A simultaneous development of the crime (not yet really Crimesploitation Films) genre, was the Police Procedural. As serious, if not as dark, in tone as the Noir, these movies would be instantly familiar to modern viewers of TV series such as CSI or Law & Order. Focusing on the day-to-day operations of big-city cops, most often Homicide detectives, these films were less interested in the criminals than in the crimes themselves, and how modern police departments go about solving them. These films persisted well beyond the end of the Film Noir era, aided by their ready adaptability for the new medium of television.

    One such police drama was Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night (1967), starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. Well-acted and superbly written, it tells the story of a black Philadelphia detective assisting a white police chief investigating a murder in rural Mississippi. Racially charged, it had the advantage of being timely, coming as it did at the height of the Civil Rights struggle. Indeed, the awarding of the Best Picture Oscar, which it won in 1968, was delayed due to the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King.

    In the Heat of the Night introduced the prototype of a new form of action hero—the “Supercop.” It can also be accurately described as the first “Buddy-Cop” movie. The Supercop can best be described as the rogue, the loner—the cop who always gets his man, even if he has to bend the rules to do it. He might have a partner, but that partner will be lucky to survive the picture. The Supercop doesn’t need a partner. He is, after all, a Supercop. Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs was not quite a Supercop—but he was a prototype for one, a model upon which others would expand. The first Supercop would come just a few months later, in the person of Steve McQueen’s Bullitt.

    Bullitt, directed by Peter Yates from a script by Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner (and based on the novel Mute Witness by Robert L. Fish, writing as Robert L. Pike), established the pattern that subsequent Cop films would follow. Many of the elements that one commonly associates with this type of movie were perfected here - the hero as an iconoclast, an outsider even among his own kind. His self-confidence, his utter conviction that his way is the right way. The fact that the Supercop is cool - to use the old cliché, “men want to be him, women want to be with him.” His clothes, his car, his home - even his looks have to set him apart from his fellows. Most importantly, his competence. His ability to get the job done. His single-minded dedication to his mission. Others had demonstrated one or more of these traits before - most notably Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon - but McQueen was the first to package them in this manner.

    The movie opens to a nighttime view of Chicago, and four men looking into a glass-fronted, but darkened, office. Inside, a man cowers behind a desk - it’s obvious that they are there for him, and that there’s evil in their purpose. He uses a smoke grenade to cover his escape out the back as they come in through the front. The fugitive makes his way to the parking garage, where a man is waiting for him. Instead of the trap that one might expect it to be, however, it’s clear that he’s there to assist the first man to escape his pursuers.

    The scene shifts to San Francisco. The man from Chicago is in a cab, stopping to use a pay phone, checking for messages at a hotel where he’s not registered. Being strangely conspicuous for someone on the run.

    It’s early Saturday morning, and a police detective named Delgetti (Don Gordon) is on a mission. His superiors need someone for a top-priority job, and the man they want is Lt. Frank Bullitt (McQueen). The job is simple, but that doesn’t mean it will be easy. A Mob moneyman from Chicago, Johnny Ross, has agreed to turn State’s Evidence, and testify before the Senate committee on Organized Crime. An up-and-coming politician, Chalmers (Robert Vaughn), has Ross on ice at a local fleabag hotel. Bullitt’s job will be to safeguard Chalmers’ witness until Monday morning.

    Bullitt, Delgetti, and a young detective named Carl Stanton (Carl Reindel) proceed to the hotel, and meet with Ross. Bullitt’s not happy with the location, but there’s little he can do about it. He leaves Delgetti to take the first shift. Stanton will relieve him at midnight, then Bullitt in the morning. After leaving the hotel, Bullitt heads to a rendezvous with his girlfriend, Cathy (Jacqueline Bisset), at the architecture firm where she works. They go to dinner, then back to his place.

    Back at the hotel, Stanton has relieved Delgetti. The front desk calls - a man named Chalmers is there with a friend, they want to come up. Stanton stalls them, and asks the desk clerk to place a call to Bullitt. Bullitt’s immediately suspicious - Chalmers there, at one in the morning? He tells Stanton not to let them up, he’ll be there in five minutes. He’ll be too late.

