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Sharp Shooting From July 2000 
While on summer vacation, I often watch a lot of movies on television. During one such sojourn, I happened to catch Bullitt. This 1968 movie is known, of course, as featuring one of (perhaps) the greatest car chase
sequences of all time. It also features one of the coolest of movie stars, Steve McQueen. Total guy movie: Cool guy, cool cars, groovy chick (Jacqueline Bisset).
Having not seen the film in years, I was surprised by how casual and naturalistic it is. The car chase is great, fairly realistic and not too flashy. It's not like William Freidkin's car chases in The French Connection or To Live and Die in L.A. It's not Ronin or Gone in 60 Seconds (2000). But it feels like a real car chase. (Bullitt's chase used two Mustangs and two Dodge Chargers and was filmed in three weeks. The cars reached speeds of 110 mph. The whole sequence runs about ten minutes.) In screenwriter William Goldman's book Which Lie Did I Tell?, he writes an amusing section about the compression of time in movies. The hero drives up to a building in busy Manhattan, finds a parking space right away in front and is inside in no time. In other words, film cuts out the extraneous stuff of life. Bullitt leaves all that stuff in. Going to the vending machine. Waiting for a doctor. Standing around. The story is simple: cops are protecting a witness over the weekend; people break in and shoot a cop and the witness; hero must find out who and why before Monday morning. McQueen's performance is suitably low-key in nature. Bullitt is only 113 minutes in length. If remade, the pace of the film would be jacked way up -- perhaps all the way to 11. There would be more shooting and bigger chases. The plot would be more gimmicky and obvious. And the whole thing would stink. I see Mel Gibson in the lead. By the way, I think Bullitt -- along with Madigan, released the same year -- marks the beginning of the loner cop film. You know, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, Lethal Weapon, anything with Martin Lawrence or Chris Tucker as policemen... Stephen Hunter, in an essay from his book Violent Screen pointed out that the cop film is of fairly recent vintage. There have been movies about criminals since the twenties, but its really only from the period of Bullitt onward that we see a genre with police heroes, complete with all the conventions that now exist. The genre seem to take hold quicker on television, since we've always had cop shows. Two months after writing the above, I saw the movie on TV again. I was struck by two things. Steve McQueen underplays the part. In many scenes, he doesn't have much dialogue; the acting is in his face. He also doesn't come out with a bunch of quips. For example, during the movie, he battles with a politician. At one point, the guy is trying to get Bullitt to play along, to do what it takes to get ahead in the world, explaining that this is the way the world works. Bullitt's reply: "Bullshit. Now get the hell out of here." And that's the last conversation they have, even though Bullitt soon is forced to kill the criminal that the politician is trying to keep alive to testify. Mel Gibson would have a snappy comeback. The other factor is the downbeat ending. Bullitt wins. He goes home, but feels the weight of the world on him. His girlfriend has accused him of shutting himself off from the world, because of the violence he faces every day. And Bullitt feels the disconnect. Dirty Harry and Madigan also have downbeat endings; for that matter, so does The French Connection. There's not as much of that today. |