Bullitt (1968) Call it charisma, call it star power, call it Special Sauce.......whatever it was, Steve McQueen had it.......placing him in that select pantheon of actors who could lure moviegoers into theaters on their force of personality alone......
Or, to put it in blunt studio chief terms, they put asses in seats.
None of his roles as the terse, cool-under-fire hero solidified McQueen's 'King Of Cool' image better than 'Bullitt'......
As San Francisco police detective Frank Bullitt, McQueen moved with a quiet relentless grace as he methodically dealt with gangsters, hit men and a reptilian politico (Robert Vaughn using Bullitt to further his own career.......
Does the film still hold up as it hits its 50th Anniversary?
Oh yeh........
And we still enjoyed everything that made it a hit a half-century ago......Lalo Schifrin's pulsating jazz score........the rationally explainable plotline.......Robert Vaughn's unctuous, slimy political manipulator, who stood in stark contrast to the straightforward modest decency of McQueen's cop........and naturally, the now iconic car chase, McQueen's hair-rasing, nausea-inducing auto duel with the two hit men who foolishly attempt to stalk him......
Pardon us if we chuckle at the memory of a packed theater's collective gasp and laughter as McQueen barked out "Bullshit!" to one of Vaughn's oily, corrupt entreaties. Nobody had ever heard a major star in a major film say that word out loud......... (how times change....)
And unlike other fans of the film, we even liked Jacqueline Bisset in the thankless, throwaway role of McQueen's girlfriend........for no other reason than we got to watch the beyond beautiful Jacqueline Bisset in a movie that was already a favorite of ours.....even without her. So....talk about icing on the cake.
British director Peter Yates, imported to direct 'Bullitt' because of the equally brilliant car chase he filmed in his previous movie "Robbery", gave the movie a stylistic unobtrusive mood to match McQueen's character perfectly.......the film hums along at a measured pace, stunning audiences with sudden eruptions of violence and action.
50 years later, "Bullitt" remains a 5 star (****) FIND OF FINDS.
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