Cinema Speculation

by Quentin Tarantino

Joe’s diatribe ends with the sentiment that somebody oughta kill ’em all (the hippies). Well, Patrick just did and, in an unguarded moment, makes a barroom confession that only Joe hears. What follows is the strangely antagonistic, yet symbiotic, relationship between the two different men from two different classes. They’re not exactly friends (Joe’s practically blackmailing the anguished father), but in a black-comic twisted way they do become compadres. The distinguished middle-class man of the executive class has enacted the fascistic rants of this low-class blue-collar loudmouth slob. By blackmailing Patrick into a sort of alliance, Joe shares both the murderer’s dark secret and, to some degree, the culpability of the murder. This dynamic unleashes the desires and inhibitions of the blue-collar blowhard and buries the cultured man’s guilt, replacing it with a sense of purpose and righteousness. Till the two men, armed with automatic rifles, are executing hippies at a commune. And in a tragic, ironic freeze-frame, the father ends up executing his own daughter. Pretty strong stuff? You bet. But what that synopsis can’t begin to convey is how fucking funny the film is.

And the audience at the Tiffany Theater in 1970 watched the early section of the film in silence. But once Dennis Patrick enters the tavern, and Peter Boyle’s Joe enters the movie, the audience started laughing. And in no time at all the adult audience went from repulsed repose to outright hilarity. I remember they laughed at pretty much every fucking thing Joe said. It was a superior laugh; they were laughing at Joe. But they were laughing with Peter Boyle, who enters the movie like a force of nature. And the talented screenwriter Norman Wexler gives him a bunch of outrageous lines. Boyle’s comedic performance alleviates the picture’s one-note ugliness. It doesn’t make Joe likable, but it does make him sort of enjoyable. Avildsen, by combining Peter Boyle’s bravura comic performance with this grim trash-o-logue, produces a cocktail mixed with piss that’s disturbingly tasty.

I remember just as it seemed the laughter in the tavern scene had started to calm down, Joe gets up from the barstool and moves over to the jukebox to drop some coins in. And as soon as he gets a look at all the (I assume) soul music on the jukebox’s playlist, he yells out, “Christ, they even fucked up the goddamn music!” The audience of the Tiffany Theater burst out laughing even harder than before. But after the bar scene was over, and sometime after Dennis Patrick and his wife go over to Joe’s house for dinner, I fell asleep. So I missed the whole scene where Joe and his newfound acolyte go on a hippie-hunting murder spree. A fact my mother was thankful for.

Well, I might have slept through the second half of Joe, but once the movie was over and the lights came on, I woke up. And in no time at all the second movie on the Tiffany double feature started, the more overtly comedic Where’s Poppa? And right from the get-go when George Segal puts on a gorilla suit and Ruth Gordon punches him in the nuts, this movie had me. At that age, the height of comedy was a guy in a gorilla suit, and the only thing funnier than that was a guy getting punched in the nuts. So a guy in a gorilla suit getting punched in the nuts was the absolute pinnacle of comedy. No doubt, this movie was going to be hysterical. As late as it was, I was going to watch this movie all the way to the end. I’ve never seen Where’s Poppa? all the way through since that screening. But so many visual moments have remained burned into my brain, whether I understood them then or not.

Yes, some of those adult movies were fucking amazing! MASH, the Dollars Trilogy, Where Eagles Dare, The Godfather, Dirty Harry, The French Connection, The Owl and the Pussycat, and Bullitt. And some, to an eight- or nine-year-old, were fucking boring. Carnal Knowledge? The Fox? Isadora? Sunday Bloody Sunday? Klute? Goodbye, Columbus? Model Shop? Diary of a Mad Housewife? But I knew, while they were watching the movie, no one cared whether or not I was having a good time.

I remember Airport being a big hit with my family in 1970. Mainly due to the surprise of Van Heflin’s bomb going off. The moment the bomb exploded on board the aircraft was one of the most shocking moments in any Hollywood movie up to that time. As Curt said on the ride home, “I thought Dean Martin was going to talk the guy out of it,” subtextually remarking on how a Dean Martin movie of 1964 or 1965 would have played out, compared to a film—even a relatively old-fashioned one—of 1970. And the scene that followed—the hole in the aircraft sucking people out—was the most intense cinematic set piece I had ever experienced. But in that year of 1970, I saw a lot of intense shit.

