Bullitt (1968)

Bullitt (1968)

Director: Peter Yates

Starring: Steve McQueen

There are bad cops and there are good cops – and then there’s Bullitt.

Lieutenant Frank Bullitt is assigned the task of protecting mobster-turned-witness Johnny Ross by ambitious politician Walter Chalmers. However after Ross’ hiding place is somehow discovered he is gunned down by assassins and Bullitt has to find unravel the mystery of who tipped the assassins off and keep the angry Chalmers off his back until he does so.

So what can I say about Bullitt that hasn’t already been said? It features Steve McQueen in what, along with The Great Escape, is his most iconic role. It’s one of the most well-known action films of the 60’s and features one of the two most famous car chases in history. A car chase so famous that the rest of the movie is almost forgotten in the tire smoke it leaves behind. I had seen this movie before around fifteen years ago and all I recalled was that car chase. So now that I’ve seen it again what did I think about it this time? Yeah, it was great. I don’t really have much to say about it however but it was far better than I recalled. I’ll start with McQueen’s character first of all.

So far on my retrospective blog on action movies we have seen many types of protagonists from secret agents, hitmen, thieves, bounty hunters, martial arts experts, heroic everymen and ummm sports car loving murderous go-go dancers, but this movie is our first taste of one of action cinemas most common archetypes- the policeman who doesn’t play by the rules but gets results, dammit! At least that’s how I remembered it, but that’s not really the case as despite what the tagline wants you to believe Bullitt remains firmly on the good side of the law. There is a scene where Bullitt’s boss tells him to play by the rules and I thought ‘Aha, here we go!’ but then it’s the boss that tells our rogue cop to do whatever as long as he gets results and completely flipped my expectations around.

Bullitt is played with effortless cool by Steve McQueen, but the character itself is fairly unremarkable. I did like his introduction where he is suffering from a hangover, which is something we’ll see a lot going forward in movies like The Last Boy Scout and The Nice Guys, but my biggest problem with the film is that almost all the characters are completely forgettable. Okay so McQueen through sheer charisma is able to take what is not a very fully fleshed written character and give him somewhat of a persona, Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) is suitably slimy and Bullitt’s girlfriend Cathy is given warmth by Jacqueline Bisset, but they are the only three that stand out. I am writing this just three months after Robert Vaughn’s death which saddened me as I used to watch him in the TV show Hustle and it was nice to see a young version if him here. Cathy after seeing a dead body gives Bullitt a lecture saying how he’s jaded and Frank just takes it rather than saying “Hey look, I’m trying to find the killer of the woman you just saw!” which kind of grated on me a little, but I did like her overall and really enjoyed the fact she drove him around town after Bullitt banged up his Mustang. Also this is the first time we have seen a rather healthy relationship with our main character in one of these movies so that was a welcome change for me.

Speaking of the Mustang let’s talk about the car chase at last. We have seen a race in Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and a chase in Dr No, both with awful rear-screen projection, but nothing that even comes close to this! Here we have real stunts with zero camera tricks and it looks amazing! Heck fifty years later despite the hundreds of chases that have followed this still gets talked about as being one of the best! That’s not just people ranking the car chase in Bullitt as one of the best because it was a pioneer in a sense of nostalgia because after seeing it again I can vouch that it is still as incredible today as it would have been in 1968.

Yes some have small niggles about the six hubcaps that fly off the Dodge Charger, how both cars keep passing the same WV Beetle and how the route taken by the vehicles makes no sense for those who know the geography of San Francisco but that’s nit-picking to the extreme. I rewatched Spectre two days ago and couldn’t believe how poor the car chase through Rome is with its bizarre empty city and find it staggering how a movie with a budget that must dwarf that of Bullitt’s can be so inferior and lack any sense of danger, suspense or excitement that a movie fifty years old has in spades.

The editing of the chase is incredible too and won Frank P. Keller an Oscar. The decision to put cameras on the bonnet of the cars is great, making the viewer feel nauseous and part of the chase. For me watching this as a kid Bullitt was also one big holiday advertisement for San Francisco which just looked amazing with its crazily steep hills and the film is still the first thing I think of when I hear the city’s name. Also when I was young I used to adore the videogame Driver (still do actually) which was a love letter to the car chase movies of the 60’s and 70’s. The game had so many winking nods to films such as The Driver and The French Connection (there was one mission too where you had to scare a guy for information which I think must have been a Point Blank homage) and it featured Miami, Los Angeles and New York as playable levels. However it was the other playable city I was obsessed with and that was San Francisco and spent I spent hours in the game trying to recreate Bullitt. The shot in the film from the bottom of the hill where we see the cars leap into the air, disappear from view before reappearing and jumping over another hill is stunning and I would play around in Driver’s time-consuming film director mode trying to ape that. The only thing Driver had that also made me fall in love with San Francisco which Bullitt somewhat surprisingly underutilizes in the chase are the trams. Guess we’ll have to wait for The Rock for that.

