Bullitt

It’s to director Peter Yates’ great credit that, more than four decades later, the car chase in 1968’sBullitt is still way more thrilling than anything hawked as an “action movie” today. Steve McQueen stars as a cop breaking the rules to break a case, and the film is rife with ’68 cinema signifiers: lens flares, soft-focus foregrounds, a jazzy Lalo Schifrin score, and vivid location shooting. On his commentary track, Yates says that he saw Bullittas a kind of Western, but he frames the action so that roads and cars are almost always in the background. It’s the right way to present McQueen, a notorious auto-racing enthusiast who wore gasoline like cologne.

Updated 07/20/2011