Cinema Speculation

Bullitt

(1968)

Along with Paul Newman and Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen was the biggest of the younger male movie stars of the sixties. The UK had its share of exciting young leading men like Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Albert Finney, and Terence Stamp, but of the young sexy guys in America—that were also genuine movie stars—it was McQueen, Newman, and Beatty. On the next level down was James Garner, George Peppard, and James Coburn. But for the most part, anytime one of them got a picture, it was because one of the top three turned it down. Producers wanted Newman or McQueen, they settled for George Peppard. They wanted McQueen, they settled for James Coburn. They wanted Beatty, they settled for George Hamilton. James Garner was actually popular enough to get scripts from time to time that weren’t covered with the top three’s fingerprints, but not often.

The next level down was up and coming leading men like Robert Redford, George Segal, and George Maharis, and pop stars like Pat Boone and Bobby Darin (who in the sixties actually had legit movie careers). In fact, if he had ever taken his movie career seriously, the young movie star leading man who could have truly given the three actors at the top a run for their money was Elvis Presley. But Elvis was a prisoner of both Col. Tom Parker and his own success. Elvis made two movies a year and none of them ever lost money. Now, not all those Elvis movies were bad. Some were better than others. But it’s safe to say they weren’t real movies, they were “Elvis Presley movies.”*

But one of the things that made Steve McQueen so popular in the sixties, along with his king of cool persona and his undeniable charisma, was that of the top three actors (Newman, McQueen, and Beatty), McQueen did better movies.

Once McQueen became a movie star with The Great Escape, he made a string of movies that were all pretty damn good. In the sixties the only real dud in his filmography post–The Great Escape is Baby the Rain Must Fall. And that’s mostly due to the ridiculous sight of Steve trying to play a folk singer. Whereas Paul Newman for his whole career did an incredible amount of lousy movies mixed in with some iconic ones. I mean, some of the movies Newman agreed to do over the years are really baffling. I suspect he just wanted to get out of the house. After Splendor in the Grass, none of Beatty’s films are worth a damn before Bonnie and Clyde (okay, maybe Lilith). But the material McQueen chose to do—compared to the other two—was consistently of a higher quality.

But the reason McQueen’s material was superior wasn’t due to the fact that the actor was poring over all the material available and demonstrating his uncanny ability to choose projects. McQueen didn’t like reading. It’s doubtful he ever read a book of his own volition. He probably never read a newspaper unless there was a story about him in it. And he only read scripts when he had to. It wasn’t that he couldn’t read. He wasn’t illiterate. Neile McQueen, his first wife, told me, “He read car magazines.”

And it wasn’t that he wasn’t smart. He could talk to you about engine displacement, how to break apart the carburetor of a motorcycle, or discuss armaments until you couldn’t listen anymore.

He just didn’t like reading.

So who read the material?

Neile McQueen.

The importance of Neile McQueen to Steve’s success as a movie star can’t be overemphasized.

It was Neile who read the scripts. It was Neile who narrowed down the material. It was Neile who was good at choosing material that would be best for Steve. Steve’s agent, Stan Kamen, would read ten scripts that were being offered, then narrow that down to five and send those off to Neile. She’d read those five scripts, write a synopsis on the material, narrow it down to the two she liked best, and then tell Steve the stories and explain her reasons why she liked them for him. Which would usually end up in him reading the one Neile liked the most.* Now of course the director was important, how much they were paying him, the location they were shooting the film at—all of these things were important. But so was Neile weighing in. Naturally, directors who worked with Steve before—that he liked—got preferential treatment. But if Neile didn’t like the script, it was an uphill battle. And it was thanks to Neile’s good taste and her keen understanding of both her husband’s ability and his iconic persona that she steered her husband, starting with The Cincinnati Kid, into the biggest winning streak of the second half of the sixties (a Neile McQueen is what Elvis needed).

Neile was also aware of something that action director maestro Walter Hill told me about McQueen. Hill worked twice as 2nd AD with Steve on both The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt and then later when he was a screenwriter he wrote The Getaway.

