Beyond the chase scene, Bullitt actually has a fairly involved plot, with local political machinations and a central mystery. Yates films the whole thing with a sort of vérité naturalism. There’s very little expository dialogue, and you have to figure out where these people exist in relation to each other just by watching how they react to each other. There’s a great moment when a young black doctor agrees to help Bullitt hide a body so that he can keep his investigation going. The doctor never has to explain that he’s helping because an asshole politician has insulted him; it’s understood. That level of subtlety did not exist in action movies for long, so enjoy it while it lasts.

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The plot involves a mob informant who’s under police protection because he’s set to testify in a Senate subcommittee hearing. And the car chase isn’t the only set piece; there are also a couple of foot chases and one nasty shooting. The movie maintains a nice momentum without taking too much focus off its central character. In a cool moment, Robert Duvall shows up in a role that would’ve been called a cameo if Duvall had been famous when he made it.

Most of the movie’s principal figures wouldn’t go on to have the sort of career that Duvall did. McQueen, of course, made a bunch more great movies before dying young in 1980. Yates, meanwhile, went on to make some badass crime movies—The Hot Rock, The Friends Of Eddie Coyle—as well as the great bike-racing romance Breaking Away and the cheesed-out ’80s fantasy Krull.

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But the legacy of Bullitt isn’t necessarily what the star and director would do afterward. Instead, Bullitt pioneered the chase scene, making it hectic and believable and somehow entirely coherent at the same time, a trick that a present-day director like Michael Bay still hasn’t mastered. And it proved that the world had an appetite for that sort of brisk, tough, modern action movie. It was a big hit, it cemented McQueen’s stardom, and it left a blueprint that plenty of other movies would follow. It very much deserves to be the first movie in this series.

Other noteworthy 1968 action movies: There weren’t many of them! Once Upon A Time In The West, maybe the greatest Western ever made, came out in 1968, but it wasn’t really an action movie. It was also a big year for war movies, with The Green Berets, Ice Station Zebra, and Where Eagles Dare, the latter of which gave a young Clint Eastwood so many chances to upstage an aging Richard Burton. There were a few biker-gang movies, early kung-fu movies, and Japanese entries in the Zatoichi series, but none of them are all that significant. The only real competition for Bullitt—and it’s not serious competition—is Coogan’s Bluff, in which Eastwood plays a cowboy cop running around psychedelic-era Manhattan. It’s a pretty fun movie on its own, but it’s mostly notable for being the first time Eastwood worked with Don Siegel, who would go on to direct him in Dirty Harry and a bunch of other movies.

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Next time: Sam Peckinpah raises standards for gore and body counts with The Wild Bunch, a Western so grimy you can only barely call it a Western. Along the way, he accidentally invents the John Woo shoot-’em-up.