Bullitt ***** (1968, Steve McQueen, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Vaughn) – Classic Movie Review 941

British director Peter Yates’s 1968 thriller is the best-ever car chase movie as well as (arguably) the quintessential Steve McQueen movie. There’s a riveting police detective yarn too, in which one San Francisco cop is the model of decent behaviour when all around him are vicious or corrupt.

Harry Kleiner and Alan R Trustman’s screenplay, based on the novel Mute Witness by Robert L Pike (aka Robert Fish), showcases McQueen as honest cop Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt who clashes with slimy, slick, ambitious politician Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) after he gives him the job of protecting the chief witness in a Mob trial. He is Johnny Ross (Pat Renella), a Chicago-based mobster who is about to turn evidence against the organization at the hearing.

Bullitt and his team of Sergeant Delgetti (Don Gordon) and Detective Carl Stanton (Carl Reindel) keep Ross in protective custody for 48 hours over the weekend at a flophouse near an overhead freeway until Ross gives his testimony on the Monday. Bullitt’s superior, Captain Samuel Bennet (Simon Oakland), gives him full authority to lead the case, no questions asked.

But at 1 am the next day it all goes awry with two blasts of a shotgun, leaving Stanton and Ross fighting for their lives at San Francisco General. Bullitt is certain he hasn’t been told the full story, so he clandestinely moves Ross while he tries to find out who is after him.

Chalmers vows to ruin Bullitt’s career if Ross dies. But Bullitt gets a break when the gunman appears at the hospital to finish off Ross. Now Bullitt must smoke out the gunman and his backup man before Chalmers carries out his threat, leading to a high-speed pursuit and a fiery crash at a gas station.

Bullitt is delivered with dynamic speed and urgency by British director Yates, who’d just made Robbery in the UK, and this movie deservedly propelled him to a fine international career.

On the acting front, McQueen holds centre screen magnetically, but he has some extremely solid backup playing to support him by Vaughn, Oakland, Robert Duvall, Norman Fell, Georg Stanford Brown and Jacqueline Bisset (who gets the soft end of things as the troubled love interest, Bullitt’s live-in artist girlfriend Cathy).

Bullitt is the most atmospheric, exciting, edge-of-seat pursuit thriller imaginable, with the movies’ best-ever car chase that sees McQueen where he should be, behind the wheel of a car chasing the villains at the highest, scariest speeds imaginable over those San Francisco bumpy mean streets.

It is all excitingly lensed by cinematographer William A Fraker and thrillingly scored by Lalo Schifrin. Acknowledging the movie’s fine craftsmanship, Frank P Keller’s film editing won an Oscar.

Peter Yates, who started out briefly as a professional racing car driver and team manager, died on 9 January 2011, aged 81.

Don Gordon died on 24 April 2017, aged 90. He was also in Papillon (1973), Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981) and Lethal Weapon (1987), among many others.

© Derek Winnert 2014 Classic Movie Review 941

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