Hill told me, “Quentin, one of the things you would have liked about Steve is that while Steve was a good actor, he didn’t see himself as just an actor.* Steve saw himself as a MOVIE STAR. It was one of the most charming characteristics about Steve. He knew what he was good at. He knew what the audience liked about him and that’s what he wanted to give them.”

Walter said, “I really admired Steve. He was the last of the true movie stars.”

And it’s true, McQueen didn’t want to bury himself under layers of characterization, or wear false beards that changed his appearance (a la Paul Newman in The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean or Robert Redford in Jeremiah Johnson). When he did movies, he wanted to do cool movie star things in these movies. He didn’t want to do movies where anybody else had a better role than him. He didn’t want to share the screen, and he always wanted to come out on top. McQueen knew his audience, and he knew they paid to see him win.

I asked Neile McQueen how the film Bullitt came about. She told me Steve had just made a deal with Warner Bros.-Seven Arts to back his film production company, Solar Productions. And that was their project that Warner’s wanted to start the association with. Neile wanted Steve to do Bullitt too. Bullitt was coming after Steve’s biggest hit, The Thomas Crown Affair, and Neile thought, “It would be a good change of pace for him. In Thomas Crown he was a robber. Now he’ll be a cop.”

Everybody wanted McQueen to do it but McQueen. “It took him forever to say yes. He took so long agreeing to do it,” Neile said. “Jack Warner would call up the house and scream into the phone in my ear. And then I’d scream at Steve ‘Just do the damn thing!’”

McQueen was famous for taking a long time to commit to projects, but the reason for his trepidation on the cop picture was his embrace of the flower-child counterculture. The actor started sporting love beads around his neck and wearing more hippie-inspired clothing. As Neile chuckled, “Steve had been practicing free love for years. So now it was a philosophy, he was all for it.”

She explained, “Steve wanted to be one with the flower children. And they hated the cops. He said, they call the cops ‘pigs.’ I can’t play a ‘pig.’”

Walter Hill also described this to me: “Steve felt a mysterious kind of connection with his audience. He felt they were younger and hipper than the normal movie star’s. He knew they cared about the clothes he wore and the things he did in a movie. The exact cut of his blue jeans. He thought his audience was into these kind of cool details.”

And Neile remembered Steve saying: “If I make this movie as a cop, my fans’ heads would spin.”

In the book Steve McQueen: Star on Wheels, author William Nolan related that Steve’s daughter Terry gave him a string of hippie love beads as a birthday gift. Nolan wrote, “He liked them so much he actually considered using the beads in a trade ad for Bullitt.” Love beads and a gun. A symbol of the hip detective.

Eventually McQueen put Bullitt into production as a Solar picture with Warner Bros.-Seven Arts handling distribution. The end result was not only Steve McQueen’s biggest hit, but a zeitgeist smash, and finally McQueen surpassing his greatest rival, Paul Newman. The way Dirty Harry (which Steve later passed on) took the already iconic Clint Eastwood and gave him a new level of Clint-specific iconography, is what the chic cool-dude, slow-boil, fast-driving Frank Bullitt did for McQueen.

Bullitt also changed the cop film genre, and later cop shows on TV for good. Thanks to James Bond, it was secret agents that were the cool cats. Even private eyes, like Paul Newman as Harper, Frank Sinatra as Tony Rome, Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly, and George Peppard as P.J., were allowed to dress better, live in swankier digs, and generally have fun. But movies about cops were all very somber, serious, and frankly a drag. The movies were all the same, the cops were all the same, and they all dressed the same in their cheap dark suits and ties, with their porkpie hats and their trench- or raincoats. Frank Sinatra in The Detective, Sidney Poitier in They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, Richard Widmark in Madigan, and George Peppard in Pendulum were literally interchangeable. They all could have jumped ship on their films and taken over the lead on any of the other ones without anybody noticing the difference.

