Bullitt - WikiHQ

Bullitt is a 1968 American crime thriller film

A star vehicle for McQueen, Bullitt began development once Yates was hired upon the completion of the screenplay, which differs significantly from Fish's novel. Principal photography took place throughout 1967, with filming primarily taking place on location in San Francisco. The film was produced by McQueen's Solar Productions, with Robert Relyea as executive producer alongside Philip D'Antoni. Lalo Schifrin wrote the film's jazz-inspired score. Bullitt is notable for its extensive use of practical locations and stunt work.

Bullitt was released in the United States on October 17, 1968, by Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. It was a critical success, with praise for its screenplay, editing, music and action sequences; its car chase sequence is regarded as one of the most influential in film history, and retrospective reception has named Bullitt among the greatest action films ever made.

Plot

On a Friday night in Chicago, mobster Johnny Ross briefly meets his brother, Pete, after fleeing the Outfit. The next morning, Lieutenant Frank Bullitt of the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD), along with his team, Delgetti and Stanton, are tasked by federal prosecutor Walter Chalmers with guarding Ross over the weekend, until he can be presented as a witness to a Senate subcommittee hearing on organized crime on Monday morning. The detectives are told he is in a cheap hotel on the Embarcadero. At 1:00 am Sunday, while Stanton is phoning Bullitt to say Chalmers and a friend want to come up, Ross unchains the room door. Two hitmen burst in, shooting Stanton in the leg and Ross in the chest. Chalmers, who has ambitions of public office and needs Ross as his star witness, holds Bullitt responsible.

After Ross dies in the hospital, Bullitt sends the body to the morgue as a John Doe to keep the investigation open. An informant states that Ross was in San Francisco because he had stolen millions of dollars from the Outfit. Bullitt also discovers that Ross made a long-distance phone call to a hotel in San Mateo. While driving his Ford Mustang, Bullitt becomes aware he is being followed by a Dodge Charger. He eludes his pursuers, and then turns the tables as he follows the hitmen. An extended chase ensues through the city, ending in an explosion in Brisbane, when the Charger crashes into a gas station, killing the two hitmen.

Bullitt and Delgetti are confronted by their superior, Captain Sam Bennett. Chalmers (who is assisted by SFPD Captain Baker) serves them a writ of habeas corpus, forcing Bullitt to reveal that Ross has died. Bennett ignores the writ because it is Sunday; this allows Bullitt to investigate the lead of the long-distance phone call to San Mateo. With his car damaged from the chase, Bullitt gets a ride from his architect girlfriend, Cathy. The two then find a woman garroted in her hotel room. Cathy confronts Bullitt about his work, saying, "You're living in a sewer, Frank." She wonders, "What will happen to us in time?"

Bullitt and Delgetti examine the victim's luggage and discover a travel brochure for Rome, as well as traveler's checks made out to an Albert and Dorothy Renick. Bullitt requests their passport applications from Chicago. Bullitt, Bennett, Chalmers, and Baker gather around the telecopier as the applications arrive. Chalmers turns out to have sent Bullitt to guard a Doppelgänger, Albert Renick, a used-car salesman from Chicago, while his wife Dorothy was staying in San Mateo. Bullitt realizes that Ross was playing the politically-ambitious Chalmers by using Renick as a decoy so he could slip out of the country Sunday night.

Delgetti and Bullitt watch the Rome gate at San Francisco International Airport, but Bullitt realizes the real Ross (on Renick's passport) probably switched to an earlier London flight, which is ordered to return to the terminal. Bullitt chases a fleeing Ross back to the crowded passenger terminal, where Ross guns down a deputy sheriff before being shot dead by Bullitt. Chalmers arrives to survey the scene, but leaves, saying nothing. Early Monday morning, Bullitt arrives home to find Cathy asleep in his bed, having chosen to stay. He places his gun on a banister to make it easier to wash his face. As he washes, he looks at himself in the mirror. The last moment of the film cuts away from showing his face in the mirror to a closeup of his gun resting on the banister outside the bathroom with the sound of running water from the faucet.

