New Movies: Cop Art

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This highly polished piece of cop art emphatically watches a lone lieutenant playing it straight in a crooked world. Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen), of the San Francisco police force, is assigned to keep a state's witness alive and soon finds himself wallowing in other people's blood. A colleague is shotgunned down, a witness ice-picked, a blonde garroted. These are only his minor problems. A self-aggrandizing official (Robert Vaughn) wants Bullitt "castrated" because he fails to obey orders the way his cowardly superiors do. Bullitt's girl (Jacqueline Bisset) says that he's "living in a sewer" and finds him so cool in the presence of death that it makes her frigid.

Reminiscent in style of the good old Warner Bros, crime films of the '40s, Bullitt is given a distinct touch of Now by Director Peter Yates. The movie is full of gritty city details and has a streaking pace that would leave Jim Ryun winded. As the beleaguered cop, McQueen is surprisingly subtle, mixing his customary hip swagger with an urban high-strung sensibility; like Oscar in The Odd Couple, he is so tense he has clenched hair.

No McQueen film would be complete without a chase scene; Bullitt provides two. The first is a thumping, screeching sports-car slalom over the Frisco hills. The second, on foot, dodges between whining jets at the airport and ends with McQueen pulling a gun—strangely enough, considering the violence, for the first time in the picture—to cut down his quarry and win his little war. In the end, Vaughn skulks off in a car with the ironic bumper sticker: SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL POLICE. If they were all like Bullitt, everyone could and would.