Maybe Poitier playing Madigan might have drawn some attention—due to the actor’s nice-guy image—but that’s why it could have been interesting, rather than snarling Widmark giving another in his never-ending line of snarling performances. But everything about those movies was the same. They all could have been costumed by the same costume designer, they could have rented the cars from the same garage, the supporting actors (Ralph Meeker, Harry Guardino, Jeff Corey, Jack Klugman, James Whitmore, Richard Kiley) could have all swapped parts with each other, and the scripts could have been written by the same screenwriter and adapted from the same book. The cases they were involved in all dealt badly with something considered provocative in the late sixties. And they all struggled to have slightly more rough-sounding street dialogue (a struggle they’d lose). And almost comically, all these sourpuss cops seemingly had the same dissatisfied wife at home (Inger Stevens, Lee Remick, Barbara McNair, and Jean Seberg).

Enter Steve McQueen’s Frank Bullitt.

Bullitt is introduced to the audience waking up in the morning—having gone to bed at five—in snazzy pajamas he could have borrowed from Hugh Hefner. Bullitt doesn’t have a dissatisfied wife, he has a very satisfied hot-piece-of-ass girlfriend in the guise of Jacqueline Bisset. When you see the police detective officially on the job—meeting with Robert Vaughn—he too is wearing a suit and tie, but a suit and tie that actually fit. And throughout the rest of the movie, Bullitt’s wardrobe consists of one chic outfit after another.*

Neile said, “Steve had fabulous taste. If he wore a pair of jeans in a movie, he’d have those jeans washed a hundred times.”

Peter Yates’ film doesn’t quite have the same zeitgeist position it enjoyed through the last decades of the twentieth century. While a lot of people born since 2000 may have heard of it, and they probably have heard about its famous car chase, that doesn’t mean they’ve seen it. I’m old enough to have actually seen Bullitt at the cinema when it came out. Which means I saw it at six. I don’t remember the movie. I remember the car chase. And that’s what most people usually remember about Bullitt. But they also remember how cool Steve McQueen was as Frank Bullitt, his cool clothes, his cool haircut, and his cool Ford Mustang. If they had a sense of the movie, they also might remember Lalo Schifrin’s terrific jazzy score (the type of score Quincy Jones tried to do for years and always failed miserably at). The one thing they don’t remember is the story. Bullitt does have a story. But it’s not a memorable story, nor does it have anything to do with what you respond to in the movie.

So for most people who haven’t seen the movie in five or six years, even though they’ve seen it a few times before, if you asked them to describe the plot of Bullitt, they couldn’t do it. The comedian Robert Wuhl once told me, “I’ve seen Bullitt four times and I couldn’t tell you what the plot’s about. All I know is it has something to do with Robert Vaughn.”

But strangely, in the case of the film Peter Yates made, this isn’t a negative observation. In fact a case could be made it’s a mark of the film’s inner integrity. All those other cop pictures I mentioned spend all their time telling us boring stories nobody in the audience gives two shits about. They populate their boring movies with dull characters that are meant to add depth but create only apathy. They bore us with scene after scene that illustrates the lead cop’s dismal life, or one plot exposition scene after another about a murder nobody gives a fuck about.

We don’t give a shit who killed the homosexual in The Detective, we don’t care who killed the hooker in They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, we don’t give a flying fuck what happens to Madigan’s gun, and we know exactly who killed Peppard’s wife in Pendulum, and we can’t believe it takes the movie as long as it does to figure it out.

Yet since Yates cares so little about the crime story at the center of Bullitt, it suggests he knows we don’t care either, and that suggests a bohemian hipness that was unusual in a Hollywood crime movie. A light Hitchcockian thriller could ultimately be laissez-faire about the McGuffin the film’s characters chase one another over, but not a violent-bloody-cop picture.