Cast

Credits from the American Film Institute.

thumb|McQueen in 1968, the year of the film's release.

thumb|[[Dave Toschi is the real-life San Francisco police officer who influenced Bullitt's characterization.]]

Production

Bullitt was co-produced by McQueen's Solar Productions and Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. The film was pitched to Jack L. Warner as "doing authority differently".

Development

Bullitt was director Peter Yates' first American film. He was hired after McQueen saw his 1967 U.K. feature, Robbery, with its extended car chase. Joseph E. Levine, whose Embassy Pictures had distributed Robbery, did not like the film much, but Alan Trustman, who saw the picture the week he was writing the Bullitt chase scenes, insisted that McQueen, Relyea, and D'Antoni (none of whom had ever heard of Yates) see Robbery and consider Yates as director for Bullitt.

Casting

In the original novel Mute Witness, the lead character is an older, overweight police lieutenant named Clancy. D'Antoni and his original co-producer Ernest Pintoff considered the film a vehicle for Spencer Tracy, but his death in 1967 ended that. McQueen was a great admirer of Tracy and took on the project, in part, as a tribute to him. The original novel was also set in Chicago, not San Francisco.

McQueen based his performance on San Francisco Inspector Dave Toschi, later known as an inspector of the Zodiac Killer case, with whom he worked prior to filming. McQueen even copied Toschi's unique "fast-draw" shoulder holster.

Robert Vaughn initially refused the role of Chalmers, feeling the plot was too "thin". Decades later, when Vaughn considered entering politics, he discovered that people could not take him seriously, or found him untrustworthy, as they remembered his performance in this film.

Katharine Ross was offered the role of Cathy, but she refused it, as she felt the part was too small.

This film was the first of three times McQueen worked on-screen with his real-life friend Don Gordon, the other two were in Papillon (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974).

Filming

Bullitt is notable for its extensive use of external locations rather than studio sets, and its attention to procedural detail, from police evidence processing to emergency-room procedures. Director Yates' use of the new lightweight Arriflex cameras allowed for greater flexibility in location shooting. The film was shot almost entirely on location in San Francisco. In the emergency-room operation scene, real doctors and nurses were used as the supporting cast. According to McQueen, "The thing we tried to achieve was not to do a theatrical film, but a film about reality." In a 1968 interview, D'Anatoni reasoned the production would cost no more to shoot in San Francisco than in Los Angeles, despite transportation and housing expenses, because so much money was saved on construction by using real locations. (226 Embarcadero near Howard Street, close to the Embarcadero Freeway)

Nob Hill
Cow Hollow
Chalmers' Residence, 2700 Vallejo Street, Pacific Heights
Grace Cathedral
Enrico's (Broadway at Kearny Street)
San Francisco International Airport

Car chase

At the time of the film's release, the car chase scenes featuring McQueen at the wheel in all driver-visual scenes generated prodigious excitement. Leonard Maltin has called it a "now-classic car chase, one of the screen's all-time best." Emanuel Levy wrote in 2003, "Bullitt contains one of the most exciting car chases in film history, a sequence that revolutionized Hollywood's standards." In his obituary for Peter Yates, Bruce Weber wrote, "Mr. Yates' reputation probably rests most securely on Bullitt (1968), his first American film – and indeed, on one particular scene, an extended car chase that instantly became a classic."

Vehicles

thumb|Bullitt Mustang '559 on display at the LeMay Car Museum in Tacoma, Washington, 2019

Warner Bros. ordered two identical 1968 Mustangs for filming. Both were painted Highland Green and had the GT package with 390 CID FE engines. These cars had the sequential vehicle identification numbers 8R02S125558 and 8R02S125559. Prior to filming, the cars were modified by Max Balchowsky. Car '558 was modified and used for the stunt driving, while '559 was used for McQueen's close-up driving shots. Ross drove it until 1970, then sold it to Frank Marranca, who had it shipped from California to New Jersey. In 1974, Marranca sold the car to Robert Kiernan through an advertisement in Road & Track. In 1977, Steve McQueen attempted to buy it back, but was refused.

