts his down first then Keith lowers his then Bond shoots Keith. Meanwhile, Aldo Ray (who had not yet been tied up) jumps Bond and takes his gun.

That should be it, of course, The good-guy has the gun pointed at the bad guy. But it isn’t. The time bomb of stupidity is still ticking. Bond takes off. Ray takes a shot at him but just wings him. Bond (what else ya gonna do?) climbs into the driver’s seat of a nearby snowplow that has gigantic tearing teeth on the front end of it. That’s not much of a getaway vehicle given that you can probably walk as fast as the top speed of that snowplow which is already sitting in a field of deep snow. (It’s winter.)

Okay, you have a gun. A guy climbs into the driver’s side of a snowplow. What you must be thinking if you’re Aldo Ray (and especially silly Silliphant) is “How can I lose my advantage with the gun so that we can have a knock-down, drag-out fight between Aldo Ray and Rudy Bond as the climax to the movie?”

Well, as climaxes go, this is a case of premature ejaculation. But let’s stay with it. Instead of pointing the gun at Rudy Bond or even just shooting him through the open door, he climbs up into the cabin of the snow plow (gun in hand) whereby Rudy Bond (at least he isn’t stupid) promptly takes the gun away and they get into a scuffle.

They fight in the cabin a bit and then roll on the ground a bit. Meanwhile the snow plow, which Rudy Bond had started (folks, never leave your keys in your snow plow, even if you're just dropping in to get a quick gallon of milk). So now the snow plow is slowly underway without a driver and it is (egads!) heading right for the shack where Anne single-boom Bancroft and James Gregory are tied up. Whatever will Aldo do?

Well, he does manage to get back in the cab and turn the wheel so that it misses the shack. He scuffles some more with Rudy Bond, giving him a good whacking. Bond is momentarily dazed on the ground and — you guessed it — is run over by the snow plow. But first he is chopped up by the really nasty looking rotating blades on the front of it. But at least he managed to get out of this movie.

At this point you wouldn’t be disappointed if they all fell through the ice, for at looks as if that small shack could be situation on a frozen snow-covered lake and could be used as shelter for a fishing hole. But there is no suck luck. This hoped-for ending is spoiled when the words “The End” appear magically out of nowhere. The pain is now over for everyone.

Only my movie reviews are reliable, Mr. Kung. But even for IMDB, that is a peculiar rating. It’s not a movie I would recommend, even with caveats. It’s just too flawed.

A movie being imperfect or filled with a few gadgets is no reason to dismiss it entirely. But I think one reviewer touches on the central truth of this movie:



There’s a basic script incompetence or artlessness that invades this movie. Yes, I could live with Aldo Ray’s wooden acting. But the whole movie is a rickety mess of illogic and plot points that are a cheat (or just lame). This is the kind of movie that is like a chimney with a few cracked and missing bricks that is in danger of falling over. If you could just replace/repair a few of those bricks, you’d have something solid.

James Gregory’s role in this is extremely solid, for instance. But the chimney ultimately topples because of the many flaws in its structure.