A film
review by Roger Ebert on Dec. 23, 1968.
Steve McQueen is sometimes criticized for only
playing himself in the movies. This
misses the point, I think. Stars like McQueen, Bogart, Wayne or Newman aren't
primarily actors, but presences. They have a myth, a personal legend they've
built up in our minds during many movies, and when they try to play against
that image it usually looks phony.
McQueen
was a bomb as Thomas Crown, for example, because the character clashed with
McQueen's own personality. But McQueen is great in Bullitt, and the movie is great, because director Peter Yates understands the McQueen
image and works within it. He winds up with about the best action movie of
recent years.
McQueen
plays a San Francisco cop assigned as bodyguard to a syndicate witness. The
witness gets shot-gunned -- in the most brutally direct 10 seconds of film I
can remember -- and McQueen becomes a political football. Robert Vaughn (better than usual) is the politician who puts the
heat on, and it's up to McQueen to hide the victim's body until he can untangle
the case.
It's a
very tangled case, too. The beautiful thing is that Yates and his writers keen
everything straight. There's nothing worse than a complicated plot that loses
track of itself (as in The Lady in Cement,
which I defy anyone to explain).
Bullitt is Yates second film; his first was Robbery, a superior movie about
England's great train robbery, which played Chicago earlier this year. Robbery had a great chase sequence in
it, involving a running machine gun battle, all sorts of near misses in heavy
traffic, lots of blood and remarkable photography.
Bullitt, as everybody has heard by now, also
includes a brilliant chase scene. McQueen (doing his own driving) is chased by,
and chases, a couple of gangsters up and down San Francisco's hills. They slam
into intersections, bounce halfway down the next hill, scrape by half a dozen
near-misses, sideswipe each other, and leave your stomach somewhere in the
basement for about 11 minutes.
One
trouble. They couldn't be satisfied with a cop movie, I guess; they had to have
sex appeal, and so they brought in Jacqueline
Bisset (a lovely sight, true) to be McQueen's girl. And every line she
recites is disastrously inappropriate. She has one speech so awful it takes the
movie five minutes to recover.
Yates
pulled the same trick in Robbery
(1968), giving Stanley Baker a wife he didn't need so the movie could have
three unnecessary scenes with her. And Lee Remick cluttered up The Detective. And Inger Stevens was
extra baggage in Madigan. They ought
to leave the girls out or make them policewomen, like Coogan's Bluff did, come to think of it. [Ebert’s rating: **** out
of 4 stars]
Labels: action,
auto-racing, crime, mystery, thriller
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