Because I was allowed to see things the other kids weren’t, I appeared sophisticated to my classmates. And because I was watching the most challenging movies of the greatest movie-making era in the history of Hollywood, they were right, I was. At some point, when I realized I was seeing movies other parents weren’t letting their children see, I asked my mom about it. She said, “Quentin, I worry more about you watching the news. A movie’s not going to hurt you.” Right fucking on, Connie!

Just making a list of the wild violent images I witnessed from 1970 to 1972 would appall most readers. Whether it was James Caan being machine-gunned to death at the toll booth, or Moe Greene being shot in the eye in The Godfather. That guy cut in half by the airplane propeller in Catch-22. Stacy Keach’s wild ride on the side of the car in The New Centurions. Or Don Stroud shooting himself in the face with a tommy gun in Bloody Mama. But just listing grotesque moments—out of context of the movies they were in—isn’t entirely fair to the films in question. And my mother’s point of view—that she later explained to me—was always a question of context. In those films, I could handle the imagery, because I understood the story.

The film they paid to see was Sweet Sweetback. Now the reason I didn’t attend that screening was because since it was rated X (“by an all-white jury!”), I couldn’t. I’m sure Curt, Uncle Roger, and Robin didn’t know what to make of Melvin Van Peebles’ howling cry of black empowerment any more than they did Brewster McCloud. But while I’m sure they couldn’t fathom why anyone would bother to make Altman’s malarkey, the Van Peebles film was something. Something they didn’t understand. Something they couldn’t grasp (which made them mad). Something that wasn’t for them (after it rejected them, they rejected it), but unlike Brewster McCloud, something they couldn’t deny. The interesting part of my memory was the only reason they saw it was due to my mom. I doubt, other than her, any of them had ever heard of it (she hipped them to it). Also, mom never used the short version of the film’s title. Always referring to it by its full soul title, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. And while I remember the men coming home complaining about the movie (for days), my mother didn’t say much. She didn’t defend the picture, but she also didn’t join in on the diatribe. She remained (strangely for her) quiet on the subject. Less than a year later she would leave Curt and exclusively date black men for the next three years.

This being the Saturday night showing of the brand-new Jim Brown movie, the huge auditorium (there were probably 1,400 seats) wasn’t exactly packed, but it was definitely busy, and buzzing with anticipation. My little face was the only white one in the audience. This was to be my first movie in an (except for me) all black movie theatre in a black neighborhood. This was 1972. By 1976 I would be venturing on my own to a mostly black theatre called the Carson Twin Cinema in Carson, California, which is where I would catch up on all the Blaxploitation and kung fu film classics I’d missed in the earlier part of the decade (Coffy, The Mack, Foxy Brown, J.D.’s Revenge, Cooley High, Cornbread, Earl and Me, The Watts Monster, Five Fingers of Death, Lady Kung Fu, The Chinese Connection) as well as all the other exploitation films that came out around that time. And by the early eighties, I found my way back to that theatre row on Broadway. Though by that time, the neighborhood was far more Mexican than black, and the 35mm film prints they showed usually contained Spanish subtitles.

I was wiping tears of laughter from my eyes as the lights came up in the massive auditorium. I started figuring out, because of my mother, Reggie was trying to get in good with me. So, I asked him could I get a Coke and some candy at the snack bar. But instead of taking me to the concession stand, he just dug out his wallet, whipped out a twenty-dollar bill and said, “Get anything you want.” As far as I was concerned, mom could marry this cat.

To one degree or another I’ve spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film, on a Saturday night, in a black cinema in 1972.

Along with Paul Newman and Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen was the biggest of the younger male movie stars of the sixties. The UK had its share of exciting young leading men like Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Albert Finney, and Terence Stamp, but of the young sexy guys in America—that were also genuine movie stars—it was McQueen, Newman, and Beatty. On the next level down was James Garner, George Peppard, and James Coburn. But for the most part, anytime one of them got a picture, it was because one of the top three turned it down. Producers wanted Newman or McQueen, they settled for George Peppard. They wanted McQueen, they settled for James Coburn. They wanted Beatty, they settled for George Hamilton. James Garner was actually popular enough to get scripts from time to time that weren’t covered with the top three’s fingerprints, but not often.

