Men of Action: Bullitt (Dir Peter Yates, 1h 53m, 1968)

In the pantheon of action stars, perhaps none are so beloved as Steve McQueen. McQueen has long since become the yardstick of cool, a king of turning the everyman into the icon, from the drifting Vin in The Magnificent Seven to the quintessential WWII anti-hero, Cooler King Hilts, to all manner of enjoyably tough racers (Le Mans), heist masterminds, (The Thomas Crown Affair) and the voice of calm in the face of disaster (The Towering Inferno). No film, though, cements his iconic status, no performance captures McQueen at his best, than Bullitt, where McQueen's Frank Bullitt, a lieutenant in the San Francisco Police Department, turns detective in a web of conspiracy, organised crime, and assumed identity that masterfully matches the late 60s counter culture, some of the best action and chases of the entire decade, and a superbly told detective story into the film that made McQueen one of the great action stars of the 60s.

Bullitt begins with one of cinema's greatest double acts. First, with the music of the legendary Lalo Schifrin, a man who, even by this point in his career had given the world the score for Cool Hand Luke (1967) and the theme to Mission Impossible-the score for Bullitt is not merely incredibly cool jazz, a slice of the genre at his comptemporary best, but practically the film's heartbeat, appearing, unbidden at key moments, ratcheting up in effortless style the tension of the action. Here, in the film's opening moments, though, it meets its match in the cinematography of William A. Fraker, the camera moving through the titles, as the film's instigating theft is carried out,  and the slick design of Pablo Ferro's titles. It's the empitome, from its visuals to its music, of cool, and it's something that the film only expands upon further through its story.

Most importantly though despite not a word uttered, and whilst McQueen won't appear on screen for another seven minutes, the tone of Bullitt is there, fully formed, from the moment Johnny Ross makes his escape, soon to wind up in front of a Senate comittee, care of career-minded senator, Walter Chalmers. There's just the small matter of protecting this small-time crook in a dingy hotel for the weekend, and this task falls to Bullitt and his team to protect Ross. This plan to protect the witness promptly unravel when a duo of gunmen break into the hotel room, and shoot both Stanton, Bullitt's subordinate, and Ross, before making their escape, with both rushed to hospital. Whilst Bullitt, now being held responsible for the attack, manages to foil a second attack on Ross by the gunman, but is forced to turn to more extreme measures, when the gangster dies of his wounds, and with a mounting papertrail and a mysterious phone call to San Mateo, the case begins to complicate.

What the opening half of Bullitt is, up till the film's most famous moment, in which it enters the annals of action movie history with perhaps the single greatest car-chase in cinema, is an exercise in remarkable cinematic veracity and detail. McQueen's introduction is not that of the great action hero, but that of an everyman, introduced to Chalmers at a function, and whose slow evolution into the action hero are more the reasoned strategy of a seasoned officer rather than the typical action movie maverick, making leaps of judgement only when pushed into a corner. Around him, the rest of the film is remarkably grounded; the hospital in which Bullitt finds himself protecting Ross, a real-life hospital, with real nurses and doctors taking part in the surgery scenes, with, thanks to the small and lightweight Arriflex camera, barely a single sequence of Bullitt shot on soundstages.

As McQueen himself noted at the time, Bullitt is less a theatrical film, more "a film about reality". We see Bullitt balance his superiors' demands against the needs of the case, as well as the grubbiness of being a police officer, from the down-at-heel hotel that Ross is found in, to his girlfriend's concern at the world that her lover finds themselves in, describing it as a veritable sewer. There is, for all the action sensibilities of Bullitt, a groundedness, a grittiness, a morality and a concern for its female characters, and, yes, a grubbiness that many of the noirish films of the late 60s and early 70s lack,

All of this, though, is simply build-up, a ratcheting up of tension, to one moment. For, at the centire of the film, stretching across ten minutes of breathless action, roaring engines, and the masterful editing of Frank P. Keller, comes the gold standard of action chases. It is in the chase, as Bullitt finally tracks down and confronts the duo of gunman and getaway driver, that Bullitt crosses the line between simply a good film and an excellent one. Our duo of villains pull up in their black Dodge Charger, a sublime shorthand for the menace these two exude, having tailed Bullitt. He gets into his Ford Mustang, and Schifrin's score starts up, a low tick of cymbals and brass as the camera tracks him, and then the duo's car in the foreground. And then the film does something masterful, the Arriflex allowing the camera to go into their car, Bullitt now seen from their pursuing vehicle as things gather pace, the cars roaring up the steep hills of San Francisco. For a moment, we-and they-lose Bullitt, before, perfectly framed in the car's mirror, he swings back into view. The tension builds. Builds, as Bullitt trails them.

A quick cut to the duo doing up their seatbelts, a perfect sense of rising action. Until, without warning, the Dodge accelerates, swerves left, and the score drops out to be replaced by a symphony of roaring engines and squealing tyres as the chase barrels through downtown San Franscisco in a spectacular game of cat and mouse. It's visereral. It's real. We see, we hear the chase, the thud and crash as cars barrel down slopes, we see McQueen and the duo's driver, stunt driver Bill Hickman, spin the wheel, and at points struggle to keep their car on the road-several of the impacts, most notably the tank-slapper where the Dodge hites the camera car, are utterly for real.

But even in the chase itself, with gunman Mike (played by Paul Genge) itself has growing tension, so that by the time the firearm becomes involved, there is an inevitability to death and chaos, with the Dodge finally pushed too far, hitting the barrier, and plowing into a petrol station that promptly explodes. It is, simply, one of cinema's greatest car chases, a thrilling benchmark for the entire concept in the medium in cinema, and its tyremarks can be seen everywhere from the French Connection to The Fast and Furious.

Whilst the rest of Bullitt never quite lives up to this chase-even the film's denoument in which its central conspiracy masterfully unravels in a tense airport chase that sees Bullitt chase a suspect across a runway and through a crowded airport feels like a runner-up to the car chase-it is still a remarkable slice of late 60s neo-noir, smartly told, and with a remarkable sense of veracity in its depiction of procedural detective work. It is, simply, a slice of cinematic cool from top to bottom, from score to action scenes, with one of the greatest actors of the period at his very best

Rating: Highly Recommended

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