    As Stanton’s on the phone with Bullitt, Ross crosses the room to the dresser by the door, fixing himself a sandwich. Hanging up the phone, Stanton cautions him to stay clear of the door. As he moves back to the bed, the detective notices the chain is off the door - Ross has unlocked it. Before he can react, the door comes crashing inward, propelled by a strong kick. A gray-haired man in a tan trenchcoat swings a Winchester shotgun up, firing at the cop, who falls to the floor, blood pouring from a leg wound. The shooter and his back-up man turn their attentions to Ross, backing away from them on the bed. A blast from the Winchester pump catches him in the face and shoulder, throwing him against the wall. The shooter picks up his spent shells, then leaves, two bloody bodies lying in his wake.

    Bullitt arrives just as the ambulance crews are bringing Ross out on a stretcher. Delgetti’s there, he explains what happened. Bullitt tells him to accompany Ross to the hospital, while he goes inside to check on his man, just being brought down in the elevator. The Lieutenant gets in the back of the ambulance with the younger cop, questioning and reassuring him. Stanton’s able to provide a description of the shooter, enough to give Bullitt something to go on.

    When they get to the hospital, Stanton is rushed into the ER. The prognosis is good - he’ll make it, and keep the leg. Ross’ outlook isn’t so bright. His surgeon, Dr. Willard (Georg Stanford Brown) gives him at best a 50-50 chance of pulling through. Bullitt places guards around the intensive care ward, and at the hospital’s entrances. He expects there to be another attempt on Ross’ life, and intends to be ready.

    Capt. Sam Bennett (Simon Oakland), Bullitt’s superior, arrives, wanting to know what happened. The detective tells him, and receives a warning from Bennett that Chalmers has been informed of what has happened to his star witness; chances are good he’ll try to paint the department in as bad a light as possible in order to shift the negative press off himself. Bullitt asks who’s running the investigation, him or Chalmers. Bennett tells him it’s his case - do what he needs to do. Bennett’s parting words are that he’ll, “… try to back you up.”

    Chalmers arrives, demanding to know what went wrong. Bullitt deflects this, informing the politician that the attackers used his name to gain access. Who else knew where Ross was holed up? Chalmers reacts angrily to Bullitt’s implication. He storms out, stopping long enough to tell the nursing supervisor that he wants Dr. Willard replaced on the case, as he’s too, “… young and inexperienced.” Willard, who’s black, overhears this discussion, and he and Bullitt exchange a knowing look. Both have formed their own opinions regarding Chalmers’ character, and the reason behind Willard’s dismissal.

    As Chalmers and his aides leave the hospital through one door, a small group enters through the other. Two nurses are chatting with a doctor, and a gray-haired man, wearing a tan trenchcoat, enters right behind them. The officer on duty in the lobby is distracted, and pays no attention to the man walking past. The hit man (Paul Genge) stops a passing doctor. He tells him that his friend was brought in with a gunshot wound, where might he find him? The doctor directs him to the intensive care ward on the second floor, but shortly afterward has concerns about the man. He gets word to Bullitt, who informs Delgetti that their man is somewhere in the building.

    A nurse’s screams brings him running; she just surprised a strange man hiding in a stairwell. The detective chases the man down the stairs, into the building’s basement. The place is a maze of corridors, rooms, and service areas, and Bullitt loses his man. He hears a door slam, and by the time he gets outside the gray-haired man is gone.

    When Bullitt returns to the ICU, Ross is in cardiac arrest. Willard and another doctor are working on him, to no avail. They pronounce him dead. Thinking fast, Bullitt orders Delgetti to get an unmarked ambulance, take Ross to the morgue, but put him in there as “John Doe.” He explains the situation to Willard; he needs time to find the killer, and once Chalmers finds out his witness is dead, he’ll shut the entire unit down. He needs the record of Ross’ death to disappear, but he doesn’t want the doctor to expose himself to trouble. Willard agrees to bury the record. Bullitt tells him to remember that he filed it properly - what happened after that is the detective’s fault.

    Bullitt heads to the victim’s hotel, still sealed from the night before. He and Delgetti interview the clerk who had been knocked out by the hit men. At first he remembers nothing about his attackers, but under threat of being taken down to the station he starts recalling details. Once he’s described the hit man, Delgetti steers him to recall details about the victim. One pertinent fact emerges - Ross arrived in a taxicab, a Sunshine cab.

