This is the first in what will be an ongoing series where I watch the major movies that Quinten Tarantino (Q.T.) writes about in his acclaimed book Cinema Speculation, most of which will be new-to-me. Afterwards, I will read Q.T.’s chapter on the movie, and write about that. In doing this, I’m hopefully going to come to a better understanding, not only of the films themselves, but also of how I watch and react to movies.
Bullitt is one of the few movies that Tarantino writes about in his book Cinema Speculation that I’ve actually seen before, years ago (the others being Dirty Harry, which I saw as a teenager, and Taxi Driver, which is one of my all-time favorite movies). I don’t remember much about it other than Steve McQueen being very cool, and his car being even cooler, so it feels like a first-watch.
When Lt. Bullitt is tasked with protecting a witness from “The Organization,” things predictably go wrong, leaving the witness in critical condition and one of Bullitt’s colleagues in the hospital with a shotgun blasted leg. There are signs that this wasn’t a straightforward hit, and Lt. Bullitt becomes Hell-bent on getting to the bottom of it. What follows is a plot that is unmemorable and mostly feels unimportant, but that doesn’t matter much because the plot exists mostly as an excuse to stage great action/chase scenes, one of the most brilliant car chases ever committed to film, and to have Steve McQueen be the coolest motherfucker on the planet.
And it’s that coolness that might be to blame for my chilly reception. I find McQueen’s Bullitt to be so unaffected by the things going on around him, so seemingly unphazed by the world, that it leads me to feel similarly unphazed by most of the action of the movie. The stakes never feel very high, so even when I’m enjoying the various set pieces, I don’t find myself caring too much about their outcomes.
Still, it’s an incredibly will-made neo-noir action movie that contains a wonderful score, a memorable performance by Steve McQueen, and arguably the most legendary car chase sequence of all time, so it’s hard not to have a good time while watching Bullitt, but I think that it could have benefited from a tighter script. While I’m not usually the one to complain about plot (possibly the least important part of my enjoyment of a movie), something to heighten the action would have helped me get into its groove. To me, it doesn’t reach the heights of other neo-noirs that I’ve seen in my life, but it’s a thrilling and mostly entertaining movie.
I really enjoyed the on-location shooting, and the elements of a realistic procedural (the brief surgery scene is a stand out), because they help to break up the coolness of the movie, which permeates almost every scene. And with a plot that has such low stakes as this one, the distance that I felt from the characters kept me from feeling totally enthralled by this movie.
I do think that Lt. Bullitt’s coldness is meant to be a theme in the film. One scene stands out to me: Bullitt’s girlfriend has stumbled upon a murder that Bullitt’s is investigating, and she’s shaken up. They have a conversation where she confronts him on his coolness in the face of such horrors. She asks him if he lets any thing reach him. He lives in a “sewer” she tells him, “day after day,” and she is terrified that he doesn’t let any of it affect him. “That’s where half of it is, you can’t walk away from it,” he calmly tells her. She asks him how he “can be a part of it without becoming more and more callous,” and he just looks at her, with no real response. To the film’s credit, a lesser film would have used this to drive the point home—to have him break down or finally lose his cool, but it doesn’t. He’s as cool and as terse as ever. This scene serves as the one moment where the audience does Bullitt’s introspection for him, because we can’t possibly know what he is thinking.
Noir might be my favorite movie genre, and in my favorite noirs, there is a sadness that weaves its way through the plot—the sadness of a doomed, flawed would-be hero who is in over his head and rarely comes out on top in a cold, brutal world. Bullett is the opposite of that, which isn’t necessarily a knock against it, though it may explain why I didn’t find myself as invested as I usually do. McQueen has the effortlessly cool presence of the best noir leads, but his Bullitt doesn’t feel doomed—his coolness betrays a confidence that he will succeed despite the setbacks.
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After reading the chapter:
I’ll start off by saying that this is exactly the kind of stuff I wanted from a book about movies by Q.T. It’s very well-written and punchy, as you might expect, and also conveys an infectious passion for movies, as you also might expect. It’s a breezy mixture of the history of the movie along with very thoughtful analysis of the movie itself—along with some insights that you could only get from a movie director. If the rest of the book is as good as this first chapter, then it may go down as one of my favorite books about movies.
The chapter on Bullitt starts with some history about leading men in the ’60s. He compares the top American leading men (McQueen, Newman, and Beatty), to the middle tier leading men (Garner, Peppard, and Coburn), and explains their strengths against one another. McQueen, Q.T. concludes, was his coolness, as well as his “undeniable charisma,” which made him perfect for Bullitt.
Apparently, McQueen’s career was as successful as it was because his wife, Neile, was very perceptive about what would not just be good roles for Steve, but would also be good for his career (something, Q.T. notes, that Elvis’ movie career would have benefited from). Q.T. states that “The Importance of Neile McQueen to Steve’s success as a movie star can’t be overemphasized.” Steve hated reading—apparently, he got to the point where he would charge studios millions of dollars if they wanted him to actually read a script—so reading scripts was essentially Neile’s job and she was great at it. They would often argue about what movie would be best for his career, and she usually won.
I particularly enjoyed an anecdote from a conversation that Q.T. had with the legendary Walter Hill, wherein Hill talks about Steve’s greatness as a true MOVIE STAR—a good actor, but one who knew his limitations and how to give the audience exactly what they wanted from him. This is oppositional to, say, Paul Newman, who considered himself a serious “New York stage actor.”
What I enjoyed the most about this chapter is that it helps me to understand the context into which this movie came out. Q.T. writes about the state of cop movies at the time, and why Bullitt was so influential. While detectives and spies could be cool and sexy, cops in movies were usually shlubs who nobody wanted to identify with or root for. McQueen himself (at the time a bit of a hippie, and imagining McQueen as a Flower Child will never not be funny to me) didn’t want to play a cop, and he was worried that young people would turn away from him if he did.
Nevertheless, Nelie convinced him to do it, and the result, Q.T. argues, profoundly changed the world of modern American action movies. Compared to other cop/detective movies at the time, Bullitt is sleek and consistently thrilling, Q.T. argues, and constantly oozes style. And while I may have chaffed a bit at the lack of real stakes in the plot, Q.T. says that that doesn’t matter. While he agrees that the story is convoluted and forgettable, what matters is the how it all works in the “emotional movie sense.” We won’t remember the plot after the credits roll, but we will remember Steve being cool as a cucumber as he hits one roadblock after another, we will remember the chase through the hospital, we will remember the feeling of the movie, and we will remember Steve’s rad-as-hell Mustang.
And of course, we will remember that famous car chase through the streets of San Fransisco—today the movie’s main claim to fame. Q.T. acknowledges that this is a movie that has seemingly fallen out of favor, any movie lover will at least be familiar with that scene. But what makes the whole thing sing is Steve’s minimalistic performance. Q.T. writes that he “did nothing better than anybody,” and I can’t argue with that. While I can’t quite find myself agreeing with Q.T. when he says “As pure cinema, (Bullitt) is one of the best directed films ever made,” I can’t exactly disagree with him either. This chapter made me want to watch it again, with a greater understanding of the context of its release, and with a new sense of what to pay closer attention to, which is about as high a praise as I can give to a work of film criticism.
The Turnip Green 