The importance of Neile McQueen to Steve’s success as a movie star can’t be overemphasized. It was Neile who read the scripts. It was Neile who narrowed down the material. It was Neile who was good at choosing material that would be best for Steve. Steve’s agent, Stan Kamen, would read ten scripts that were being offered, then narrow that down to five and send those off to Neile. She’d read those five scripts, write a synopsis on the material, narrow it down to the two she liked best, and then tell Steve the stories and explain her reasons why she liked them for him. Which would usually end up in him reading the one Neile liked the most.* Now of course the director was important, how much they were paying him, the location they were shooting the film at—all of these things were important. But so was Neile weighing in. Naturally, directors who worked with Steve before—that he liked—got preferential treatment. But if Neile didn’t like the script, it was an uphill battle. And it was thanks to Neile’s good taste and her keen understanding of both her husband’s ability and his iconic persona that she steered her husband, starting with The Cincinnati Kid, into the biggest winning streak of the second half of the sixties (a Neile McQueen is what Elvis needed).

Eventually McQueen put Bullitt into production as a Solar picture with Warner Bros.-Seven Arts handling distribution. The end result was not only Steve McQueen’s biggest hit, but a zeitgeist smash, and finally McQueen surpassing his greatest rival, Paul Newman. The way Dirty Harry (which Steve later passed on) took the already iconic Clint Eastwood and gave him a new level of Clint-specific iconography, is what the chic cool-dude, slow-boil, fast-driving Frank Bullitt did for McQueen. Bullitt also changed the cop film genre, and later cop shows on TV for good. Thanks to James Bond, it was secret agents that were the cool cats. Even private eyes, like Paul Newman as Harper, Frank Sinatra as Tony Rome, Ralph Meeker in Kiss Me Deadly, and George Peppard as P.J., were allowed to dress better, live in swankier digs, and generally have fun. But movies about cops were all very somber, serious, and frankly a drag. The movies were all the same, the cops were all the same, and they all dressed the same in their cheap dark suits and ties, with their porkpie hats and their trench- or raincoats. Frank Sinatra in The Detective, Sidney Poitier in They Call Me Mister Tibbs!, Richard Widmark in Madigan, and George Peppard in Pendulum were literally interchangeable. They all could have jumped ship on their films and taken over the lead on any of the other ones without anybody noticing the difference.

Peter Yates’ film doesn’t quite have the same zeitgeist position it enjoyed through the last decades of the twentieth century. While a lot of people born since 2000 may have heard of it, and they probably have heard about its famous car chase, that doesn’t mean they’ve seen it. I’m old enough to have actually seen Bullitt at the cinema when it came out. Which means I saw it at six. I don’t remember the movie. I remember the car chase. And that’s what most people usually remember about Bullitt. But they also remember how cool Steve McQueen was as Frank Bullitt, his cool clothes, his cool haircut, and his cool Ford Mustang. If they had a sense of the movie, they also might remember Lalo Schifrin’s terrific jazzy score (the type of score Quincy Jones tried to do for years and always failed miserably at). The one thing they don’t remember is the story. Bullitt does have a story. But it’s not a memorable story, nor does it have anything to do with what you respond to in the movie.

The story itself is more or less simple to follow. What’s unclear, especially during the middle section, is exactly what Bullitt’s up to, or why he does half the things he does. And if you think about it later, some of the things he does don’t make sense. At least not narrative sense. But as you watch—as you follow him breezing through San Francisco—it makes emotional movie-sense. One of the producers of the film, Philip D’Antoni, would also make The French Connection a few years later. And he followed the same narrative strategy in that film as well. The audience doesn’t know what’s going on half the time in The French Connection either. We know Popeye Doyle’s after the French guy with the gray beard, but none of the procedural shit means anything to us. It’s just lively, busy, and sort of exciting . . . like Yates’ film.

If Bullitt was going to change action films (I’d say create the modern action film), it first had to break the back of the police procedural. The snazzy opening credit sequence with Lalo Schifrin’s score and Pablo Ferro’s stylishly designed titles sets the audience up for the whole movie. We don’t really have any idea what’s going on. But the characters on screen seem to know what’s going on. And we don’t really care, because it’s groovy to watch. Instead of wasting time trying to explain a mystery, it’s the first urban action movie to go from one expertly executed set piece to another (you could make the case that Goldfinger was the first modern movie to do that. But the fantastical nature of the story allowed for it more than a modern-day cop/crime picture). And it’s not just the car chase. The scene where the killer (John Aprea) is loose in the hospital—and Bullitt and Delgetti are after him—is terrific as well (when you see how well Yates does that scene you have to wonder how he managed to so badly stumble his way through the suspense scenes in his anemic 1981 thriller Eyewitness). Bullitt is about action, atmosphere, San Francisco, Yates’ great location photography, Lalo Schifrin’s jazzy score, and Steve McQueen, his haircut and wardrobe. Nothing else matters.

