Steve McQueen set the standard for a man’s man film presence after John Wayne had entered terminal decline and before Harrison Ford took over the role. No one has ever accused McQueen of being a great thespian, though, like Burt Reynolds, he was very good in the roles he was handed and could carry a critical closeup with the best of the method actor class. He did, in fact, study in New York with Stella Adler and went along the same training path as Marlon Brando, James Dean, and his eventual co-star, Dustin Hoffman. He was a rare masculine star with real acting chops.
He also occupied the masculine role in a unique time of transition and, like Clint Eastwood, made films in San Francisco when the town later known for far-left civic politics was still showing the police in a heroic light. Eastwood really defined the genre in the public imagination as Dirty Harry Callahan, but before there was Dirty Harry, there was Bullitt.
Bullitt is a 1968 film directed by Peter Yates that tells the story of Frank Bullitt, a police detective on the San Francisco police force. Bullitt is tasked with guarding a Chicago mobster who has fled the mob and will testify before congress in a few days. An oily congressman, Chalmers, states over and over how important this witness is, but Bullitt finds the witness to be rather nonchalant the danger he faces. The witness then participates in his own demise by unlocking the door to his hotel room. Bullitt suspects something is not right, that Chalmers is either corrupt or clueless, and so Frank Bullitt hides the witness’s body while he tries to uncover the real story.
The film would be unremarkable now and was dated even a few years later when Clint Eastwood and Dirty Harry started slaying bad guys in 1971. The pace of the film feels like a standard ‘police procedural’ now common on TV. In the pivotal year of 1968, however, the film resonated because it was early in tapping into an anti-police and antigovernmental feeling that was emanating from the boomer-led counterculture. Frank Bullitt was an early anti-hero in that he had to go way outside of the law to get at a ‘higher truth.’
Further, as with Dirty Harry, the film shows the cost the cops pay for being a truth seeker. Frank Bullitt witnesses terrible stuff that he must keep to himself. His girlfriend, played by the English ingénue of the moment, Jacqueline Bissett, witnesses a murder scene he must process, and she notes how warping his world is to his personality. The implication is clear; he must choose between her or his personality warping job. In the end, he leaves his job, as did Eastwood in Dirty Harry.
In the classic Coen Bros film made 39 years later, No Country For Old Men, the sheriff in West Texas that has witnessed the new chaos enveloping the world, Ed Tom Bell, decides to retire for largely the same reason Bullitt sets down his gun and climbs into bed with his warm, loving girlfriend. This was the cultural moment when the guardians of public order and Western Civilization had to make a choice; be a killer that operates on the margins of the law to save the innocent from the wicked or throw in the towel and seek shelter elsewhere. The ethos of the counterculture was that the status quo was not worth defending, and Bullitt captures the transitional moments quite nicely. Before 1968, lawmen always stood and fought back the forces of evil and they had the support of most people they were charged with protecting. John Wayne represented this kind of character, as did many others in many films. Authority figures stood against the forces of chaos, be they bandits or natives. But as the counterculture took over the previous culture, faith in authorities and institutions waned and so only men outside of those systems could seek truth.
For a time, there were vigilante movies that allowed these men to fight back with a clear conscience, but they had to accept they were also now, outside the law. Charles Bronson made these kinds of movies, as did Eastwood in westerns like The Outlaw Josey Wales. Al Pacino starred in several films throughout the seventies that rounded out the theme. By the time he walked out of the courtroom at the end of …And Justice For All, the theme had run its course. The United States traditional culture was corrupt, and even the Reagan years and the patriotic films of the 1980s could not get the loving feeling to return.
And now, we have superhero movies. In a sense, we have superhero movies because we no longer have culturally acceptable heroes or antiheros. The American cinema still produces a resonant hero movie now and again, films like American Sniper. But, that movie was directed by Clint Eastwood and he’s in his 90s now. To the degree that there are characters like Frank Bullitt, they are in the NCIS TV shows, and that genre may well have finally run its course. Very few films are set in San Francisco that involve any policing. There simply are not sympathetic police movies anymore, heroic, or antiheroic.
The great irony now is that the current corruption IS the counterculture. This is how a film like Sound of Freedom becomes an alt-indie hit.
Bullitt is notable for at least two other reasons. The movie has a part for a very young Robert Duvall, who would go on to appear in the Godfather films in a few years, and it has what is widely considered the greatest car chase sequence ever filmed up to that time.
Here is the chase scene in it’s entireity:
Not too long after Bullitt, we had Dirty Harry. Here is the iconic ‘Do you feel lucky’ clip:
Finally, 10 years later, faith in the authority figures was gone and Al Pacino had his career made playing the antihero:
TomRoushOnline 