Bullitt

The Steve McQueen "cool" persona was reinforced with the release of Bullitt in 1968. He plays an unflappable police lieutenant who has an almost Zen calmness, even as he's roaring down Lombard Street in a Mustang.

The film was directed by Peter Yates in the kind of gritty style that would dominate police dramas in the 1970s. Set in San Francisco, it has smarmy Robert Vaughn as a local politician enlisting the police to babysit a witness set to testify in a Senate hearing on organized crime. McQueen handles the case, but things go wrong when the witness himself allows gunmen to enter his hotel room and a cop gets shot. Vaughn wants McQueen's hide, but the cool one's captain (the steady Simon Oakland) backs up his man.

This film is best remembered today, and perhaps was best known at the time, for a centerpiece car chase, with McQueen behind the wheel of a Mustang, chasing bad guys in a Dodge Charger up and down the hills of Frisco. The scene is perhaps the best car chase ever put on film, and was the prototype for many to follow. It still holds up today, and Yates and his editor (Frank P. Keller, who won an Oscar for his work) wring everything possible out of the situation. It begins quietly, with McQueen noticing he is being tailed. He ends behind the villains, and the chase is on. Much of it was shot from a P.O.V., so there's a thrill-ride aspect to it that gets the juices pumping, and you'll wince thinking about the abuse those shock absorbers are taking. You can even forgive that the cars pass the same VW Beetle three or four times.

The rest of the film is decent if not earth-shattering. There's a certain procedural tone to it, especially in an extended sequence early on in a hospital, where McQueen waits to hear about the condition of one of his officers. He waits, has a sandwich, listens calmly to Vaughn's invective, quietly considers the facts of the case. He's not in any particular hurry, and neither is the movie.

The obligatory romance has McQueen involved with Jacqueline Bisset, which seems tacked on. Her big scene is yelling at McQueen because he deals with a murdered woman without emotion. I'm not sure what her point was--does she want to date a policeman who would fall to pieces with every tragedy? And he is Steve McQueen, after all. He's not an emoter. She is nice to look at, though.