    Bullitt tracks down the driver (Robert Duvall in an early role), and hires him to recreate Ross’ movements of the previous day. They go to an upscale hotel, then stop at a pay phone. Bullitt makes a call to a source of his, asking for any information he might have on Johnny Ross. They arrange to meet later. When he returns to the car, the cabbie informs him that Ross made two calls - the second a long distance call.

    They soon reach the restaurant where Bullitt plans to meet his informant, Eddy (Justin Tarr). The information he has is only four hours old - Ross ran the mob’s wire service in Chicago, moving hundreds of millions of dollars around the country and around the world. He siphoned off a couple million to his own account, and skipped out just ahead of a hit squad the boys sent after him. Word on the street is that he’s in San Francisco. Bullitt thanks him, and the cabbie takes the detective back to where he parked his Mustang.

    As the cop pulls out of the lot, he sees a black Dodge Charger, with two men inside watching him. The driver is a nondescript, middle-aged white man. The passenger, however, is older, gray-haired, wearing a tan coat. As Bullitt drives past, they pull out and start following him. This marks the beginning of what many consider to be the greatest car chase ever filmed (in 2004, critic Leonard Maltin called it, “[a] now-classic car chase, one of the screen's all-time best”); it’s certainly the most famous.

    For the next ten minutes, the two muscle cars challenge each other through some of the most recognizable city streets in the country. Racing down hills and through intersections, smoking tires as they round corners at high speed, the chase leads them out of the inner city onto a four-lane highway. The Charger’s passenger climbs into the backseat, blasting at the pursuing Mustang with his shotgun. Bullitt’s forced off the road once, but quickly regains control and rejoins the pursuit. As they approach an exit ramp, Bullitt rams the rear of the Charger, sending it out of control. It crashes into a row of fuel pumps at a truck stop, precipitating a massive explosion. Bullitt’s car fares only slightly better, plunging into a ditch on the opposite side of the road, rendering it inoperable.

    Bullitt rides back downtown in a patrol car. Bennett demands to know what’s going on. Where is Ross? Chalmers had returned to the hospital to find him missing, and he and his tame cop, Capt. Baker (Norman Fell) have been raising hell ever since. Chalmers has gone so far as to serve Bennett with a writ of Habeas Corpus, requiring him to produce the witness. Baker in fact is in attendance at this meeting, and Bennett has to order Bullitt to divulge Ross’ whereabouts in front of the man.

    He tells them Ross is dead, downstairs in the morgue as John Doe. The two men who killed him are the ones who burned to death in the Charger. Bennett asks how he’s sure. He replied that he saw them; what’s more, they tried to use the same weapon on him that they used on Stanton and Ross, a Winchester pump.

    Baker’s of the opinion that this ends the case, and Bennett’s inclined to agree. Bullitt’s not sure. There’s one lead he wants to follow up on: the long distance number that Ross called from the pay phone. It’s been traced, and the call went to a Dorothy Simmons, at a motel in San Mateo. He wants time to run it down. Bennett tells him he’ll hold the writ until Monday morning, he has that long.

    Bullitt stops off at the morgue, where the autopsy of Ross is underway. He makes sure that fingerprints of the dead man are taken, to be checked out by the FBI. As he walks outside, Chalmers is waiting. He demands a statement, signed by Bullitt, admitting that Ross died while in his custody. Bullitt defers, telling the politician, “When I’m ready.” He stops at the motor pool to request a car, but Capt. Baker has gotten there first, he’s told there are none available.

    Shortly afterward, Cathy is driving him to San Mateo to check out Dorothy Simmons. There’s no answer when the desk clerk tries to phone the room, but a flash of Bullitt’s badge gains him access. He finds a young woman, dead. As police cars roll up to the motel, sirens screaming, Cathy follows the officers in. She stands in the doorway, horrified at the tableau before her, as the man she loves nonchalantly discusses the woman’s death on the phone. He looks up and notices her standing there, and takes her away from the scene.

    Later, in the crime lab, Delgetti and he are examining Dorothy Simmons’ personal effects, recovered from the motel room. Surprisingly, the luggage contains a large amount of men’s clothing, all brand new. In fact, everything in the trunks seem new. Including a new passport wallet, empty. However, they do find a fortune in traveler’s checks, in the name of Albert Rennick. That would seem to match the “AR” monogram on the man’s shirts, and what’s more, they find more checks in the name of Dorothy Rennick. Dorothy Simmons wasn’t who she was supposed to be; is it possible that Albert Rennick isn’t either?