For the record, the plot, taken loosely from Robert L. Pike’s novel Mute Witness, deals with San Francisco cop Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) and his partner Delgetti (Steve’s pal Don Gordon), who are given an assignment by the smarmy assistant district attorney named Chalmers (a deliciously oily Robert Vaughn) to guard his witness, Johnny Ross (Walter Hill regular Felice Orlandi), for the weekend. Chalmers wants Ross to testify at a big commission against organized crime Monday morning. In fact he’s the publicity-seeking A.D.A.’s big star witness. So a lot of emphasis is put on keeping him alive through the weekend. But the location that was chosen to stash Ross is compromised. While one of Bullitt’s men sits in the hotel room guarding Ross, two hit men, one with a shotgun, appear at the door and blast the cop and the witness. The witness soon dies in the hospital. But Bullitt covers up his death—spiriting his corpse away from the hospital—to convince the killers that Ross is still alive so that they’ll try again before the weekend’s out. Meanwhile he has to dodge Vaughn’s D.A. Chalmers and his powerful friends in the department who want Bullitt to produce the witness they think is still alive. Now just me writing that out sounds like a pretty nifty plot. And it is. But I just took more time explaining it than Yates does in telling the story of the movie.

I’m exaggerating. But only a little.

Even Neile McQueen laughed about how confusing the script was. She said both Steve and Robert Vaughn were tearing pages out of the script when they were shooting. “At times they were writing the script on the street.”

The story itself is more or less simple to follow. What’s unclear, especially during the middle section, is exactly what Bullitt’s up to, or why he does half the things he does. And if you think about it later, some of the things he does don’t make sense. At least not narrative sense. But as you watch—as you follow him breezing through San Francisco—it makes emotional movie-sense. One of the producers of the film, Philip D’Antoni, would also make The French Connection a few years later. And he followed the same narrative strategy in that film as well. The audience doesn’t know what’s going on half the time in The French Connection either. We know Popeye Doyle’s after the French guy with the gray beard, but none of the procedural shit means anything to us. It’s just lively, busy, and sort of exciting . . . like Yates’ film.

Bullitt is filled with weird moments and conveniences, but they don’t matter, because Yates, D’Antoni, and McQueen know we don’t give a fuck as long as the movie’s cool and doesn’t get dumb.

If Bullitt was going to change action films (I’d say create the modern action film), it first had to break the back of the police procedural. The snazzy opening credit sequence with Lalo Schifrin’s score and Pablo Ferro’s stylishly designed titles sets the audience up for the whole movie. We don’t really have any idea what’s going on. But the characters on screen seem to know what’s going on. And we don’t really care, because it’s groovy to watch.

Instead of wasting time trying to explain a mystery, it’s the first urban action movie to go from one expertly executed set piece to another (you could make the case that Goldfinger was the first modern movie to do that. But the fantastical nature of the story allowed for it more than a modern-day cop/crime picture). And it’s not just the car chase. The scene where the killer (John Aprea) is loose in the hospital—and Bullitt and Delgetti are after him—is terrific as well (when you see how well Yates does that scene you have to wonder how he managed to so badly stumble his way through the suspense scenes in his anemic 1981 thriller Eyewitness).

Bullitt is about action, atmosphere, San Francisco, Yates’ great location photography, Lalo Schifrin’s jazzy score, and Steve McQueen, his haircut and wardrobe.

Nothing else matters.

Aside from the opening credit sequence, the other scene that sets up the movie is early on when Frank takes his girlfriend out to dinner. They go to a restaurant called Coffee Cantata. And we watch them have a good time and eat dinner. Yet, we don’t hear a fucking thing they say. Other than demonstrating they like each other and that Frank is capable of having a good time, nothing personal is revealed about the couple during the whole sequence. What Yates feels is important is the jazz band performing at the restaurant, the sound of jazzy music, the hip vibe of the establishment, the San Francisco atmosphere, and the spot-on looking extras that surround McQueen and Bisset.

The scene tells us nothing narratively. But we dig it. It was cool being in the Coffee Cantata. It was cool watching McQueen and Bisset vibe with each other in the San Francisco surroundings.*

It both didn’t tell us anything and told us everything.

