“We take you now behind the scenes of a police headquarters in a great American city, where under the cold glaring lights will pass before us the innocent, the vagrant, the thief, the murderer. This is The Line-Up.”
Dragnet is the best-known police drama from the Golden Age of Radio; even people who have never heard an episode know the iconic theme music and Jack Webb portrayal from film, television, and parody. Less known but just as strong is The Line-Up, a series that premiered on CBS on July 6, 1950 and kept pace with Webb’s program in its early years on radio.
The series was set in “a great American city” (unnamed at first, but later revealed to be San Francisco in the television version of the series) and it followed the police as they tracked down killers, thieves, con men, and mob bosses. Each episode opened with a line-up of suspects, sometimes connected to the crime of the week, who were questioned by officers while anxious eyewitnesses watched and tried to recognize them. These scenes were wonderful displays of characterization, humor, and sound design as the hushed observations from the gallery mixed in and out of the loud defiant answers of the suspects being questioned.
The Line-Up was originally developed by Elliot Lewis, Morton Fine, and David Friedkin - the trio behind Broadway is My Beat and later Crime Classics. After the initial eight week run on CBS, the series was turned over to Blake Edwards and Jaime del Vallee, the creative team behind Richard Diamond, Private Detective. Edwards and del Vallee shepherded a series that had the realism of Dragnet (especially in how it portrayed the frequent monotony of police work), but that was more nuanced and allowed for richer characters to populate its precinct. Joe Friday and his partners were cops; the men on The Line-Up felt more like real people.
And to get that level of characterization, you need great actors in the roles. The Line-Up started strong at the top. In what may be his greatest radio role (and that’s saying something given his two decades of work in the Golden Age of Radio), Bill Johnstone starred as Lt. Ben Guthrie. Johnstone first rose to prominence when he succeeded Orson Welles as The Shadow, a role he played from 1939 until 1943. He moved to Hollywood and joined the incredible talent pool of west coast radio players. Johnstone was a fixture on Suspense, Escape, Sam Spade, and many more. Cops were something of a specialty for Johnstone; he appeared opposite Sydney Greenstreet in several episodes of The New Adventures of Nero Wolfe as Inspector Cramer, and he played Lt. Ybarra opposite Van Heflin on The Adventures of Philip Marlowe. The prematurely gray-haired Johnstone had a rich voice that gave his characters an “older than their years” sound, and that technique was put to great use as Ben Guthrie. He was overworked (long hours and trips to the coffee pot were standards on the show) but Johnstone captured Guthrie’s determination to close a case through the late nights.
Johnstone was supported for the first years of the program by actor Wally Maher as Sgt. Matt Grebb. Grebb called the titular line-up that opened each episode and his wry dressing-down of suspects added some levity to the dramatic scripts. Grebb could also be counted on to rib Guthrie about the latter’s bachelor lifestyle. Grebb played a role similar to that of Frank Smith on Dragnet, but Maher was given more opportunity to make Grebb a true character. Sadly, Maher passed away at age 43 in 1951, leaving a hole in not only The Line-Up, but the reperatory cast of Hollywood radio actors.
Actor Jack Moyles (who enjoyed a run as a radio detective in Rocky Jordan) played Sgt. Pete Carger, Guthrie’s new partner, for the duration of the radio run following Maher’s death. As a tribute to Maher (or perhaps because the late actor’s style was so closely associated and identified with the program), Moyles used a similar delivery and cadence when calling the line-up at the start of each episode.
The Line-Up aired on CBS from July 6, 1950 to February 20, 1953. Like other shows of the era, it transitioned to television (albeit without its radio cast). The TV version starred Warner Anderson as Lt. Guthrie and Tom Tully as Inspector Grebb. Grebb received a promotion for TV because the San Francisco Police Department Bureau of Inspectors had no “Sergeant” rank. The series ran on CBS television from 1954 to 1960, and a feature film spin-off hit theaters in 1958. Ditected by Don Siegel (later he would direct Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry), the film co-starred Eli Wallach. Anderson returned as Guthrie for the film.
As more episodes of The Line-Up continue to enter circulation, it’s a great time to discover this series. Fans of police drama and sharp writing would do well to sit in the gallery and watch as the suspects are paraded out and questioned. Just don’t pay too much attention to their answers, as they often lie.
