Directed by Peter Yates
Music by Lalo Schiffrin
Steve McQueen – Lieutenant Frank Bullitt
Robert Vaughan – Senator Walter Chalmers, head of Senate sub-committee
Jacqueline Bisset – Cathy
Paul Genge – hitman
The 60s retrospective series continues …
The film that launched ten thousand TV cop episodes is reduced in memory to that car chase which became the template for so many more. It has been bettered over fifty intervening years of SFX screeching cars. James Bond movies try hard. Baby Driver was the recent superb one. Bullitt feels ‘real’ though without tinkering in post production. It’s set and filmed in San Francisco 1968, as was Petulia, but Bullitt has not even the faintest background reference to hippy or flower power. I reckon it was based in San Francisco purely for the steep hills. A city imitates a roller-coaster. I’ve driven in San Francisco on three visits. You really can floor the silencer / muffler with ease on the dips. It feels even at 30 mph that the car could take off on the peaks. The first time there we rented a Lexus 300 and it could cope with the inclines. Last time we had a Chevrolet Traverse and in “Drive” on an auto box, it started slipping back on hills if we stopped. I thought that was impossible with an automatic, and asked the valet parking guy at a hotel. He told me Chevys could slip back, but “European cars” like Mercedes and BMW didn’t. But those big American cars are designed for going fast in a straight line, so lurch, skid and screech much more dramatically on corners which was what Bullitt required. The first time I rented a big American car, in Florida, I couldn’t believe the total lack of cornering and steering ability, lurching and squeaking even on freeway slip roads. Like so many Brits at that time, we booked a “Full-size” and couldn’t resist an extra $50 a week upgrade to a Cadillac when we arrived. Then we realized that the parking lot was 50% Cadillacs, so many of us got caught.
Three stars will shine tonight …
It isn’t just the car chase though that was such a huge influence. They used the then new lightweight Arriflex cameras enabling it to be shot mainly on real locations. It’s about the cop defying the system. It’s the junior cop with a wife and kids (Aah!) who gets hurt or killed under the hero’s command. It’s the smooth greasy politician throwing his weight about (Robert Vaughan). It’s the stairwell running chase ending in an inevitable pipe lined basement. It’s the incredible airport chase sequences, running under taxiing Pan American Boeing 707s. I often dream of trying to get through a huge airport with everything going wrong, though I never get shot and fall through a glass door in the dream. Now I wonder whether seeing Bullitt started it off.
Robert Vaughan as Senator Chalmers; Steve McQueen as Lieutenant Bullitt
The story: Frank Bullitt is assigned to protect Johnny Ross, a witness against “The Organization” by Senator Chalmers. The police captain gives Bullitt a free hand to do whatever he thinks best. Two hit men break into the hotel room and shoot the witness, and one of the police officers. They are raced to the hospital. The hit man is trying to get into the room armed with an ice-pick. The witness dies on the operating table in a scene straight from Dr Kildare complete with surgeon’s forehead mopping. Bullitt conspires with the surgeon (African-American, the only visible one in a major role in the film) to move the body out without telling anyone. There is a significant moment when the surgeon says Chalmers wants him off the case because he’s too “young.” We get the subtext. Chalmers is not told the witness is dead. Bullitt sees a black Dodge Charger following his Mustang (cars are really important here!). The car chase starts, with (unusually) the good guy as pursuer. It ends with the bad guys trying to shoot Bullitt mid chase, then being knocked off the road into a gas station, where it explodes in a ball of fire. Both end bits are repeated in Easy Rider a year later.
The cars are the stars
On tracing phone calls, they discover the witness made calls to a woman. Cut to her hotel room. Murdered horribly. Bullitt arrives with Cathy, his girlfriend, who is in shock at the sight. They get her suitcases (they look like pink cabin trunks) and work out that the dead guy was not Johnny Ross. The real one has a ticket to Rome (no doubt en route to The Organization’s head office?) Bullitt races to the airport, and ends up in a long chase sequence. The real Johnny Ross fires his gun at Bullitt who shoots him dead. End of film. End of important witness too. Oh, dear. Room for a sequel where Bullitt talks his way out of that one, but it never happened.
