Peter Yates (1968)

Are you now or have you ever been interested in car chases?  No, but I went obediently to see Bullitt at the York Odeon sometime in the early 1970s.  My filmgoing life was in its infancy and my deference to other filmgoers’ views at its peak.  William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), a multi-Oscar winner, had featured what was reputedly the best car chase since Bullitt.  So I had to see that, too.  Half a century on, BFI has put together a three-month ‘Art of Action’ season, celebrating ‘high octane’ cinema.  I’d retained no memory of Bullitt, except for a vague recollection of cars going up and down hills, and nothing else in the programme appealed much.  I decided to give Peter Yates’s crime movie another go:  at least nowadays, if I’m very bored, I’ve no compunction about walking out of a film, however highly rated.  Bullitt revisited was a surprise:  I enjoyed it a lot.

Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) is a San Francisco police lieutenant.  Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) gives Bullitt and his team the job of keeping watch on Chicago mobster Johnny Ross during the weekend preceding Ross’s appearance as a witness before a Senate committee on organised crime, scheduled for the Monday.  It’s not too clear what Ross is expected to tell the committee or who Chalmers is exactly – a senator, an attorney? – but he clearly expects everyone to do as he says, which Bullitt refuses to do.  Ross is apparently shot in a San Francisco hotel room and dies in hospital.  To cut a long story short (it’s not worth getting into detail), it turns out that Ross has duped Chalmers, who in turn has instructed Bullitt to guard a man who’s a doppelganger for the mobster.  The real Johnny Ross (Pat Renella) means to fly out to Europe on the Sunday evening.  Bullitt and his right-hand man, Delgetti (Don Gordon), intercept the plane before it takes off from San Francisco.  Ross jumps out but Bullitt pursues him across the airfield and, in a confrontation at gunpoint in a crowded passenger terminal, shoots him dead.  Chalmers, thoroughly thwarted, is driven away.

The screenplay, by Alan R Trustman and Harry Kleiner, is adapted from a novel, Mute Witness, by Robert L Pike.  For the most part, the dialogue is tersely serviceable – Peter Yates puts it to good use anyway.  The main character’s name is almost a spoof – exactly what a tough, uncompromising cop should be called – but Steve McQueen makes him interesting.  McQueen’s high star wattage and minimal acting style are a strong combination here:  despite some outlandish plotting, Bullitt is professionally convincing.  McQueen never grandstands.  Well aware he’s not too expressive vocally, he does a great deal through his movements and with his eyes.  When Bullitt eventually tells Chalmers, ‘I don’t like you’, the line is such an understatement that it’s very funny.  Robert Vaughn had been developing a promising career in cinema by the time he was diverted to Man from U.N.C.L.E. duties, on the big screen and the small, for much of the 1960s.  Vaughn overdoes Chalmers’ nasty suavity – he’s too deliberately theatrical – although the film does need him, as Bullitt’s chief antagonist.  There’s some excellent naturalistic playing in smaller parts from Don Gordon and Robert Duvall, as a cab driver (shortly before the roles – in M*A*S*H (1970) ahead of The Godfather (1972) – that changed his life).

It doesn’t do to be too nostalgic about Bullitt.  These were the days when the hero’s girlfriend’s function was chiefly decorative.  Although the beautiful Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset) is supposedly an architect, it’s a while before she has anything more to do than lie in bed with Frank then saunter through his apartment in a pyjama jacket, asking if she can fix him breakfast (‘Just coffee’ is the reply).  When they drive to a hotel and discover the corpse of a garroted woman there, Cathy suddenly comes out with a morally urgent speech that’s all the more phony thanks to Jacqueline Bisset’s elocuted delivery.  Cathy tells Frank that he lives ‘in a sewer’ (an amusing coincidence hearing the phrase again so soon:  only two weeks ago, Zoë Saldaña’s lawyer character in Emilia Pérez described her professional life in the same terms).  She concludes with the agonised question, ‘What will happen to us in time?’  Frank’s gnomic reply – ‘Time starts now’ – appears to settle their differences.  At the end, when the crime action’s done, Frank returns to his apartment.  Cathy’s asleep in bed, waiting for him to join her there.

Even so, there’s so much in Peter Yates’s direction that is now refreshing.  The city’s steep gradients instantly became the film’s signature image but Yates creates plenty more absorbing settings – hospital corridors at dead of night, San Francisco streets coming to life next morning, a store where Bullitt picks up a stack of TV dinners (as if Cathy isn’t going to come up with something better …).  Descriptions of surgical and police procedure have a nearly documentary realness but there’s always more going on in them.  A forensic pathologist, examining the corpse that isn’t Johnny Ross, speaks his report into a dictaphone while taking the corpse’s fingerprints; Bullitt and Chalmers are at the margins of this morgue scene, saying nothing but telling us plenty through the looks they exchange.  Airline passengers caught up in the climactic shootout express their horror but continue to gawp at the bodies of Ross and the officer he shot dead moments before Bullitt shot him.  What’s striking is that, high octane as Bullitt‘s set pieces may be, these are far more rationed than the almost non-stop ‘highlights’ of a present-day film – which isn’t an action film as such – like Anora.  Lalo Schifrin’s score for Bullitt is pretty generic but Yates uses this also sparingly and effectively.  Although Frank P Keller no doubt won the Best Film Editing Oscar because of the car chase, his cutting of the film is often more unobtrusively excellent.

So how is the great chase, the hero’s car pursued by one with a pair of mob hitmen in it?  I can’t really judge except to say that I felt more involved in Bullitt‘s other, car-less chases – Bullitt running after an assassin down flights of hospital stairs or tracking Ross across the airfield to the terminal (although this goes on a bit too long).  A decade later, Peter Yates would make a better vehicular movie – about a cycle race, and real human relationships into the bargain.  I still prefer to remember Yates as the director of Breaking Away (1979) but Bullitt serves as a decent commemoration of his talents – and the talents of Steve McQueen.

21 November 2024