‘Bullitt’, ‘Drive’ and walking the LA River

A walk through Los Angeles’s legal and physical grey areas

I’m in a hotel room in Adelaide watching Bullitt on Fox Classics. I flipped channel to find myself right at the start of the famous car chase scene. I must have seen this scene around 50 times. I had this movie on VHS, when one had such things, and used to know the exact time to fast forward to. I’ve just realised that, as a non-driver, perhaps this was a form of sublimation.

For what is not a great movie, by most measures, Bullitt is an influential film. What it gave us is more textural than textual. It has its moments — the car chase most obviously — but delivers moods and stylings rather than narrative or structural innovation: the blankness of McQueen; his look, and that of Jacqueline Bisset’s; Lalo Schifrin’s score; the pace of the cop movies of the following decade, involving laborious observation of detectives at work; the way that San Francisco is shot, including some handheld but also carefully sanitised of any of the social ferment present in the city in 1968.