Peter Yates’ first American movie is memorable less for its plot – about a San Francisco cop trying to track down a crucial witness in a Mafia trial – than for its dramatic use of the city’s locations and for an exhilarating extended car-chase. (McQueen hired Yates – formerly a manager for Stirling Moss – to direct after seeing the car-chase in his film Robbery.) An influential landmark in action cinema.
Geoff Andrew, bfi.org.uk
A contemporary review
The slogan would again appear to be Go West Young Man. Almost every month, it seems, some striking new ‘first’ film from the other side of the Atlantic comes from a director who has achieved only modest or intermittent success in Britain. Bullitt may not have quite the impact of Point Blank, but it is a highly creditable effort as a relatively young English director’s first American film. Indeed, even from a native American the sense of involvement in the milieu and the environment would have been remarkable, and despite the apparently unhelpful background of RADA and provincial repertory, Peter Yates also appears to have assimilated that special brand of violence which most Europeans think of as specifically American. And perhaps because not a native Californian, he has also succeeded in presenting a picture of that Mecca of the new moviemakers, San Francisco, which is at once fresh and believable.
Basically, Bullitt is a well-made but fairly conventional and slightly overlong film about the duel between an incorruptible policeman and a politically ambitious district attorney for possession of the key prosecution witness in a racket-busting hearing. What distinguishes it from many of its kind is the vivid sense of background, and of life going on all around. Since both star and director have professional motor-racing experience – and a car chase was the high spot of Yates’s previous film, Robbery – it is perhaps not surprising that the long car chase in Bullitt is among the most exciting ever filmed. Similarly, the initial shotgun slaying of the supposed witness in the run-down hotel is perhaps the most violent screen killing since one character was literally blasted out of his boots in the The Left Handed Gun.
But Yates’s greatest success is with the sequences at the hospital and at San Francisco airport. In the intensive-care unit to which the dying witness and his badly injured police bodyguard are taken, and where a bitter three-cornered battle of wits is waged between the detective, the suave politician and the grey-haired professional killer bent on completing a bungled contract, one is vividly aware of the normal hospital routine proceeding all around. Rarely have blood-drips and all the frightening impedimenta of modern surgery been put to more dramatic or seemingly casual use or the audience been made so aware of the very smells of a surgical ward. And the final sequences at the airport convey both the bustle and feel of muted expectancy common to the concourses of all great airports, and the beauty of the great jets manoeuvring by night on the runways among which Bullitt and his prey play out the last deadly game of hide-and-seek. Throughout, the director’s controlled and economical use of violence is equalled by the sureness with which he conveys the atmosphere of violence about to erupt, especially in crowded public places. There is one shot of a closed door about to burst open to permit bloody murder which is frightening in the intensity it engenders.
Jack Ibberson, Sight and Sound, Winter 1968/69
BULLITT
Directed by: Peter Yates
©: Warner Bros.-Seven Arts, Solar Productions
Production Company: Solar
Presented by: Warner Bros.-Seven Arts
Executive Producer: Robert E. Relyea
Produced by: Philip D’Antoni
Unit Manager: Joe L. Cramer
Production Manager: Jack N. Reddish
Assistant Directors: Tim Zinnemann, Daisy Gerber
Assistant Director: Walter Hill *
Script Supervisor: Marshall Wolins
Screenplay by: Alan R. Trustman, Harry Kleiner
Based on the novel Mute Witness by: Robert L. Pike
Director of Photography: William A. Fraker
Special Effects: Sass Bedig
Film Editor: Frank P. Keller
Assistant Editor: Ralph H. Martin
Art Director: Albert Brenner
Set Decorators: Philip Abramson, Ralph S. Hurst
Costume Designer: Theadora Van Runkle
Costumes: Alan Levine
Make-up: Emile Lavigne
Hairstylist: Pat Davey
Steve McQueen’s Hairstylist: Jay Sebring *
Titles by: Pablo Ferro Films
Colour by: Technicolor
Music by: Lalo Schifrin
Sound: John Kean
Stunt Co-ordinator: Carey Loftin
Stunt Double: Bud Ekins *
Cast
Steve McQueen (Frank Bullitt)
Robert Vaughn (Walter Chalmers)
Jacqueline Bisset (Cathy)
Don Gordon (Delgetti)
Robert Duvall (Weissberg)
Simon Oakland (Captain Bennett)
Norman Fell (Captain Baker)
George Stanford Brown (Dr Willard)
Justin Tarr (Eddy, the informer)
Carl Reindel (Stanton)
Felice Orlandi (Renick)
Vic Tayback (Peter Ross)
John Aprea (killer)
Robert Lipton (1st aide)
Ed Peck (Wescott)
Pat Renella (Johnny Ross)
Paul Genge (the hired killer)
Al Checco (desk clerk)
Bill Hickman (Phill)
USA 1968©
114 mins
Digital
* Uncredited
ART OF ACTION: CELEBRATING THE REAL ACTION STARS OF CINEMA
Big Screen Classics: The History of Action
Safety Last! + One Week
Mon 21 Oct 14:30; Tue 5 Nov 20:30; Sat 30 Nov
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior
Mon 21 Oct 18:20; Wed 27 Nov 20:50
Seven Samurai Shichinin no samurai
Mon 21 Oct 18:30; Sun 3 Nov 13:30; Sun 10 Nov 11:45; Sun 24 Nov 14:30
Hell Drivers
Tue 22 Oct 18:15; Thu 14 Nov 12:20; Sat 16 Nov 20:40
The Thief of Bagdad
Wed 23 Oct 14:30; Thu 31 Oct 12:20; Sat 9 Nov 12:30
Goldfinger 60th anniversary screenings
Wed 23 Oct 18:20 (+ intro by season programmer Dick Fiddy); Sun 10 Nov 18:40; Sat 23 Nov 18:20
Bullitt
Wed 23 Oct 20:40; Sun 3 Nov 16:25; Thu 21 Nov 14:30; Tue 26 Nov 20:45
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Thu 24 Oct 14:30 (+ intro by Bryony Dixon, curator, BFI National Archive); Sat 2 Nov 11:45; Sat 23 Nov 15:00
Enter the Dragon
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Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
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Battleship Potemkin Bronenosets Potyomkin
Sat 26 Oct 13:20; Thu 7 Nov 20:55; Tue 12 Nov 14:30
Captain Blood
Sun 27 Oct 12:45; Wed 6 Nov 18:10 (+ intro)
The Train
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Three the Hard Way
Wed 30 Oct 18:15 (+ intro by Ti Singh, BFI FAN season producer); Thu 7 Nov 12:30; Sun 17 Nov 16:10
Police Story Ging chaat goo si
Fri 15 Nov 18:00 (+ panel discussion with Action Xtreme); Tue 19 Nov 20:55; Thu 28 Nov 18:20
District B13 Banlieue 13
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Programme notes and credits compiled by Sight and Sound and the BFI Documentation Unit
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