The Lineup

As a young boy,"San Francisco Beat" was my favorite TV show.I loved and still do, any film that uses pre-1970 San Francisco as a background.I still can remember the opening shot at the top of Hyde St. with the O'Farrell,Jones & Hyde cable car going down the hill as the old Ford squad car comes up and turns into Lombard St.Later when the show was renamed "Lineup" the scene was the same except a Dodge was used as the squad car and the cable car had changed to a Powell & Hyde car.Has anybody noticed the view outside their squad room window is not correct?It was impossible to get that view from the old "Hall of Justice".I think that shot was taken from the top of "Nob Hill".It was still a great show.I wish I could see this show again!!!

To this day, fifty years later, I can never go by one of those still-standing Gamewells (the old police call boxes which used to stand on seemingly every other street corner in town) without expecting to find Lt. Ben Guthrie or Inspector Matt Greb leaning into it. Perhaps it's the fact that so much of this series was shot on location -- rather than on soundstages -- and perhaps it has to do with the fact that the producers used a great deal of "local talent" (sportscaster Sandy Spillman seemed to spend as much time in uniform here as he did doing the nightly sports roundup); whatever the reason, "The Lineup" managed to weave itself into the fabric of daily San Francisco life in that era. If you lived here, you grew used to seeing their production van -- with its distinctive silhouetted "Lineup" on the sides -- pulling up to ready another shot. You never knew but that you might end up in a scene. It happened to me once, waiting in line for a 'kiddie matinee' outside the Paramount theatre, only they edited the scene just before the camera panned over me. Ah well, fame is fleeting, or so they say . . .

"The Lineup" owed its inspiration to the success of "Dragnet," of course, even to the characterizations of Guthrie and Greb (while Warner Anderson's stern asceticism could make Jack Webb's Joe Friday look like Chuckles the Clown, it's not hard to imagine Tom Tully's Matt Greb and Ben Alexander's Frank Smith knocking back a few rounds and swapping lies at a cop bar together); this is where the similarities ended. "The Lineup" was tighter, its pace more in keeping with that of daily SF life, and the dialogue was refreshingly free of the "natural speech" um's and ah's in "Dragnet." Fictional as it was, it nonetheless became a fairly faithful chronicle of its time and place

That time has long since passed, and so much of the sights and the sounds of the place have changed. Yet interestingly enough, a large number of those old Gamewells still stand . . . almost as though they're waiting for Guthrie and Greb to return.

Neither of those guys, after all, would ever carry a cell phone!

I remember watching it when I was a kid. This show was the basis for all the later partner police stories such as Streets of San Francisco and others. I like Tom Tully and Warner Anderson together - kinda like Joe Friday and Frank Smith from Dragnet. This show provided a later rematch for these two actors - they worked together in the 1943 movie "Destination Tokyo" where Warner Anderson was an Officer and Tom Tully was the enlisted man. They kept this relationship in The Line-Up - the scariest part was in the opening credit when all of a sudden you see the car come up over the top of the hill and make a quick left turn - used to scare me to death. Looked like a 1949-1951 ford. I would like to see this show in reruns sometime.

Growing up in the SF Bay area as a kid in the 50's I always looked forward to San Francisco Beat coming on the tube every Saturday night. All the SF locales such as the Japanese Tea Garden,the old Hall of Justice on Kearny Street, Playland at the Sea. Filmed before the "Manhatanization" of downtown SF when the highest point in the city was Coit Tower on Telegraph Hill. I can't remember any details of the episodes but clearly recall the "feel" of the show which encapsulate everything that was San Francisco just after WWII. Fog horns, sea gulls, the wharf, this show had it all with a real film noir feel. The two detectives would stop at the police call boxes to talk to headquarters.

I remember seeing this show on Friday nights. What I remember best is that they were not kids shows but were still very enjoyable for the whole family. They were very tight half hour shows, in other words, it went by very quick. I wish these shows would be on some cable channel that would show programs of the fifties like this one.