Don Siegel did terrific location photography in his career, and he would do a good job shooting San Francisco three years later in Dirty Harry (even though half the movie would be shot on the Universal back lot). But nobody had ever shot San Francisco as great as Peter Yates did or ever will again. The way he utilizes location to such a dynamic degree suggests a master cinematic stylist. One of the reasons he did such a dynamite job was he went thirty days over schedule. Yates was shooting a movie, not a schedule. While Yates would do good work many times again—Breaking Away, The Hot Rock, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (overrated), The Deep, and Mother, Juggs & Speed (underrated)—he would never demonstrate the cinematic style and confidence he does in Bullitt. If he had? If he managed to do what he did in Bullitt four more times? He would have been the greatest action filmmaker (save for Steven Spielberg and Sam Peckinpah) of the seventies. I mentioned that to film critic Elvis Mitchell and he said, “If he did it even one more time he would have been a pantheon director.”*

And then there’s Steve McQueen as Frank Bullitt.

The reason why we’re here.

The reason we’re watching.

The reason the whole fucking thing works.

Rarely in the entire history of Hollywood movie stars being movie stars has a movie star done less and accomplished more than McQueen with this role in this movie. The part is nothing and yet he makes it a great role. He practically does nothing, but nobody in the history of movies did nothing like Steve McQueen.

As great as McQueen could be, this is the role he needs to be remembered by. Because it’s in this role he demonstrates what he could do that Newman and Beatty couldn’t.

Which is just be.

Just fill the frame with him.*

I’m not saying McQueen was playing himself. Steve McQueen in real life was decidedly not like Frank Bullitt. Frank Bullitt was a McQueen creation.

But what makes it such an achievement is how minimalistic the creation was, and how the minimalism was key to the performance’s success. In real life everything suggests Steve McQueen could be a real hothead. In Don Siegel’s autobiography he relates that a few times during the making of Hell Is for Heroes the two men almost came to blows. Apparently McQueen and his costar on that film, Bobby Darin, also couldn’t stand each other. When the fat Hollywood hack James Bacon once mentioned to the Sicilian-tempered Darin that McQueen was his own worst enemy, Bobby replied, “Not while I’m alive.”

But McQueen’s Lt. Frank Bullitt is no hothead. He is the epitome of cool.

And when I say cool, I don’t mean just the charismatic he-man bad-boy cool McQueen was famous for (though he does have that too).

I mean, emotionally, Frank Bullitt is as cool as a reptile.

Nothing makes him get hot.

Nothing makes him lose his cool.

When Robert Vaughn’s ambitious D.A. Chalmers bitches out Bullitt in the hospital, accusing him of incompetence and threatening his career, Bullitt says nothing.

No blowup.

No, Look, Chalmers, I have a wounded man in there fighting for his life because of you and your assignment!

Bullitt just looks at him.

He doesn’t quietly seethe behind the eyes.

When Chalmers leaves, he doesn’t even roll his eyes. He doesn’t make a face or say to himself a 1968 version of “What a prick.”

And when Bullitt’s back with his partner Delgetti, he doesn’t make comments about “that asshole Chalmers.”

He just doesn’t engage.

Lt. Frank Bullitt doesn’t engage with anything that would upset him. And he possesses a Herculean power to not get upset. His one conflict with girlfriend Jacqueline Bisset is over how the crime, and the death, and the murder he witnesses in his job don’t affect him. When he misses the killer at the hospital, yeah, he’s a little frustrated, but he doesn’t go on a tear about how they had him and he slipped through their fingers.

He just goes back to work.

When he shows up Chalmers and the police brass, he offers no sarcasm (like Dirty Harry would).

He just exits the room.

And after the climax at the airport, there’s no sense of satisfaction or vindication on Bullitt’s part.

It’s just done.

Interestingly, the climax at the airport does play different than the other action scenes in the movie. Because finally we know what’s going on and what Frank is trying to do. There’s a sense of urgency to this sequence that isn’t in the others.

I wondered how much this minimalist design of the character was in the script. I asked Neile McQueen—since she was one of the first people to read the material—how different was that first script compared to the finished film. She told me it was “vastly different.” She implied the original script by Harry Kleiner was much more of a straight adaptation of Pike’s novel. She described the original script as “almost genteel.” But then McQueen and his partner at Solar Productions, Robert E. Relyea, brought on Thomas Crown Affair screenwriter Alan Trustman and they just built a movie around Steve.

