I feel like a teenager because what I really want to write about Bullitt is that IT’S SO F@$%ING AWESOME! Here are some things that make it awesome:

• Shot on location in San Francisco in 1968
• Prolific and masterful use of the zoom lens
• Car chase over the SF hills ending in fiery death for the bad guys
• Steve McQueen as the proto-”rogue cop just doing his job by any means necessary”
• Jacqueline Bisset as the too-good girlfriend
• A one minute long scene amidst the action wherein the principal actors watch silently as a “fax” prints on a byzantine telecopier machine.
• The noticeable absence of musical queues, especially during the action scenes.

The feeling I got while watching Bullitt was that I’d seen it before, and I have, thousands of times on TV and in movies. Bullitt is the blueprint from which nearly every police drama takes shape, and it’s better than most of it’s offspring.

The DVD also includes the short ’Bullitt’: Steve McQueen’s Commitment to Reality which is quite funny (unintentionally so) and well worth watching.

This film is achingly cool. Worth watching for the title sequence alone, and then there’s that cracking car chase.