Cinema Speculation

by Quentin Tarantino

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.