Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [99]
Even as word began to spread in the industry that The Reivers was going to be a bomb, on October 17, 1968, Bullitt had its star-studded world premiere at New York’s Radio City Musical Hall. It received across-the-board ecstatic reviews. Renata Adler, writing in the New York Times, called it “a terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen—fast, well-acted, written the way people talk. McQueen simply gets better all the time.”
Archer Winsten, in the New York Post, said: “McQueen keeps his cool as only he can, now that Bogart is long gone.… [The film has] the best, most exciting car chase the movies have ever put on film.… McQueen, motorcycle and auto racer, knew what he was doing and what had to be done.”
Ann Guarino, in the New York Daily News, raved that “McQueen joins the ranks of top movie detectives. His portrayal is cool, calm, casual, and convincing.”
Tom Milne, the Sunday Observer: “A curiously exhilarating mixture of reality and fantasy, so actual that at times one could almost swear that the fictional adventures must have been shot with concealed cameras.”
Variety: “An extremely well-made crime melodrama, highlighted by one of the most exciting auto chase sequences in years.”
And Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Steve McQueen is sometimes criticized for only playing ‘himself’ in the movies. This misses the boat, I think. Stars like McQueen, Bogart, Wayne or Newman aren’t primarily actors, but presences. They have a myth, a personal legend they’ve built up in our minds during many movies, and when they try to play against that image it usually looks phony.… McQueen is great in Bullitt and the movie is great, because director Peter Yates understands the McQueen image and works within it. He winds up with about the best action movie of recent years.… Bullitt, as everybody has heard by now, also includes a brilliant chase scene. McQueen (doing his own driving) is chased by, and chases, a couple of gangsters up and down San Francisco’s hills. They slam into intersections, bounce halfway down the next hill, scrape by half a dozen near-misses, sideswipe each other, and leave your stomach somewhere in the basement for about 11 minutes.”
The film proved a smash, and in the wake of its enormous profits, the Hymans clammed up about that $200,000 location override and wished they had left McQueen alone. Official studio estimates put the cost of making the movie at $5.5 million, against $18 million earned in its initial domestic run (some estimates put the domestic gross as high as $35 million, and Alan Trustman, who had a percentage of the profits, estimated that Bullitt grossed nearly $80 million in its first year of domestic release).
It was, without question, the biggest, most memorable, and most influential film of Steve’s career, the one that placed him finally and firmly in the pantheon of international superstars. Steve was named by trade magazine Film Daily as one of its “Famous Five” box office stars of the year. Boxoffice, another widely read industry rag, ranked Steve sixth (Paul Newman was first on both lists). Although Steve was not nominated for an Oscar for Bullitt, the film did receive two nominations and won one (Frank P. Keller won for Best Editing; John Kean was nominated for Best Sound).
It also proved a major influence on how future policiers would be made. Without Bullitt there would be no The French Connection three years later directed by William Friedkin, and Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry owes more than a little to the character, style, and feel of Bullitt, right down to shooting locations on the streets of San Francisco and especially in Clint Eastwood’s characterization of Harry Callahan, a carbon copy of Frank Bullitt. Even Steven Spielberg’s 1971 Duel, his feature directorial debut, with its spare dialogue and feature-length chase, is more than a little indebted to Bullitt.
Several supporting actors who appeared in the film also owe a lot to it. Vic Tayback, Norman Fell, Robert Duvall, and Georg Stanford Brown all had their careers