Recently I had the chance again to watch the American thriller "Bullitt" (1968) starring Steve McQueen, Jacquline Bisset and Robert Vaughn. To cut a long story short the plot of the movie is as follows:
A Senate subcommittee holds a hearing in San Francisco on organized crime in America. Bullitt's (Steve McQueen) unit is requested to protect a key witness Johnny Ross over the weekend until the start of the hearing Monday. The unit protects Ross around the clock in a cheap miserable hostel near the double decker Embarcadero Freeway leading up to The Golden Gate Bridge, the freeway was later demolished in the 1989 earthquake. During the weekend two hitmen intrudes the hotel room and Ross gets seriously wounded. Ross dies subsequently of his wounds, but Bullitt tries to keep the secret about the death of the key witness and starts his own investigation which leads him into the mafia. Ross's death becomes more and more of a problem for Bullitt since he was in his custody. But Bullitt succeed in proving that the murdered man was not Ross. The real Ross is on the run and is finally caught by Bullitt in the airport of San Francisco. An episode which ends with the shooting and killing of the real Ross.
But the plot of the movie is not essential to me - but the famous car chase is! - the father of later car pursuit movies - where Bullitt at first is tailed by the two hitmen and later the pursuer leading to the end of the two hitmen.
So to me this is not just another stunt where two cars are chasing each other. It is the intense story about how 3 weeks of filming results in 9 minutes and 42 seconds of film. It is the story about how to succeed doing a car chase at the speeds of about 75-80 mph and camera cars up to 110 mph on the surface streets of hilly San Francisco - and being the first to do it without knowing exactly how to accomplish it. It is the story of how to work with film shooting from different angles to give the illusion of different streets - even though the chase was kept within a few city block's. It is about catching the atmosphere inside and outside of the cars. It is the story about a lot of details for instance how the interior rear-view mirror in the Mustang is up when McQueen is behind the wheel and down when the stunt man is driving, it is about how to catch the real sound of the engine, it is about how to control the cameras on the way down hill to give the audience the right feeling of the jumping up and down, it is about how to secure the cars for the struggles and so on and so on.
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