Bullitt (1968)

Bullitt arrives from 1968, a year when a man could still be judged by the quality of his shoulder holster. Peter Yates directs Steve McQueen through the streets of San Francisco with documentary patience, lingering over evidence bags and emergency room procedure as though the audience had enrolled in a night course. The result is a crime thriller that treats bureaucracy as texture and violence as an administrative inconvenience. The famous chase, ten minutes of Mustang against Charger, remains the film's argument for itself, and it is a good one.

The cultural inventory here is remarkably bare. A Black actor appears as a doctor in the hospital sequence, and the film neither announces him nor asks for credit, which is the correct and unremarkable approach. Jacqueline Bisset's Cathy gets a single scene in which she asks what will become of them, a question the film answers by having her asleep in his bed by Monday morning. Senator Chalmers is a study in political ambition, not an indictment of any economic order. Race, sexuality, the environment, the body, the mind, and the historical record are all left undisturbed. Nobody lectures. Nobody explains the lesson. The lesson, such as it is, is that a man should drive well and keep his word.

We have graded this one honestly and found nothing to grade. It is a film about a detective, a witness, and a car. The absence of contemporary messaging cannot be awarded points as a virtue. It is simply a fact of the calendar. Every measure we keep returns zero, and the sommelier sets down the glass and reaches for the next bottle.

THEMATIC TAGS: oscar_winner, book_adaptation