Stunt driver Bill Hickman provided two 1968 Dodge Chargers, which were painted black for use in the film. One was reserved for close-ups, and the other performed the stunts. Vehicle supervisor Max Balchowsky strengthened the suspension of the stunt car, but left the engines mostly unmodified.

Filming

The chase scene starts at 1:05:00 and lasts 10m 53s. It begins under Highway 101 in the city's Mission District as Bullitt spots the hitmen's car. It ends outside the city, at the Brisbane exit of the Guadalupe Canyon Parkway on San Bruno Mountain. Shooting occurred over a period of weeks. The chase sequence combined several locations, located miles apart and edited together. Mapping the movie route shows that it is not continuous and is impossible to follow in real time.

Two 1968 325-horsepower 390 FE V8 Ford Mustang GT Fastbacks with four-speed manual transmissions in Highland Green were purchased by Warner Bros. for the film. The Mustangs' engines, brakes, and suspensions were heavily modified for the chase by veteran car racer and technician Max Balchowsky. Ford Motor Company originally lent two Galaxie sedans for the chase scenes, but the producers found the cars too heavy for the jumps over the hills of San Francisco. They also felt a Ford-on-Ford battle would not be believable on screen. The cars were replaced with 1968 375-horsepower 440 Magnum V8 Dodge Chargers in black. The engines in the Chargers were left largely unmodified, but the suspensions were mildly upgraded to cope with the demands of the stunt work.

The director called for maximum speeds of about , but the cars (including the chase cars) at times reached speeds over .

Drivers' point-of-view shots were used to give the audience a participant's feel of the chase. Filming took three weeks, resulting in 9 minutes 42 seconds of pursuit. Multiple takes were spliced into a single end product, resulting in discontinuity: heavy damage on the passenger side of Bullitt's car can be seen much earlier than the incident producing it, and the Charger appears to lose five wheel covers, with different covers missing in different shots. Shooting simultaneously from multiple angles and creating a montage from the footage took place to give the illusion of different streets also resulted in the speeding cars passing the same vehicles at multiple times, including, as widely noted, that of a green Volkswagen Beetle.

In one scene, the Charger crashes into the camera; the damaged front fender noticeable in later scenes. Local authorities did not allow the car chase to be filmed on the Golden Gate Bridge, but did permit it in Midtown locations, including Bernal Heights, the Mission District, and on the outskirts of neighboring Brisbane.

McQueen, a racecar driver at the time, drove in the close-up scenes, while stunt coordinator Carey Loftin, stuntman and motorcycle racer Bud Ekins, and McQueen's usual stunt driver, Loren Janes, drove for the high-speed parts of the chase and performed other dangerous stunts. Ekins, who doubled for McQueen in The Great Escape sequence in which McQueen's character jumps over a barbed-wire fence on a motorcycle, performs a lowsider crash stunt in front of a skidding truck during the Bullitt chase. The Mustang's interior rearview mirror goes up and down depending on who is driving: When the mirror is up, McQueen is visible behind the wheel; when it is down, a stunt man is driving.

The black Dodge Charger was driven by veteran stunt driver Bill Hickman, who played one of the hitmen and helped with the chase-scene choreography. The other hitman was played by Paul Genge, who played a character who had driven a Dodge off the road to his death in an episode of Perry Mason ("The Case of the Sausalito Sunrise") two years earlier. In a magazine article many years later, one of the drivers involved in the chase sequence remarked that the Charger, with the larger Dodge 440 CID Magnum engine versus the Ford 390 CID FE engine and greater horsepower (375 versus 325), was so much faster than the Mustang that the drivers had to keep backing off the accelerator to prevent the Charger from pulling away from the Mustang. and has been included in lists of the "Best Editing Sequences of All-Time." In the volume The Sixties: 1960–1969 (2003), of his book series History of the American Cinema, Cinema Arts professor Paul Monaco wrote: