Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [93]
The personality of the landscape plays an important part as well. San Francisco has always been a favorite locale of filmmakers, each imparting their own vision on the city’s unique streets. Hitchcock, in his 1958 meditation on lost love, Vertigo, used the hills and valleys as a way to express his protagonists’ mood swings. Yates and McQueen emphasized the dangers of those unexpected hilly drops and steep elevations without thought or manipulative embellishment (Lalo Schifrin’s crisp but spare soundtrack does not supply music during any of the chases).
The sequence comes to an apocalyptic end after nearly ten full minutes, when the villainous Dodge keeps its appointment with destiny by crashing into a gas station and exploding, its journey to hell complete. According to Relyea, “The chase between Bullitt and his adversaries wasn’t in the original script. It evolved out of McQueen’s love for racing and the potential we all saw in San Francisco’s rollercoaster streets to provide an unusual twist. Our goal was to run the camera at normal speed, with the cars flying through the city at 115 miles per hour. We had two 1968 Ford Mustang GT fastbacks and two 1968 Dodge Chargers … one of each pair had to be used as a ‘jumper’ and the other as a ‘runner.’ … [T]he camera car had to be fast enough to stay with the Mustang and Charger. So Pat Houstis [one of the crew] picked up a convertible Corvette, stripped it and attached a special rig so it could function as the camera car.” The sequence took three weeks to shoot, and a lot of it was improvised by the expert stunt drivers and by Steve. They only had two patrol cars to block off traffic, and everyone was amazed that no pedestrians or stunt doubles were hurt during the filming of this memorable sequence.
The third chase takes place at San Francisco International Airport. Bullitt now knows that the witness he was guarding, and who died, was not the witness at all but a double hired by the real witness to take his place, allowing for a quick exit out of the country. Bullitt also knows now the fake witness is also a killer, and traps him aboard a flight about to leave for Rome. The dramatic tension of the chases escalates—first feet, then cars, now planes.
The killer jumps out of a rear exit of the plane, and Bullitt follows. The killer runs across the tarmac as planes are taking off and landing; Bullitt is forced to duck under a rolling Pan Am 707 jet. The timing of the stunt, which took place at three in the morning in thirty-degree weather, was measured down to microseconds, and this time Steve insisted he do the shot himself, so that the camera could catch the whole breathtaking sequence in one unbroken take and audiences would know that it was actually him. Everyone on the shoot held their breath as the plane rolled out and Steve ran like a wide receiver, avoiding the plane’s wheels and the blasts of hot air coming from the jet’s engines. After the plane passed over him, its wing coming within two feet of the filming crew, Steve ran directly toward the camera, his face plainly visible. At the shot’s completion, the crew broke out into applause. “Boy,” Steve said at the top of his lungs and with a big grin on his face, “I love this business!” Later, a reporter on-set asked if they couldn’t have used a dummy, to which Steve quipped, “They did.”
When the killer gets to the edge of the strip, he hides near a ditch, takes out his gun, and fires at Bullitt. Once again, the pursued becomes the pursuer. Bullitt is relentless and keeps coming, chasing the killer back into the airport. Soon enough, gunshots ring out and the killer dies. Lurking nearby in the limo is Chalmers, whose reaction is either of anger and disappointment or of satisfaction and relief.
Bullitt goes home to his apartment. It is dawn. Cathy is in the bedroom, sleeping. He checks in on her, then takes off his gun and walks to the bathroom to wash up. The camera cuts to a close-up of the bullets on his gun belt as the film cuts to black and the credits roll.
In what would become a familiar stylistic