The real birth of cool

Most things described as being “cool” are often - if not only - regarded as being so by those seemingly self-appointed to be arbiters of what is cool. Which isn’t cool. One of the reasons I stopped buying men’s fashion magazines wasn’t so much the photography of ridiculously priced clobber, but the assumption that those who wrote and produced such magazines were somehow above the rest of us who, by nature, are not cool. Oh, and I’m not cool to begin with.

However, there are some things that are so intrinsically cool they don’t even need highlighting. They just exude cool. The Amalfi Coast, for example. Bass Wejun loafers. Soho. James Bond. Fonzie. Perhaps each to their own, but these would, I’d hesitate to suggest, feature on an untouchable list of cool things all of their own. Along with two others: Steve McQueen and his unquestionably cool crime thriller Bullitt, which was came out this day, 50 years ago.

What makes Bullitt cool is both a sum of its parts as well as the whole. McQueen sits at the centre of this hypothesis. The actor was and - face facts, Brad Pitt, Bradley Cooper and any other pretender to the throne named Brad or Bradley - remains the coolest actor in Hollywood history. Not Newman, Redford, Pacino or any contemporary registers on the same level of cool. By the time McQueen strapped on Lieutenant Frank Bullitt's shoulder holster he’d already set the bar for cool in The Great Escape, appropriately as PoW Hilts “the Cooler king” (and, even earlier, in The Magnificent Seven). But his starring role as the monosyllabic San Francisco detective in Peter Yates’ 1968 thriller notched the cool factor up, quite considerably. The cool factor begins with McQueen's wardrobe - his Sunday attire (the day being a key part of the plot) comprising a perennially cool rollneck sweater and what were then known as “slacks”, topped off with a three-quarter length trenchcoat. Cool on top of cool on top of cool.

Then there’s that car, a 1968 Ford Mustang Fastback in Racing Green, which stars in the greatest - and coolest - car chase in cinema history*.  If you’ve never seen the film - and if not, why not? - it’s a frenetic, ten-minute sequence which covers a series of streets in San Francisco which, if you know the city at all won’t make any geographical sense, but thanks to some superb direction and editing, provides an exhilarating, tyre-squealing, rubber-burning tour, from its prowling start on Army Street before hill-bouncing its way out of North Beach towards a fiery conclusion for the baddies on the Guadalupe Canyon Parkway in San Bruno. When I lived in the Bay Area I occupied an idle Sunday afternoon by trying to recreate the chase route, albeit with greater regard for stop signs than McQueen’s character did. It was, not surprisingly, impossible to cover in the 10 minutes and 53 seconds of screen time the chase occupied in the film, but a lot of fun, especially while listening to the Bullitt's Lalo Schifrin soundtrack (itself, achingly cool). Proportionately it takes up a fraction of the film, but hats off to Yates for making it such a pinnacle of cinematic action. And to think he was the man who directed Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday…
*fact

Bullitt has become an iconic entry in every petrolhead's catalogue of must-see films, but it also provided the template for others to follow. William Friedkin was such a fan that he was he inspired by it for the car chases in both The French Connection and To Live And Die In LA. No wonder there is a plethora of websites devoted to mapping the course of that Mustang as McQueen chases the Mob hitmen across San Francisco in their Dodge Charger. The Ford Motor Company's marketing department hasn’t been shy about exploiting the Mustang's defining role in the film, building on the resurgent muscle car on American streets by introducing a special Bullitt edition of the car to coincide with the film's anniversary. Nice idea, but I very much doubt it will replicate the grunt of the original car driven by McQueen on screen.

Vehicular cool not withstanding, there is so much more of the frosty stuff to Bullitt than just a muscular ten minutes of extreme roadcraft. There is, for a start, a smart plot and its undercurrent of Mob retribution and political ambition (courtesy of the wonderful Robert Vaughn as the slimy Walter Chalmers in an utterly brilliant - and cool - performance. San Francisco itself must be recognised as another cool character in the film, though the Yates' choice of locations is never designed to act as a tourist promotion of a city regarded by many as their favourite in America for its laid-back nature (in spite of the threat of widespread tectonic devastation), dramatic topography, ornate architecture and a sky of a shade of blue all of its own (paler than elsewhere on the West Coast due, I’m told, to unique atmospherics above it).

Like that other embittered San Francisco cop of few words, Clint Eastwood's Harry Callaghan in Dirty Harry, released three years after Bullitt, McQueen's character is framed by his personal life, living on TV dinners bought from VJ Groceries across the road from his apartment at 1153-1157 Taylor Street. The grocery store even manages to provide one of the film's coolest moments - a single tracking shot which follows Bullitt out of the shop and across the road without even leaving the premises, watching the detective from behind its front window. It is details like this that make up the sum of the parts of why Bullitt is such a brilliant film and, of course, so cool.

Until his death in 1980 McQueen wouldn’t make another film as good, or play a character as cool as Frank Bullitt. And while actors tend to get judged on the body of their work, I could live with Bullitt being the only film McQueen made, not because he was a good or bad actor, but because it was such a singularly cool film. Some are like that (I can and do watch Heat whenever it appears in the television schedules, despite the fact I own it on multiple formats and have probably seen it more often than my own front door). Perhaps that is even the definition of cool, something that transcends everything else to stand out and stand up to repeat inspection. I know that I will never tire of watching Bullitt, enjoying its subtleties and its grand gestures in equal measure. But, if I think about it, mostly for Steve McQueen. Who was, in case you haven’t gathered by now, just bloody cool.