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Bullitt (1968)

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From Time Out Film Guide

A thriller which begins, as it means to go on, with a bang. Only minutes after the preliminaries are over, a door bursts open, a shotgun is fired, and the victim is blasted clean off the bed into the wall behind him. The plot, concerning the battle of wits between an honest cop and an ambitious politician for possession of the key witness in a Mafia exposé, is serviceable but nothing special. But the action sequences are brilliant, done without trickery in real locations (including a great car chase which spawned a thousand imitations) to lend an extraordinary sense of immediacy to the shenanigans and gunfights.

Author: TM

Time Out Film Guide

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Jubal Kinkaid said...

Posted on Feb 05 2010 01:05 Bullitt is Steve McQueen's finest film for the following reasons: 1) Playing a rebellious cop gives him the starring role that most closely fit his personna as an anti-hero. 2) Frank Bullitt is perhaps the finest acting performance of his career (though his one Oscar nominaton was for Navy sailor Jake Holman in "The Sand Pebbles). 3) The supporting cast is superb, from smarmy district attorney Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughan) and the assorted bad guys, to Lieutenant Bullitt's sidekick (Don Gordon) and his suuperior captains (Simon Oakland and Norman Fell), 4) The script is very tightly written. The movie starts on a Friday night and ends the following Monday morning. Most of the action is from Saturday night to Sunday night. 5) The musical score by Lalo Schifrin is fantastic, superbly highlighting every scene in which it is heard, especially, the music during the preliminary scenes to the classic car chase. 6) The car chase is a doozy, rightfully called "the grandfather of all movie car chases." 7) The site of almost all the action, San Francisco, is beautifully photographed.

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