Saturday, March 05, 2016

Bullitt

Bullitt, the classic 1968 film, stars Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, and Jacqueline Bisset. I sometimes think the women in movies like this are only present to add to the scenery. The film wouldn't have missed Bisset's absence.

trailer:



This is one of those movies everybody should see if only for that chase scene, the father of all chase scenes.

Roger Ebert describes the plot this way:
McQueen plays a San Francisco cop assigned as bodyguard to a syndicate witness. The witness gets shotgunned -in the most brutally direct 10 seconds of film I can remember- and McQueen becomes a political football. Robert Vaughn (better than usual) is the politician who puts the heat on, and it's up to McQueen to hide the victim's body until he can untangle the case.

It's a very tangled case, too. The beautiful thing is that Yates and his writers keep everything straight.
Rotten Tomatoes has a critics rating of 97%. Empire Online concludes: "Stlick, stylish and ineffably cool, this was perhaps McQueen's defining role. Also mention goes to the uncreditied star of the film; San Francisco."

7 comments:

  1. It's too bad I've never seen this film. I love car chases and remember the car chase from The French Connection, the only thing I remember from that movie (saw it on VCR years ago). Guess I'm going to have to find Bullitt somewhere, because it sounds great.

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    1. It's the film all those car chases date back to. The original inspiration. That's why I watched the movie :)

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  2. I have never warmed up to Steve McQueen for some reason. I find him wooden and uninteresting. Also, car films. I never enjoyed driving, have long ago forgotten what to do with a manual shift and can´t tell one brand from another. I often mistake our own car for other red cars... :-P Perhaps it´s some kind of dyslexia. That said, "Smokey and The Bandit" was funny, at least when I was 11. Mostly I think I liked the idea of running away from home and sitting in the front seat with a dog, saying cool rhymes over the radio and doing slightly naughty, but not really dangerous (or so it seemed), things. The innocence of youth..

    I should probably see "Bullit". I understand it is a classic and who knows, I may have matured. ;-)

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    1. or you could just watch that seminal car chase and not devote the time for the whole film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0vNvc9n1ikI That (the San Francisco) is the film's main claim to fame. McQueen is not one of my favorites, either.

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    2. Oh good! I´ll do that! Thanks.

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  3. Oh yes, I remember this one. I do like McQueen and of course anything that highlights San Francisco. Think it may be time to watch it again.

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    1. It has Robert Vaughn in it, which is reason enough for me to see it :)

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