Bullitt

Kevin pointed out that we seem to have a pretty bimodal distribution of films in terms of release year – we’ve screened a lot of recent films (say from the ’80s onward) and a good number of films from the ’50s and earlier, but not a whole lot of films from the ’60s and ’70s.  And while he can’t possibly even out that distribution with a single film, he can at least take some baby steps towards it by showing something like, say, 1968’s Bullitt, a gritty cop film directed by Peter Yates.

Buzz off, kid!

Steve McQueen, who evidently loved being a race car driver as much as being an actor, plays the consummate too-cool-for-school police detective, the kind who is willing to break all the rules to get his man.  At the time, this might even have been a pretty original character but unfortunately it’s a terribly hackneyed trope at this point – and on top of that Bullitt is the clear inspiration for a piece of absolute cinematic dreck called Mitchell, which is a somewhat mixed blessing, because as horrid as Mitchell was, it became one of the most famous (and best) episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000.  So…thanks, Bullitt?

Smug enough?  Should we try that again?

The plot is relatively simple.  I hate to say that – let me explain.  Bullitt is the type of film that, if you are drinking heavily while you watch it, the whole thing makes perfect sense.  So let me start out by giving you the ethanol-assisted plot summary.  There’s an aspiring politico by the name of Chalmers who has secured a mob informant to testify before a Senate subcommittee in San Francisco, which seems totally normal if you’ve had enough to drink to forget that the U.S. Senate is located in Tallahassee, not San Francisco.  The informant, Johnny Ross, has been flown in from Chi-town and Bullitt and his team has been assigned to provide protective custody for him.

Dooming Linda Evans to the same fate

But of course, while Bullitt is off fooling around with his girlfriend Jacqueline Bissett, whose job seems to be modeling shirts that are just long enough to avoid showing any of her naughty bits, some goons break into the Ross’s hotel room and blast it up with buckshot.  They end up getting a pretty good piece of one of Bullitt’s team as well as Ross, but remember, shotguns don’t kill people, they only maim them severely.

Well, at least they don’t kill the cop, the saving of whose leg becomes a major plot point for about five minutes before the movie decides to completely forget he ever existed.  Ross, on the other hand, succumbs to his injuries and Bullitt sets out, undaunted by the complete lack of evidence, to find the killers.

Not even Bono could get away with those mutton chops

Bullitt gets some info about Ross having stolen $2M from the mob out of his totally-not-ironic mob contact.  This dude is glorious.  I want to declare him the Most Seventies Thing Ever but this movie was made in 1968.  I don’t know how to feel about this.  But seriously, this guy was in the movie for like 25 seconds, which is such a waste.  Why could this dude not be Bullitt?  I mean, Steve McQueen, sure, he’s pretty awesome, but this dude.

I love the smell of cabfare in the morning.  Smells like…income.

Bullitt also gets some info from a taxi driver, who is BOBBY DUVALL.  This is before Bobby Duvall’s breakout, so he was basically Boo Radley and a bunch of roles in minor movies and TV before Bullitt.  Sure, it was another four years before his really big break in The Godfather, but I’m going to give the taxi-driver-in-Bullitt role credit for that.  And how could you not?  I mean, this guy spends his entire life driving a taxi but remembers exactly where a particular random fare went and how many phone calls he made from the pay phone.  I mean, you deserve to be a consigliere if you can do that.

You are NOT going to beat me to the last parking spot at Candlestick!

Anyway, with Bullitt now firmly on the scent of the guys who killed Ross, they decide to stake him out and chase him down in his car.  Amazingly, Bullitt turn the tables on the whole situation and starts chasing them, which makes no sense and perfect sense at the same time.  This car chase scene is notable for several reasons.  One, it is obviously one of the best car chase scenes in movie history, and they didn’t have to have a CGI superhero scrape his hand through the asphalt to simulate an e-brake turn in order to pull that off.  This chase scene was no tricks, no frills, balls-to-the-wall camera work, and the stunt guys driving the cars?  Oh, yeah, that was Steve McQueen.  (Well, he did some of it, but there was a true stunt guy as well.)  Two, the scene does not occur at the climax of the film, which is really kind of confusing.  Nowadays, a huge car chase means the movie is over.  But this happens at more or less the midpoint of our feature.  Third, the 1968 Ford Mustang 390 GT 2+2 Fastback has a way better suspension than the 1968 Dodge Charger 440 Magnum.  I mean, it’s not even close.

The car chase ends with the bad guys going big boom into a gas station, so they’re pretty much unidentifiable.  But Bullitt ends up tracking down a woman that Ross had called down in a hotel in San Mateo, who has now been garroted, and begins to piece everything together.

Sir, we have NOT had a water landing!  The inflatable slides have not deployed!  Sir!

Evidence adds up, and Bullitt figures out that the dead “informant” wasn’t Ross at all, but was instead a random dupe and the real Ross is hopping a flight to Europe.  There’s a huge chase scene at SFO that might in fact be better than the car chase (because how many chase scenes have your actual movie star going between the landing gear of a taxiing 747?) and Ross ends up getting shot and killed, mystery solved, The End.

So I mean, that’s the movie.

But, like, some of the movie doesn’t make a lot of sense.  There are a couple of moments that, as best as I could tell, were just completely unexplained by the narrative.  For one, how in the world does Bullitt find the cab driver that was driving the fake Ross around earlier?  How many cabs are there in San Francisco?  And you manage to find the right one, like, right away?  Nah, bro.  And for another, how in the world did they figure out who the woman was that the fake Ross called?  I mean, at least explain that you had access to the phone records or something.  Maybe I missed it.  I dunno.  And of course, after the real Ross bails out of an airplane – he has a pistol!  How in the hell did he get that onto the plane?  Did they just not give a crap about metal detectors in 1968?  …as a matter of fact, there weren’t metal detectors in airports until 1972.  OK, movie, you win that one.

But even then, if you think about the fundamental underlying premise of the movie, I’m not sure it makes much sense.  We’ve got a dude who has stolen money from the mob, and his plan is a bit convoluted.  You know, some of it is almost brilliant, but just not quite.  It seems that the plan is to have his body double murdered so that the mob thinks he’s dead.  OK, that makes sense.  But the cover here is that he’s going to be testifying against the mob, and the problem here is that there hasn’t been any public announcement about his testimony.  At the same time that his confederates have killed the fake Johnny Ross, the real mob is still looking for him in Chicago.  So the question for the mob is going to be: who killed him?  We didn’t kill him!  We didn’t know he was even there!  They’ll figure this out, right?  I mean, Bullitt figured it out.

But hey, fun movie.