Bullitt

Peter Yates' police thriller, Bullitt (1968) is strangely abstract.  Steve McQueen playing the eponymous protagonist is basically inert throughout the movie -- he ponders things and looks this way and that but doesn't have much to say and he is so still that he doesn't seem anything like the kind of frenetic action heroes that movies feature today.  The story is stripped down to a theorem:  a cop has to protect a witness, the witness is killed, and the cop, concealing the death of the witness from the bad guys, lures the villains into a confrontation in which they are destroyed.  The movie consists of preparations for three chases -- in one of them Steve McQueen pursues a killer on foot through a hospital and its environs; the second chase is the much-celebrated 11 minute automobile pursuit through San Francisco and its suburbs; the last chase takes place in the darkness at an airport with the hero and his prey darting about on runways as huge planes oblivious to them coast along the runways, taking-off or landing.  By modern standards, the movie is only modestly violent -- the witness and a cop are shot, two thugs die in the car chase, and another villain (and a hapless airport security cop) die at the end.  (A girl is found murdered as well).  Since the amount of bloodshed is limited, the film seems fairly rational -- it never succumbs to the sheer bloodlust that motivates most action films in the past thirty years and that renders them both unbelievable and farcical.  Furthermore, Yates' makes the killings realistic and shows the consequences of violence in some startlingly graphic and disturbing hospital scenes and, when Bullitt guns down the last bad man, the hero decorously covers the bloody corpse with his jacket.  Like the later police and gangster films of Jean-Pierre Melville, pictures that Bullitt emulates, the movie is tough, laconic, and without any interest in character at all.  The figures in the film are simply ciphers, men and women in motion against a carefully rendered cityscape.  For instance, Bullitt is gratuitously given a girlfriend, Jacqueline Bissett, but she has literally nothing to do in the movie except to occupy the hero's bed -- at one point, she briefly whines about the cop's standoffish ways, due she thinks to his being immured in the sewer of police-work.  But the dialogue goes nowhere and after reproaching her boyfriend she returns to his bachelor pad to sleep with him at the end of the movie.  The famous car chase remains intensely exciting and is, even, better than you remember it -- a combination of thrilling behind-the-wheel shots, pictures taken from in front and behind the speeding vehicles, and documentary-like fixed camera shots showing the cars shedding hubcaps and fenders as they careen around corners, clipping other vehicles and skidding wildly sideways.  The chase has a rhythm -- it starts slowly and builds to more and more frenzied action and there is a great moment when the bad guy driving the escape car -- he is wearing black driving gloves -- pauses to click-on his seatbelt.  Bullitt's design is heavily inflected by Pop Art -- the texture of the film is all glittering surfaces like a painting by James Rosenquist:  panes of glass awash with reflections, brightly shining chrome, the fuselage of planes gleaming in the night like tubes of neon.  In one scene, the camera is very low and we see a woman's black purse -- the polished leather on the purse glistens with reflected light; a tie-tack sparks like an acetylene torch.  This effect of continuous scintillation is accomplished by shooting the movie with very dark and lustrous blacks -- this strategy extends to the title character, Bullitt's bright eyes glitter with scintillation but his torso is always covered by a jet-black turtle-neck sweater.  At the time the movie was make, of course, police officers were not everyone's idea of heroes -- the movie addresses this issue by making Bullitt casually anti-establishment:  he bucks the demands of the smarmy politician played by an unctuous Robert Vaughn.  (This guy is so bad we see him reading the Wall Street Journal in the last scene).  The anti-establishment tone, in keeping with the North Beach setting, is inflected by cool jazz -- Bullitt is a kind of beatnik with a gun:  the soundtrack simmers with Lalo Schifrin's percussive music.  It's an excellent movie, surprisingly schematic and stripped-down and, even, aggressively minimalist.