Few moments in Peter Yates’ Bullitt (1968) feel forced. But if I had to name one of them, I’d first go with something that appears midway through the movie: when the young girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) of its eponymous San Francisco detective (played by Steve McQueen, at the height of his powers) exasperatedly wonders aloud to her boyfriend whether anything “reaches” him anymore — how he can continue on with a job clearly desensitizing him. “With you, living with violence is a way of life,” she says as if she’s revealing something he doesn’t already know.
The scene — also the only one in the movie where Bisset, consigned in the film to a pretty young thing, gets an opportunity to chew on dialogue — would feel on the nose regardless of Bullitt’s presentational approach. But its saying-the-quiet-part-out-loud clunkiness feels particularly ungainly in a movie that has so far had an almost spaghetti-Western insouciance. Even its flashier moments — the abrupt shotgun killing of a key witness in a high-stakes case, a white-knuckled car chase through the California city’s capriciously hilly streets (more on that later) — go unkissed by the kind of sensationalism we’re used to seeing in films like it.
Bullitt wants to seem texturally “realer” than its peers, a feeling buttressed by its willingness to dwell in the moments of an investigation most movies of its ilk would cut for time. It will, for instance, keep the drama confined to a hospital for longer than we’d expect as we wait out the survival of a couple of people who might not make it. It finds it important that we see McQueen browse the shelves of a grocery store.
Steve McQueen in Bullitt.
Bullitt’s veneer of quote-unquote reality distinguishes it among police procedurals, a form it embodies with a fairly by-the-numbers narrative. It follows the title character, hired to protect a pivotal witness in an organized-crime case by a slithery politician played by Robert Vaughn, as he looks into how two hitmen managed to find the location where he’d been hiding said witness. The film’s coolness gets help from a characteristically jazzy Lalo Schifrin score that hardly ever gets worked up; Frank P. Keller’s artfully fluid, melt-into-the-next-scene editing; and, of course, a self-possessed McQueen performance that puts you in mind of the quietly commanding, taciturn types of men you’re more used to seeing in Westerns than in detective movies, rivaled the most in his era by the star personae of Clint Eastwood, Franco Nero, and Charles Bronson.
You don’t have to be that nosy to think it’s probably true that Frank Bullitt’s chronically placid exterior ices over an interior overpopulated with demons. But unpacking that doesn’t matter much in a movie that seems to more so admire how unruffled he appears when confronted with impossible circumstances — the most you notice him waver is that maybe he’s breathing a little faster — and how confident you find yourself that he’s going to figure it all out, largely unskeptical until after the movie’s over of the way he embodies a sort of relentless superheroism cinema tends to sell as a given rather than a fantasy in the police force.
That faith is given its biggest boost from the sequence for which Bullitt is the most famous: a car chase through San Francisco, its lead behind one wheel (a forest-green Mustang) and a hitman behind another (a black Dodge Charger). It isn’t McQueen, who in life enthusiastically raced cars and motorcycles, doing all the driving. He naturally got stuntman help for the chase’s most dangerous turns and swerves for insurance reasons. But you still digest the sequence as an extension of the impressive command of a star most think of as less an actor than a set of enviable-to-some attributes that only get less interesting the more films you see where he’s playing into them. He represents a vibe. It goes unscathed as his Bullitt carefully avoids side-swiping wing mirrors, smashing into trolleys and cars still trying to get through intersections, and fortuitously not-really-around pedestrians.
Steve McQueen and Robert Vaughn in Bullitt.
McQueen’s performance benefits from the residual power of the car chase. It’s also the kind of set piece speaking to how the cultivation and maintenance of a star image is never exclusively the work of the person directly emanating it. It wouldn’t have its force had Keller, who won a Best Editing Oscar for his work on the movie, not so precisely strung together its footage (shot over five weeks), or if director Peter Yates, an Englishman making his American debut, did not have so strong a sense of place. There’s canny forethought, too, in letting the whole thing play out without music so that it’s only the screeches of tires, the cacophony of crashed-into mirrors and steel, and the shortness of our own breath testing our nerves.
Bullitt was as much an apotheosis for McQueen’s career at that point as it was a kind of end of an era — arguably the last movie that would so perfectly complement the idea of a performer celebrated for his largely expressionless, matter-of-fact heroism. (He acted more sporadically in the ‘70s, a decade during which he would decide he was actually happier racing motorcycles than acting.)
As it so often goes for people reflecting on their own work, McQueen didn’t have as easy of a time seeing the film as most people do. While on the set of The Hunter in 1980, he grumpily told a journalist in what turned out to be his last interview that he thought of the dueling vehicles of the car-chase sequence as “the two worst cars in San Francisco” — an opinion he thought manifested on camera with the sort of disgust he said could be seen on his face as he sat behind the wheel — and that he was bothered by how short Vaughn’s pants were cut. McQueen’s inability to see what might be his best star vehicle in sentimental terms is almost comical in its rigidness. It also feels just right for an actor who so regularly played tough lone wolves aware of but not quick to indulge what was projected onto him, the audience’s gaze often more generous than what he explicitly offered it in return.
Peterson Reviews 