Jacqueline Bisset as Cathy
False memory or later assumption? No one does smooth talking slick better than Robert Vaughan. Maybe it’s all those episodes of 24 but I assumed throughout on re-watching that the senator (Vaughan) was some kind of crook / double agent for “The Organization” as they euphemistically call it. Not so. I realize how we’ve been trained to spot those double crossers by subsequent movies, TV series and box sets.
The sole 1968 hip connection is giving Bullitt a mini-skirted English girlfriend, Cathy (Jaqueline Bisset). A girl with an English accent and long legs was the essential accessory for an American idol. She had a primrose Porsche 911, so was far wealthier than a humble police lieutenant. I note that was too expensive a car to race around the hills, and as long as it wasn’t raining, it wouldn’t have skidded anywhere near as much.
Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughan
There’s an awful lot of running to pay phones, using pay phones. We forget.
The car chase occupies 9 minutes and 42 seconds of pursuit, and took three weeks to film. The cars reached speeds of 110 mph – including the camera car chasing them. They used two Dodge Chargers, and two Mustangs. They must have closed so many streets.
Bullit was released right after McQueen’s Thomas Crown Affair. It’s more exciting, more influential but Thomas Crown Affair definitely has more style. Both have cool jazzy soundtracks, this time by Lalo Schiffrin. McQueen masterminded it and chose the director, Peter Yates, after seeing a car chase in his film The Robbery. The stunt driver who drove the Dodge Charger had to play the hitman’s driver in the film. They couldn’t switch drivers. They later complained that the Chargers were so much faster than the Mustangs that they had to keep slowing to let them stay with them.
Overall? It still works in spite of so many near facsimiles and attempted improvements.
The 2018 remake can’t be far away. I see that BBC Top Gear car magazine has a cover feature on a 1968 Ford Mustang v a 2018 Ford Mustang.
I have a personal fondness for Mustang images. The revised edition of my best-selling series had a Mustang on the sleeve (though the earlier edition had a Corvette which is even better – I have the original Corvette art on my office wall):
STEVE McQUEEN
Nevada Smith (1966)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
THE 60s REVISITED REVIEWS …
A Taste of Honey (1961)
Sparrows Can’t Sing (1963)
Tom Jones (1963)
The Fast Lady (1963)
A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
Gonks Go Beat (1965)
Cat Ballou (1965)
The Ipcress File (1965)
Darling (1965)
The Knack (1965)
Help! (1965)
Doctor Zhivago (1965)
Morgan – A Suitable Case For Treatment (1966)
Alfie (1966)
Harper (aka The Moving Target) 1966
The Chase (1966)
The Trap (1966)
Georgy Girl (1966)
Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
Nevada Smith (1966)
Modesty Blaise (1966)
The Family Way (1967)
Privilege (1967)
Blow-up (1967)
Accident (1967)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
I’ll Never Forget What’s ‘Is Name (1967)
How I Won The War (1967)
Far From The Madding Crowd (1967)
Poor Cow (1967)
Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush (1968)
The Magus (1968)
If …. (1968)
Girl On A Motorcycle (1968)
The Bofors Gun (1968)
The Devil Rides Out (aka The Devil’s Bride) (1968)
Work Is A Four Letter Word (1968)
The Party (1968)
Petulia (1968)
Barbarella (1968)
The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)
Bullitt (1968)
Deadfall (1968)
The Swimmer (1968)
Theorem (Teorema) (1968)
The Magic Christian (1969)
The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
Performance (1970)
[…] of late 60s film reviewed on DVD in an attempt to see how memory compares to present reality. Bullit (LINK TO REVIEW) is from 1968. It’s one everyone must have seen. Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughan […]
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Elsewhere I’m reading, Jaqueline Bisset in the movie drove a 1965 Porsche 356C Cabriolet (Champagne Yellow).
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