It features a number of scenes shot on location in San Francisco during the late 1950s, including shots of the Embarcadero Freeway (then still under construction), the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park, the War Memorial Opera House, the Mark Hopkins Hotel, and Sutro Baths.

An international drug-smuggling racket plants heroin on unsuspecting American tourists traveling from Asia, so that the dope can pass through customs undetected.

Dancer kills three people along the way (the porter, a seaman demanding his share, and a suspicious chinese servant, refusing to hand out a drug container).

When the car becomes trapped at a barrier on the Embarcadero Freeway, Dancer first shoots his accomplice to death, holding the girl hostage, then tries to flee.

In the film, Warner Anderson and Marshall Reed reprise their roles as Lieutenant Ben Guthrie and Inspector Fred Asher from the TV series.

What is so lyrical about the ending, in San Francisco’s Sutro Museum, is the Japanese-print compositions, the late afternoon lighting, the advantage taken of the long hallways, multi-level stairways in a baroque, elegant, glass-palace building...It’s a minor masterpiece of preplanning and an extensively structured pictorial tour by Siegel...”—Film critic Manny Farber in Farber on Film (2009)[5] Film critic Manny Farber comments on Siegel’s cinematic approach to The Lineup: The Siegel touch is always apparent in the excessive number of viewpoint shots, the nice feeling for an eroded structure with awkward angles, and especially with the fascination with a somewhat mannered athleticism seen from above, in which a body is poised or moving against background action that is a violent contrast in space, tone and movement.

The straight world is as phony, dishonest and evil as the criminal’s, without the one qualification which may be an improvement on the normal: they [the criminals] are honest about their lawlessness...”[9]The film contains the line, "When you live outside the law, you have to eliminate dishonesty," of which Jonathan Lethem writes that "Bob Dylan heard it…, cleaned it up a little, and inserted it into 'Absolutely Sweet Marie'" (as "To live outside the law you must be honest.").