The first lone-wolf cop story plays by the rules of the genre it spawned, featuring a charismatic, outsider type who carries a badge and an attitude directed just as much against the egos and hubris of his superiors as against the criminal element.
Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) is a detective lieutenant on the San Francisco police force who gets handed a "babysitting job" looking after a would-be Mob informant by ambitious politico Chalmers (Robert Vaughn). Things go wrong with an attempted hit that leaves the informant and his guard in intensive care and Bullitt on the wrong side of Chalmers, not to mention a pair of killer hoods who tool around in a Dodge Charger and have no respect either for stop signs or Mustangs.
"Bullitt" the movie is best-known for an automotive duel between the assassin duo and Bullitt, still championed by some as the greatest car chase in movie history. I think it's been lapped myself, though I admire the long sections of real-time churn-and-burn since it flies in the face of MTV-style fast cutting we know today. The hoods Bullitt chase look like insurance salesmen, but of course they were really stunt men, and with McQueen doing a good deal of his own stunt driving as well, there's a validity to the sequence that makes up for some slackness in the composition.
"Bullitt" is a better film for the things that occur around the car chase, not so much with the central mystery of Johnny Ross as with the scenes of Bullitt in his element, like making coffee, talking with his superiors, eating a sandwich. McQueen's acting was showcased better in films like "The Sand Pebbles," "The Cincinnati Kid," and even his final film "The Hunter," but his star power was never more in evidence than it was here, especially in the scenes he shares with Vaughn, who plays the role of a preppy hardass to perfection and gives both McQueen and the viewer a foil more evil than the real crooks in this picture.
Seeing Bullitt handle Chalmers' baiting is a real lesson in how less is more. There's a scene where a fingerprint check gives Bullitt the opportunity to let Chalmers have it, but instead of rounding on the jerk, he simply tells Chalmers the score as he makes for the door in one of the great underplayed lines ever filmed.
Verisimilitude is everything in "Bullitt," as director Peter Yates and screenwriters Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner present it. Long scenes are shot in operating rooms, morgues, and hotel-room crime scenes as a way of presenting what we are seeing as real in a way no other film did then and few have done since. Every shot, as Yates explains on his DVD commentary, was shot on a real location, and you feel like he got it all down exactly right, getting the right mix of style and drab reality. A shot cop moans while blood pulses through his wound, while a strangled woman is seen in such gory detail we understand another character's need to throw up over it. Throughout there's Bullitt as only McQueen could play him, saying the right line the right way, jumping in an ambulance to fix a problem, telling his gorgeous girlfriend (Jacqueline Bisset) "It's not for you, baby" in a way that comes off utterly cool rather than gratingly sexist.
I couldn't figure out what was going on with the crooks "the Organization" as they are dubbed since calling them the Mafia was seen as demeaning to a particular ethnic group not yet known for creating films like "The Godfather" or "GoodFellas" not until I watched "Bullitt" a second time, at which point I realized that wasn't so important. "Bullitt" has an annoying subtext of police work as dehumanizing, something Bullitt understands implicitly makes him a tool for the wrong sort of people. That was the year that was 1968, Chicago and all that, but the au currant anti-establishment notes do rankle.
But McQueen was a cinematic great, one who doesn't get as much attention today but proves here why his image is so enduring. Yates credits the clothes McQueen wears, but Yates himself, along with his writers, Vaughn, Bissett, and a terrific supporting cast led by Simon Oakland as Bullitt's tough-but-fair captain, create one of the great platforms for a movie tough guy ever built, a platform McQueen fills very, very well.
