McQueen by Christopher Sandford

Author:Christopher Sandford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Published: 2001-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

* While a number of critics tried turning Thomas Crown into something heavy or even profound, McQueen’s own take, as usual, was on the money: ‘A lot of people are going to look for some real deep message there, but all it is is good entertainment. There are no moral messages about the Establishment or protests against the System. It’s an audience participation film . . . escape.’

* Just as Pierce Brosnan, undeniably suave but with the charisma of a watch fob, was the perfect choice for the 1999 remake. Comparing the two films was to prove easier than even McQueen’s greatest fans could have imagined. Says the critic Barry Norman, ‘The second, of course, was more obvious. Like most movies today, it was made for people with the concentration span of a gnat, by people with the concentration span of a gnat. The words subtlety and ambiguity aren’t the ones that come to mind.’

* McQueen, Bud Ekins and the stuntman Carrie Lofton took turns driving the Mustang down the San Francisco hills, several of which, to make it more interesting, remained open to the public.

* For the mechanically minded, the two cars involved in the high-pursuit scene were McQueen’s modified 390 GT Mustang, and a 440 Magnum Dodge Charger driven by ‘Wild Bill’ Hickman, a stunt professional who’d been following James Dean when Dean crashed to his death, and who went on to stage the chase sequence in The French Connection. PhD theses have been written on the implausibilities and mad geography of Bullitt’s own chase (daringly played out only to engine noise), which began at Enrico’s, a nightspot on San Francisco’s Broadway, wove a loop through the Marina district, took an improbable lurch down Lombard Street and suddenly re-emerged five miles further south, near McLaren Park, before heading on to the James Lick freeway. The recurrence of the mysterious green Volkswagen (driven by one of Carrie Lofton’s stunt team), Steve’s restless gear-changing and the unfeasibly large number of hubcaps bouncing about all excite film buffs to this day. McQueen completists will know that he did most of his own driving except for the hill-jumping on and around Chestnut Street (doubled, at Neile’s insistence, by Bud Ekins, also seen taking a skidding dive off a motorbike into the Mustang’s path), and the final side-swiping climax handled by Lofton. The subsequent fiery crash of Hick-man’s Dodge into a gas station was slightly mistimed. It’s only fair to add, too, that Loren Janes stood in for Steve for some of the airport sequence, including the running scene Yates finally used, though the shot of McQueen lying under the screaming fanjets, and the burn marks to his neck, were real enough. (‘Couldn’t we have used a dummy?’ one of the awed crew had asked. ‘We just did,’ Steve told him.) Nit-picking aside, Bullitt’s main action set pieces quite deservedly became cult classics. Both delicately conceived but fearless stunts remain among the hottest yet, in the McQueenly sense, coolest ever committed to film. Together, they’re Steve’s most sustained piece of heroics.

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