Steve McQueen again did some of his own driving in Bullitt, like he did in The Great Escape, and in fact the movie was made by McQueen’s company Solar Production giving me the feeling that the whole film made so that the petro-head leading man could race a car through the city as fast as he wanted to. You can see when McQueen is driving and when stuntmen Bud Ekins (the man who did the famous motorcycle jump in The Great Escape) or Loren James are in the Mustang depending on the position of the rear view mirror and whether it obscures the driver’s face. The driver of the Dodge Charger was Bill Hickman who was the actual guy who played the hitman and the all do stellar work.

Some people reckon that after the chase you might as well switch off the film and while my younger self would have agreed with them, I found much to enjoy afterwards this time. The chase is spectacular true, but I also liked the on foot pursuit through the airport in the movie’s climax and thought the stunt where McQueen lays under the driving airplane to be quite thrilling. Of course the chase is the highlight but I think it’s similar to the Crop-Duster scene from North by Northwest which yes, it is the obvious highlight and the moment you can’t wait to see when watching, but it is the context in which it takes place that make it even more special.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 masterpiece you know that Roger Thornhill is being lead into a trap so the whole scene is already tense to begin with as you know there is going to be an ambush but you don’t know how it will reveal itself. It is the surprise that makes the crop-duster attack so memorable. Bullitt’s chase works in a similar way. Here we have an ordinary detective story that suddenly without any warning turns into a high-octane high speed pursuit through the streets of San Francisco. Imagine how incredible that would have been for an audience in 1968 who hadn’t even anything like this before.

I also think that limiting the movie to just the one massive action set-piece has another two more advantages. First of all is that in real life a nail-biting car chase would be just as out of the blue as the one in the movie is. The chase is the movie’s most memorable moment just as it would likely be in the career of a real life Frank Bullitt. Compare that to the unbelievable day Keanu Reeve’s officer has in Speed where he goes from saving hostages in an elevator, then on a bus and then on a train. Speaking of Speed that leads to my second point. Do you even remember the elevator or train scenes from Speed? The bus portion of Speed is so bloody fantastic that it completely overshadows the other two action set pieces. Let’s be honest nothing in Bullitt was going to top the car chase to why bother anyway? The punch of violent action in Bullitt such as the chase or the shotgun blast to the witness are more powerful and shocking for how rare they are.

I can see why the rest of the movie is overlooked. I said that the chase was pretty much the only moment I remembered when I watched the film in my youth and that’s partly because aside from a couple of moments in the airport it’s the only the part of the movie that has any sense of danger for our protagonist. Compared to how many scraps James Bond, Roger Thornhill, The Man with No Name and The One-Armed Swordsman had to go through and how hard they had to fight for survival Frank Bullitt as a relatively easy time of things. I also didn’t think the plot was all that exciting honestly either even if it did have a couple of plot twists that did surprise me.

So Bullitt has a plot I didn’t find too exciting and characters I didn’t find too engaging and that sounds like pretty damaging attributes right? Well usually they would be, but not here. Bullitt emerges above much criticism by just being so damn cool that it impossible not to love. The jazzy soundtrack is cool, the fashion is cool, the cars are cool (or at least the film makes them cool), the city is cool and McQueen’s girlfriend has a cool art job and awesome 60’s miniskirt. Heck, even the opening titles are cool! Oh and it’s worth pointing out once again that this film features Steve freaking McQueen! McQueen supposedly spent hours practising how to get out of a car in order to make it look as cool as possible. He also took every redundant word of dialogue for his character out the script which gave him his usual laconic, laid-back vibe. The man is a legend. Yeah like You Only Live Twice you could say that without its big scene, this being the car chase, the movie would be much weaker but it’s a moot point as the car chase is there and is sublime and elevates a decent cop thriller into an iconic action movie classic.

9/10- One of the coolest films ever made and featuring a car chase that is still one of cinemas greatest.

Best quote: The exchange with the useless witness who under pressure finally gives Frank’s colleague some helpful information. “Am I helping you, sir?” “I never had it so good.”

Best scene: The car chase.

Kick-ass moment: You could take any one shot from the chase and that would be an acceptable answer here. I also loved Bullitt’s reveal to Chalmers that he had them protecting the wrong man, but the moment that made me fist-pump was when the police chief unexpectedly gave Bullitt the leeway to do what he wanted as long as he got results.

Next time on A Bloody Tomorrow we are going back to the West which Once Upon a Time was quite wild.