You could have almost guessed this given my new arrival this weekend, no?
My dad really loved Steve McQueen and that's how I found Bullitt. It was the Saturday afternoon movie on Channel 5 or something and he was watching it. Steve McQueen was a very different action hero than I was used to. Growing up on Sly and Ahhnold, and even catching a bit of Dirty Harry, you think of every action here as a bit larger than life.
Steve McQueen in Bullitt was just a regular guy doing a job.... and he played that perfectly.
I would have liked to see him last longer than he did... he was stricken with lung cancer and died at 50. What kind of roles would he have taken?
Bullitt also has a great cast. Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bisset, Robert Duvall.
Oh... and there's a little car chase in it, too. :)
By conventional standards, it isn't really much of a car chase... but this is really the first real movie car chase. The Mustang vs. the Charger. It was so much more realistic than the chases we see now. They used live sound, and McQueen did a lot of his own driving--screwing up a few times in the process--all caught on film. And the chase was McQueen's idea in the first place.
The interesting thing was that it also touched off another auto icon. Had they not used the Charger in the movie, it would have never influenced the use of the Charger as the "General Lee" in the Dukes of Hazzard.