January 1, 2009: Bullitt
It’s a total embarrassment that I had never seen Bullitt (1968) before. I mean, I’ve had literally my whole life to get around to it. I like Steve McQueen, I like detective movies, I was raised on muscle cars and even owned an old Dodge Charger, and yet I had never bothered to sit down and actually watch this movie. Mind you, I have seen the legendary San Francisco car chase many times (often considered along with the New York one in The French Connection to be the two greatest movie car chases of all time). I had always gathered that the movie itself was well-respected, so the time came to see what it’s all about.
Steve McQueen was in the heart of his career, in his late 30s and thus still young enough to be a sex symbol, but old enough to carry off grizzled/experienced roles rather than just boyish heroes. He plays Frank Bullitt, a San Francisco detective assigned along with two others to guard a prisoner who is about to testify as an FBI witness against an organized crime ring. In my notes written after the viewing and before my review, I summed up the plot more or less as “three good men guarding a bad man who’s becoming good, and then two very bad men make things worse”. I think that’s a fitting summary, since there’s a suitable amount of confusion over who is who and whether their intentions are good or bad, and ultimately it doesn’t particularly matter, since it seems that the journey is considered more important. When things go wrong, McQueen takes his unconventional approach to figuring out what happened, battles with his battling superiors, and in the end, he finds the answers.
Director Peter Yates appears to have been a yeoman director through the decades, bouncing around in the 1970s with Mother, Jugs and Speed (a particular favourite of mine starring Bill Cosby, Racquel Welch, Harvey Keitel and Larry Hagman) and The Deep (Nick Nolte and Jaqueline Bisset). I can’t say that I know him for any particular style. Cinematographer William Fraker has been around for decades, with notable titles in the 1960s and 1970s such as Rosemary’s Baby, Heaven Can Wait and 1941. I definitely noticed the cinematography in this film (in a good way!), with a number of strange shots and strange angles, and I think it really adds to the psychedelic style here in this 1968 film.
The story was confusing enough that we went back to review the opening scenes, which is something I often like to do in order to deepen my understanding of a film, since the opening scenes come across a lot differently when you know who the characters are and why they are saying what they say in the first minutes of the film. It helped to clarify which loose endings really were that way, and which ones we simply hadn’t connected before, but as I mentioned earlier, I’m not sure that it’s particularly important.
One thing that struck me about the car chase is that while I’ve enjoyed it on its own for years, I’m not really sure that it fits into the movie as a whole – it seemed kind of tacked on, and didn’t fit with the tone of the rest of the story. It’s unfortunate, and while it doesn’t seriously detract from the whole, either the movie or the car chase would need to change significantly to make them fit together, which would leave us with a whole different experience. I may need to do some reading about this and see whether this feeling is common.
This movie is definitely a product of its time, and detective movie conventions have changed through the years, but this is a worthwhile story made better by an interesting visual style, the commanding presence of Steve McQueen, and a maybe-superfluous car chase.
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