Wednesdays in January | 16 Movies
“Cars are almost the exact equivalent of the great Gothic cathedrals, the supreme creation of an era, consumed in image as a purely magical object.” Cultural critic Roland Barthes wrote these words in 1957, when a car’s allure was fostered by its unattainability. Cars are ubiquitous today, but Barthes sentiments nevertheless remain. Then and now audiences have relished movies that take beautiful and exotic cars to their curve-hugging, hill-jumping, break-squealing limits. Filmmakers have so frequently played on our vehicular fantasies that car chases have become a staple in action movies.
But the best car chases do more than just offer cheap thrills. They show off the talents of stunt people, serve as character development, push the plot forward or even offer social commentary – all while making audiences hold their collective breath. This month, TCM celebrates the onscreen car chase with sixteen classic films that have innovatively shaped the action film genre.
Car chases in film were staged as early as the motor vehicle itself – take, for instance, Alf Collins’ Runaway Match (1903); Ted Wilde’s Speedy (1928) (starring Harold Llyod in his last film); Don Siegel’s The Big Steal (1949); and Joseph H. Lewis’s Gun Crazy (1950) (starring Peggy Cummins who plays a trigger-happy femme fatale). Yet film critics seem to agree that the first modern car chase movie is British director Peter Yates’ American film, the neo-noir thriller Bullitt (1968). Set in San Francisco, Senator Walter Chalmers (Robert Vaughn) aims to take down mob boss Pete Ross (Vic Tayback) with the help of testimony from the criminal’s hothead brother Johnny (Pat Renella), who is in protective custody under the watch of Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen). When a pair of mob hitmen enter the scene, Bullitt follows their trail through a maze of complications, complete with a high-speed chase. The famous car chase scene starts a little over an hour into the film. Bullitt is in an absurdly cool green Mustang, trying to outdrive a black Dodge Charger, helmed by the two hitmen. The 10 minute and 53 second chase begins in the Fisherman Wharf area and ends outside the city at the Guadalupe Canyon Parkway in San Bruno Mountain near Brisbane. The route has been mapped, showing that it is geographically impossible to take place in real time, hence the montage footage.
Two 1968 390 cu. in. V8. Ford Mustang GT Fastbacks (325 hp) with four-speed manual transmissions were purchased for Bullitt. Yates called for the maximum speeds to be 75-80 miles per hour, but the cars at times reached speeds over 110 miles per hour. (Many years later, one of the drivers involved in the chase sequence remarked that the Charger – with a larger engine and greater horsepower – was so much faster than the Mustang that the drivers had to keep backing off the accelerator so as not to steal the Mustang’s thunder!)
This revolutionary chase scene was far longer and faster than what had been filmed before and placed cameras so that the audience felt as though they were inside the cars. Previously, car scenes were often staged using rear projection, a cinematic effect that combined foreground performances with pre-filmed backgrounds. McQueen, who at the time was a world-class racecar driver, drove in the close-up scenes, while stunt coordinator Carey Loftin, stuntman and motorcycle racer Bud Ekins, and McQueen’s usual stunt driver, Loren Janes, drove for the high-speed parts of the chase and performed other dangerous stunts.
Bullitt won the Academy Award for Best Editing (Frank P. Keller). Currently, there are Hollywood rumors swirling about a new Bullitt movie, to be directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by McQueen’s son, Chad, and granddaughter, Molly.
Bullitt’s producer, Philip D’Antoni, went on to produce William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), a film also routinely included on the short list of movies with the greatest chase scenes of all time. What’s often not always remembered is what a fantastic movie it is apart from the chase. It features a young Gene Hackman, who won an Academy Award for his performance as New York detective “Popeye” Doyle, launching his career. It also won Oscars for Best Picture, Direction, Screenplay, and Editing. The film’s storyline involves a $32 million shipment of heroin smuggled from Marseilles to New York, hidden in a Lincoln Continental. A complicated deal is set up between the French people, an American money man and the mafia. Doyle, a tough cop with a questionable reputation, needs a win to save his career. When he stumbles upon the heroin deal, he becomes obsessed with his job to a maniacal degree.
If in Bullitt, two cars and two drivers are matched at rather equal odds, in The French Connection the odds are completely off. In this notorious car chase Popeye commandeers a civilian’s 1971 Pontiac LeMans and then chases an elevated train on which a hitman is trying to escape. The most famous shot of the chase is made from a front bumper mount and shows a low-angle point of view of the streets racing by. Lenses were chosen to play with distance, so that the car sometimes seemed closer to hazards than it was. Director of photography Owen Roizman said that the camera was undercranked to 18 frames per section to enhance the sense of speed. This effect can be seen on a car whose exhaust pipe is pumping smoke at an accelerated rate. Other shots involved stunt drivers who were supposed to barely miss hitting the speeding car, but due to errors in timing, accidental collisions occurred and were left in the film. Popeye is a bad cop by ordinary standards: he is racist, he brutalizes people and he endangers innocent bystanders in this scene. He is representative of the postmodern gritty antiheros of the decade and this spectacular car chase is clearly symbolic of a high-speed ego trip.
