Peter Yates has had an odd career. After A.D.’ing for Tony Richardson and directing a bunch of episodes of Danger Man and The Saint in the early 1960s, Yates seems to have gotten his big break with this film, largely on his ability to shoot a car chase (as demonstrated in 1967’s Robbery). Later, he scored with a late-70s trifecta of cable TV mainstays (Mother, Jugs, & Speed, The Deep, and Breaking Away), and dished out a fascinating mixed bag of films in the 1980s, the weirdest but not the least of which is Krull.
Of course, Yates’ great legacy is that car chase: nine and three quarter minutes of squealing tires, crunches of chassis on asphalt, and loud Mustang revving. This is indeed what the film is most remembered for — plus the fact that Steve McQueen, here more than ever, is the man.
But the rest of the film is pretty fantastic, too. Robert Vaughn is wonderfully weaselly as the blue-blood politician who threatens Bullitt with a little class warfare, and Jacqueline Bisset pops up now and again to (discreetly) have sex with our hero. When I was younger, I found the film as a whole to be rather dull and hard to follow and the resolution nonsensical. And while some of these impressions linger, it’s not hard to frame this film between two other great San Francisco cop movies: Boorman’s Point Blank (for its editing) and Siegel’s Dirty Harry (for its insights into the politics of policework).
by Leo Goldsmith | Source: Warner Home Video DVD
14 Mar 2007 2:50 PM | Comments (1)
I got the impression that McQueen had a lot of freedom to project his character the way he really wanted to. It added to the realism of the film and kept away from the cop stereo-types of the day.
marky
15 March 2007
9:18 PM