Aside from the opening credit sequence, the other scene that sets up the movie is early on when Frank takes his girlfriend out to dinner. They go to a restaurant called Coffee Cantata. And we watch them have a good time and eat dinner. Yet, we don’t hear a fucking thing they say. Other than demonstrating they like each other and that Frank is capable of having a good time, nothing personal is revealed about the couple during the whole sequence. What Yates feels is important is the jazz band performing at the restaurant, the sound of jazzy music, the hip vibe of the establishment, the San Francisco atmosphere, and the spot-on looking extras that surround McQueen and Bisset. The scene tells us nothing narratively. But we dig it. It was cool being in the Coffee Cantata. It was cool watching McQueen and Bisset vibe with each other in the San Francisco surroundings.

Don Siegel did terrific location photography in his career, and he would do a good job shooting San Francisco three years later in Dirty Harry (even though half the movie would be shot on the Universal back lot). But nobody had ever shot San Francisco as great as Peter Yates did or ever will again. The way he utilizes location to such a dynamic degree suggests a master cinematic stylist. One of the reasons he did such a dynamite job was he went thirty days over schedule. Yates was shooting a movie, not a schedule. While Yates would do good work many times again—Breaking Away, The Hot Rock, The Friends of Eddie Coyle (overrated), The Deep, and Mother, Juggs & Speed (underrated)—he would never demonstrate the cinematic style and confidence he does in Bullitt. If he had? If he managed to do what he did in Bullitt four more times? He would have been the greatest action filmmaker (save for Steven Spielberg and Sam Peckinpah) of the seventies. I mentioned that to film critic Elvis Mitchell and he said, “If he did it even one more time he would have been a pantheon director.”

Rarely in the entire history of Hollywood movie stars being movie stars has a movie star done less and accomplished more than McQueen with this role in this movie. The part is nothing and yet he makes it a great role. He practically does nothing, but nobody in the history of movies did nothing like Steve McQueen. As great as McQueen could be, this is the role he needs to be remembered by. Because it’s in this role he demonstrates what he could do that Newman and Beatty couldn’t. Which is just be. Just fill the frame with him.

Yates doesn’t employ the old movie-star trick of having everybody else overact, while the lead underacts so he comes across as cooler and more in control. The ham and phony dramatics that always accompanied the supporting players in their stock roles in cop movies were stripped away by Yates. Robert Vaughn, in his own way, is as effective in his role as McQueen. Vaughn never overplays his smarmy oily act. He never makes a meal out of his provoking dialogue. Like McQueen as Bullitt, he finds his own register, his own monotone, and never veers off course. In his entertaining study of the actor’s career, Robert Vaughn: A Critical Study, author John B. Murray described Vaughn’s sneaky Chalmers: “He works so well within the scheme of the film because his style here is unobtrusive yet too dynamic and compulsive not to make one fascinated by the character. Audience feeling towards Chalmers remains at all times rather ambivalent, recognizing how despicable he is yet unable to conquer a grudging but substantial admiration.”

When Eastwood as Frank Morris in Escape from Alcatraz doesn’t speak for the first fifteen minutes, it’s self-conscious too (it’s also cool and effective). But Bullitt’s lack of dialogue is never self-conscious. Because it’s a physical performance. Bullitt doesn’t explain to the audience or other characters what he’s doing or thinking. He just does them and we watch. When I mentioned to Neile McQueen how little Bullitt spoke, she said, “That was all Steve. He really didn’t like to talk too much in movies. He would just rip out pages of dialogue. He’d do scenes with Don Gordon and say, ‘Give those lines to Don.’ Then Don would say, ‘Who cares who says it, the camera’s still gonna be on you.’ And Steve smiled and said, ‘That’s right, baby.’” Walter Hill said the same thing. “Steve would say, ‘Let him say that. I’ll be over here peeling an apple.’” Steve McQueen plays the role the way Peter Yates directs the picture. Neither man seems to have any narrative or dramatic concerns whatsoever. Steve McQueen as Frank Bullitt keeps moving forward, Yates as the director follows him, and we the audience sit back and let them do our thinking for us. As pure cinema, it’s one of the best directed movies ever made.