A few years later D’Antoni produced and directed his own action film, The Seven-Ups (1973). Several other people who worked on The French Connection such as the lead Roy Scheider (who played Detective Buddy “Cloudy” Russo in the previous film), screenwriter Sonny Grosso and stunt coordinator Bill Hickman (also of Bullitt fame). The film follows a crusading policeman, Buddy Mannuci (Scheider), who is the leader of the Seven-Ups, a squad of plainclothes officers who use dirty tactics to snare their quarry on charges leading to prison sentences of seven years or more (hence the name of the team). The car chase sequence borrows heavily from the Bullitt chase, with two cars – a 1973 Pontiac Grand Ville sedan and a 1973 Pontiac Ventura coupe – bouncing down the gradients of uptown New York (like the cars on San Francisco’s steep hills.) The end of the chase was Hickman’s homage to the death of Jayne Mansfield, where the coupe smashes into the back of a parked tractor-trailer, shearing off most of the top portion of the car.
Not all action films are suspenseful thrillers, however. The car chase is also central to comedies – such as Stanley Kramer’s It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963); and the Saturday Night Live skit inspired film, The Blues Brothers (1980) directed by John Landis. The British comedy caper film The Italian Job (1969), directed by Peter Collinson, includes one of the most noteworthy car chases in comedic history. The film’s plot centers around Cockney criminal Charlie Croker (Michael Caine), recently released from prison, who forms a gang to steal a cache of gold bullion being transported through the city of Turin, Italy. In addition to Caine, the film features a quintessentially British cast. With its rousing theme by Quincy Jones and its trio of red, white and blue Mini Cooper Ss, The Italian Job is a time capsule of cool 1960s Britannia.
However, British critics didn’t warm to it, and it didn’t make an impact on the US box office either – perhaps because misleading movie posters seemed to bill it as a tough gangster movie, with Caine wearing sunglasses and holding a Tommy gun. But it has since gained a cult following and has been ranked favorably in the top 100 British films owing to its chase scene which takes place on the roof of Fiat’s main factory. Despite the burdensome weight of the gold bars in the back of the Minis, the team of daredevils head for a gap between two buildings at top speed. Using a ramp, they clear the chasm and the less brave policemen screech to a halt. The jump is smoothly executed by Remy Julienne, but the stunt was so dangerous to perform that legend has it that producer Michael Deeley was prepared to leave the set should the stunt go wrong and the cars plummet through the 60 ft gap. The Italian Job was remade in 2003, directed by F. Gary Gray (who went on, in 2017, to direct the eighth installment of the Fast & Furious franchise, The Fate of the Furious.) A sequel, The Brazilian Job, was reportedly in development in 2004, but it was canceled.
Another legendary car chase comedy is stuntman Hal Needham’s directorial debut, Smokey and the Bandit (1977). The American road film follows Bo “Bandit” Darville (Burt Reynolds) and Cledus “Snowman” Snow (Jerry Reed), two bootleggers attempting to illegally transport 400 cases of Coors beer from Texarkana to Atlanta. The entire film is a raucously fun and funny chase as Snowman drives the truck with the beer and Bandit drives the famed Pontiac Trans Am to distract and falsely bait the bumbling Texas county sheriff, Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason), who is in hot pursuit. Along the way, runaway bride Carrie (Sally Field) jumps into Bandit’s car, romantically shifting the quest and testing our hero’s character. (Reynolds and Field began a relationship after meeting on set.)
When it came to vehicles, Needham knew Bandit had to drive the soon to be released 1977 Pontiac “Firebird” Trans Am. He imagined the car as if it was a character in the movie. Pontiac gave him four 1976 Trans Ams (with 1977 front ends) and two Pontiac LeMans. All four cars were badly damaged during production, one of which was all but destroyed during the incredible jump over the dismantled Mulberry bridge. (The Trans Am used for that jump was equipped with a booster rocket, the same type that was used by Evel Knievel during his failed Snake River Canyon jump.) Needham himself served as the driver for the stunt. By the film’s ending, the final surviving Trans Am and LeMans were both barely running and the other cars had to use donor parts to stay running. This gives rise to various continuity errors with Justice’s patrol car, which during some chase sequences is shown with a black rear fender, which then reverts to the car’s bronze color again in later scenes. When it is finally torn off, it reappears later in the film!
TCM’s series on car chases concludes with a title that rings familiar to today’s viewers: the 1954 American crime drama B movie, The Fast and the Furious. The story, written well before Vin Diesel was even born, was penned by Roger Corman, the “King of the B’s” (a moniker he resisted), who also produced the film. It stars Dorothy Malone (who had left her agent and, having no work, accepted her part for next to nothing) and John Ireland (who also directed the film in a nine-day shoot with a budget of $50,000). It follows Frank Webster (Ireland), a trucker framed for murder who escapes prison and steals a convertible Jaguar with a rich woman named Connie (Malone) in it. After Connie tries to escape several times, she and Frank develop feelings for each other, and enter a cross-border road race that ends in Mexico. The Fast and the Furious is remembered as an early exploitation flick that doesn’t shy away from the violence in both sex and cars. In one memorable scene, Connie tears down the highway with inexplicable erotic energy.
The film was popular but struggled to recoup money for the studio because it often played on the bottom of double bills. Decades later, producer Neal H. Moritz licensed the title for a 2001 film with the same name. The Fast and the Furious (2001), directed by Rob Cohen, initiated a franchise of ten feature films (directed by the likes of John Singleton, Justin Lin, James Wan, and soon, Louis Leterrier), three spin off films, two short films, a television series, video games, live shows and theme park attractions, illustrating the enduring magic of cars and their capabilities.