    Bullitt would become recognized as one of the seminal films of the Action genre. It had many flaws, true. Jacqueline Bisset’s performance was one of the worst of her career, the fault for which must be laid at the combined feet of Yates, Trustman, and Kleiner. The character of Cathy serves no useful purpose, she has no role in the story. The writers are forced to construct something for her to do, and that is to play chauffer to her boyfriend. Her one memorable scene is memorable for all the wrong reasons: confronted by the reality of Frank’s job, she explodes on him in an emotional overreaction. To be upset by seeing a murder victim in the context of what had been, for Cathy, a pleasant afternoon drive is understandable; to be angry with an experienced homicide detective for being inured to the ugliness of death is not. One is left to conclude that Yates included the character simply to give the story a feminine component, one that is unnecessary.

    While critics generally were enthusiastic about the movie, Bisset’s performance was the one area where they were in almost uniform agreement, and that was negative. Roger Ebert summed up the critical reaction to the character of Cathy when he wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times,

“    One trouble. They couldn’t be satisfied with a cop movie, I guess; they had to have sex appeal, and so they brought in Jacqueline Bisset (a lovely sight, true) to be McQueen’s girl. And every line she recites is disastrously inappropriate. She has one speech so awful it takes the movie five minutes to recover.”

    Another flaw that must be pointed out (though many do not consider it such) is that Yates emphasizes style over substance. The only problems that this creates are in term of plotting, and the holes in the story that arise. Why does Ross unlock the hotel room door? Why couldn’t Bullitt simply borrow Cathy’s car? Why was it necessary for her to drive him to San Mateo? What’s more, why involve her at all? He’s a police Lieutenant on a homicide investigation, why can’t he just order a patrol unit to transport him to San Mateo?

    The flaws in plot and characterization, however, do not overcome the reasons why people love this movie. The story, despite the holes, is an engaging, exciting mystery that holds together to the end. The pacing is superb, and the dialogue, at least for the male cast, is sharp and natural. The chase scene, planned and executed by stunt coordinator Carey Loftin, would become the movie’s signature scene, and would inspire hundreds of imitators.

    The scene would include two custom modified Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustangs, with 390 cubic inch V-8 engines, on loan from Ford Motor Co. It was planned that the killers would be driving a Ford Galaxie sedan, and the company provided two of those vehicles to Warner Bros. as well. It was quickly determined, however, that these cars were too heavy to hold up under the punishment they would be required to endure. Two 1968 Dodge Chargers were purchased from a local Dodge dealership, and the suspension systems were heavily modified.

    Though Steve McQueen did much of his own driving in the scene (as the Warner publicity dept. loudly proclaimed), stunt man Bud Ekins (who had doubled McQueen for the motorcycle jump in The Great Escape, and was also the rider who lays down his motorcycle in this chase scene...) did the truly dangerous stunts. Especially after McQueen nearly missed a turn, skidding and smoking the tires. He was forced to back up quickly and slam it back into drive. That's in the movie, and it wasn't planned or scripted. Bill Hickman, who played the driver of the Charger and the second hit-man, was one of the best stunt drivers in the business. James Dean’s former driver, he had been the first on the scene when the young actor was killed in a crash in his Porsche 550 Spyder in 1955. He was an accomplished stunt man who would go on to perform two more iconic car chases, in the films The French Connection and The Seven-Ups. He and McQueen spent days practicing the close-quarters driving that would be required for the sequence. The scene took three weeks to film, and then Editor Frank P. Keller took over.

    Working with the assembled footage from cameras in the cars, cameras following the cars, cameras along the route, and the final special effects shots, Keller skillfully weaves it into one of the most iconic scenes of the 1960s. It also creates several interesting gaffes, as when the Charger somehow manages to lose it fifth hubcap, or when the chase passes the same VW Beetle four times. Nevertheless, the editing Keller did on this film was good enough to earn him the Oscar for Editing that year.

    And then there’s the primary reason this film is so beloved—it’s star. Steve McQueen was a box-office phenomenon of the late 1960s, one of the dominant male stars of his generation. Blessed with rugged good looks, sandy-blond hair, and piercing blue eyes, he was incapable of being upstaged on screen. He commanded the viewer’s attention with a calm, quiet assurance, a presence that can best be summed up in one word, and that would be, “Cool.”