Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [91]
Working closely with Relyea and Yates, they came up with a budget of $5 million, and set a February 1, 1967, production start in San Francisco.
Steve, Relyea, and Yates now turned their attention to casting. Steve wanted Robert Vaughn for the role of Walter Chalmers, the supercilious politico, one of the key characters in the film. Since appearing in The Magnificent Seven, Vaughn had become an international television star playing the title role in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Now, eager to get back to the big screen, he quickly agreed to read the script, especially since it came from Steve and had a generous six-figure salary attached to it. One of the reasons Steve wanted Vaughn, besides their friendship, was that Steve saw Bullitt as a modern-day western, and he remembered how contemporary Vaughn’s performance had been in The Magnificent Seven. That was the feel Steve wanted from Vaughn.
But after actually reading the script, where the three chases were merely indicated, Vaughn told Steve the story didn’t make any sense, that it was “a mélange of mistaken identities, phony clues, double crosses and betrayals so confusing I became convinced several pages had gone missing during the photocopying process.” Relyea concurred. Vaughn then suggested a female writer friend of his who he was sure could do wonders with it. Steve hired her to do some ghosting, or uncredited doctoring, but in the end it didn’t help very much. Vaughn still had reservations but agreed to be in the movie. As he said later on, “I figured I would let critics and audiences figure out the entanglements.”
The entanglements, of course, didn’t bother Steve at all. He had customized the script the way he would a high-powered engine, to emphasize its speed and muscle. He was making Bullitt for the action, not the logic. Steve saw the character of Bullitt as a human projectile. Part of the appeal of the character was that he was a maverick, someone who bucked what he saw as a corrupt legal and political system, its participants in bed with each other for professional, political, and monetary gain.
Bullitt, on the other hand, is incorruptible and therefore unshakable in his mission to guard a valuable witness with unclear political connections for a weekend. What seems like a simple assignment quickly turns into something darker and more sinister than Bullitt can imagine (and the audience can understand), as it appears that someone wants the witness killed while others want him kept alive; intentionally or not, it is never made clear which side wants what. At times it seems Chalmers desperately wants the witness kept alive, but at the very end of the film, when the witness is killed at the airport, Chalmers rides off in a limo, coldly satisfied reading the Wall Street Journal. As Steve knew he would, Vaughn played this ambitious if ambiguous character to perfection.
For his partner in the film, a role that in so many policiers serves as the verbalizer for the protagonist’s inner thoughts, Steve chose Don Gordon, a character actor—a face without a name—who was a motorcycle buddy going back to the days of Wanted: Dead or Alive. Together, Steve and Gordon rode along for several nights with the San Francisco police to get a feel for what it was like to be behind the wheel of a squad car in this busy and beautiful West Coast city.
To play Cathy, Bullitt’s girlfriend, Steve picked the gorgeous Jacqueline Bisset, an up-and-coming British actress. Because her part is small, and her character is the only one who actually talks about anything meaningful to the plot, it is therefore the weakest link in the film. Midway through, after she witnesses Bullitt react coldly to the murder of a woman in a hotel, she reads him the moral riot act, telling him that he is, in effect, incapable of feeling anything and therefore incapable of having a real relationship with her. The scene doesn’t work. It’s too verbal, too explanatory, superfluous. It almost turns this edgy film into a pedestrian treatise on male-female relationships. Other than