But Yates doesn’t employ the old movie-star trick of having everybody else overact, while the lead underacts so he comes across as cooler and more in control. The ham and phony dramatics that always accompanied the supporting players in their stock roles in cop movies were stripped away by Yates. Robert Vaughn, in his own way, is as effective in his role as McQueen. Vaughn never overplays his smarmy oily act. He never makes a meal out of his provoking dialogue. Like McQueen as Bullitt, he finds his own register, his own monotone, and never veers off course. In his entertaining study of the actor’s career, Robert Vaughn: A Critical Study, author John B. Murray described Vaughn’s sneaky Chalmers: “He works so well within the scheme of the film because his style here is unobtrusive yet too dynamic and compulsive not to make one fascinated by the character. Audience feeling towards Chalmers remains at all times rather ambivalent, recognizing how despicable he is yet unable to conquer a grudging but substantial admiration.”

On one hand, even though he’s just a functionary obstacle, he comes across as the film’s main villain (you halfway expect him to be part of the conspiracy at the climax), which is a testament to Vaughn’s performance. But also by the end, as he walks away from the airport, facing a Monday morning hearing that will fizzle when it was promised to pop, you feel a little bad for him (you wouldn’t be surprised to find out Vaughn’s assistant district attorney in Bullitt becomes Vaughn’s senator in The Towering Inferno). Simon Oakland also turns in a strong, low-key performance as Bullitt’s boss. For once in Oakland’s career he plays his signature role without any bluster. On Oakland’s TV series, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, as Carl Kolchak’s (Darren McGavin) harried newspaper editor Tony Vincenzo, he screamed his dialogue in every scene he ever appeared in. In Bullitt you could mistake him for a completely different actor. Bill Hickman and John Aprea as the two shotgun-wielding killers—and Bullitt’s racing opponents through the streets of San Francisco—are effective in a uniquely uncliched way (they’re not cast for their ugly faces). And the shotgun-wielding member of the duo, Aprea, with his thinning white hair and his long tan trench coat, has a surprisingly soft and appealing voice when he’s in the hospital inquiring to the staff about where Johnny Ross is (so he can finish the job). And this stripped-down level of playing even extends to Don Gordon, as Bullitt’s partner Delgetti. I’ve never liked Don Gordon. I don’t care if it’s his dirty cop in The Mack, as Jim Brown’s goofy sidekick in Slaughter, or Dennis Hopper’s sidekick in The Last Movie, or any of the parade of seventies cop shows he guested on. But this built-for-speed version of Don Gordon is very effective. He’s actually perfect as Bullitt’s partner. And the fact that McQueen and Gordon liked each other in real life is felt in the movie.

As Frank Bullitt, Steve McQueen has more lines than he would in Le Mans. But not much more. In Le Mans the lack of lines is self-conscious. When Eastwood as Frank Morris in Escape from Alcatraz doesn’t speak for the first fifteen minutes, it’s self-conscious too (it’s also cool and effective). But Bullitt’s lack of dialogue is never self-conscious. Because it’s a physical performance. Bullitt doesn’t explain to the audience or other characters what he’s doing or thinking. He just does them and we watch. When I mentioned to Neile McQueen how little Bullitt spoke, she said, “That was all Steve. He really didn’t like to talk too much in movies. He would just rip out pages of dialogue. He’d do scenes with Don Gordon and say, ‘Give those lines to Don.’ Then Don would say, ‘Who cares who says it, the camera’s still gonna be on you.’ And Steve smiled and said, ‘That’s right, baby.’”

Walter Hill said the same thing. “Steve would say, ‘Let him say that. I’ll be over here peeling an apple.’”

Steve McQueen plays the role the way Peter Yates directs the picture. Neither man seems to have any narrative or dramatic concerns whatsoever.

Steve McQueen as Frank Bullitt keeps moving forward, Yates as the director follows him, and we the audience sit back and let them do our thinking for us. As pure cinema, it’s one of the best directed movies ever made.