Mississippi Blues and Embarcadero Clues

Why "Ballast," the best American film of 2008, should be a hopeful sign of the future of indie film.

A little of what we used to love: in Sony’s new film noir box, we find Don Siegel’s “The Lineup” (1958), a seasoned genre rapier whose first minute crash-blams from an abrupt airport theft, a chase, a crash, a rundown cop, a bullet and the title sequence. Whazzat? The next quarter of the film is a disarmingly stiff police procedural, full of unanswered questions, but then the story opens up onto the outlaw machinations behind the crime, dominated by the neurotic, co-enabling bromance between Eli Wallach’s whipcord sociopath assassin and Robert Keith’s seedy, debonair handler, the two of them assigned to retrieve troves of heroin across San Francisco (every notable landmark is visited), come hell or high water, and for fun, keeping a log of their victims’ “last words.”

Stress that you don’t see coming mounts when Wallach starts rectally examining a little girl’s expensive Oriental doll, and the movie turns positively feral once a man in a wheelchair is kicked off a public balcony, but the final trip on the road to nowhere of the unfinished Embarcadero Freeway is virtually an axiomatic noir image. The Sony box also includes Phil Karlson’s hypothetical-meta-heist movie “5 Against the House” (1955), Edward Dmytryk’s pioneering psychobabble thriller “The Sniper” (1952) and more, including a reissue of Fritz Lang’s indispensable spit of postwar savagery “The Big Heat” (1953). But if all you got was Siegel’s matter-of-fact auto-American ditty, and Wallach’s trip into the sauna, it’d be worth it.

“Ballast” (Kino Video) is now available on DVD and Blu-ray; “Columbia Pictures Film Noir Classics: Collection One” featuring “The Lineup” is now available on DVD.

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