The car chase was one of many innovations of the New Hollywood era, where on-location authenticity supplanted studio backlot fakery. Yes, there were car chases in movies before Peter Yates' "Bullitt," but they tended to be laden with process shots featuring actors at the wheel while the image projected behind them veered out of control. Even an A-plus production like Alfred Hitchcock's "North by Northwest" settled for soundstage-bound sequences that manufactured the sensation of high-speed vehicular mayhem.
Perhaps they were thrilling to people at the time because they had nothing quite so thrilling as a comparison. In any event, once Yates unleashed his 11-minute, practically shot pursuit through the perilously hilly streets of San Francisco in 1968's "Bullitt," there was no going back. If you weren't filming real cars barrelling at unsafe speeds through city streets or country roads, you were wasting everyone's time.
And it is only right...
Perhaps they were thrilling to people at the time because they had nothing quite so thrilling as a comparison. In any event, once Yates unleashed his 11-minute, practically shot pursuit through the perilously hilly streets of San Francisco in 1968's "Bullitt," there was no going back. If you weren't filming real cars barrelling at unsafe speeds through city streets or country roads, you were wasting everyone's time.
And it is only right...
- 10/23/2022
- by Jeremy Smith
- Slash Film
Hollywood glamour strikes the crime genre, with a bank robbery tale that concentrates on high living and high fashion. Superstars Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway play a coy game of thief and investigator. This expensive show is not really in fashion anymore, but in 1968 it was high-class filmmaking, with Norman Jewison solidifying his position as a smart maker of solid mainstream entertainment.
The Thomas Crown Affair
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber
1968 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 102 min. / Street Date February 13, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston, Biff McGuire, Astrid Heeren, Gordon Pinsent, Yaphet Kotto, Bruce Glover.
Cinematography: Haskell Wexler
Film Editor: Hal Ashby, Byron Brandt, Ralph E. Winters
Montage and title design: Pablo Ferro
Original Music: Michel Legrand
Written by Alan R. Trustman
Produced and Directed by Norman Jewison
Ah, 1968 was a good movie year. I remember my father returning from a car hunt (before he bought...
The Thomas Crown Affair
Blu-ray
Kino Lorber
1968 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 102 min. / Street Date February 13, 2018 / available through Kino Lorber / 29.95
Starring: Steve McQueen, Faye Dunaway, Paul Burke, Jack Weston, Biff McGuire, Astrid Heeren, Gordon Pinsent, Yaphet Kotto, Bruce Glover.
Cinematography: Haskell Wexler
Film Editor: Hal Ashby, Byron Brandt, Ralph E. Winters
Montage and title design: Pablo Ferro
Original Music: Michel Legrand
Written by Alan R. Trustman
Produced and Directed by Norman Jewison
Ah, 1968 was a good movie year. I remember my father returning from a car hunt (before he bought...
- 2/3/2018
- by Glenn Erickson
- Trailers from Hell
By Lee Pfeiffer
The year 1967 marked the high point of Sidney Poitier's screen career. He starred in three highly acclaimed box office hits: "To Sir, With Love", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "In the Heat of the Night". The fact that Poitier did not score a Best Actor Oscar nomination that year had less to do with societal prejudices (he had already won an Oscar) than the fact that he was competing with himself and split the voter's choices for his best performance. "In the Heat of the Night" did win the Best Picture Oscar and immortalized Poitier's performance as Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia detective who finds himself assigned to assist a redneck sheriff (Rod Steiger, who did win the Oscar that year for his performance in this film) in a town in the deep south that has experienced a grisly unsolved murder. When Steiger's character, resentful for...
The year 1967 marked the high point of Sidney Poitier's screen career. He starred in three highly acclaimed box office hits: "To Sir, With Love", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and "In the Heat of the Night". The fact that Poitier did not score a Best Actor Oscar nomination that year had less to do with societal prejudices (he had already won an Oscar) than the fact that he was competing with himself and split the voter's choices for his best performance. "In the Heat of the Night" did win the Best Picture Oscar and immortalized Poitier's performance as Virgil Tibbs, a Philadelphia detective who finds himself assigned to assist a redneck sheriff (Rod Steiger, who did win the Oscar that year for his performance in this film) in a town in the deep south that has experienced a grisly unsolved murder. When Steiger's character, resentful for...
- 8/6/2017
- by nospam@example.com (Cinema Retro)
- Cinemaretro.com
For 100 points, what is the thread connecting the world’s oldest sports car race and Hollywood’s brightest star in the ‘60s and ‘70s? Other than possessing a near-mythical stature in their respective fields, Le Mans (1971) is Steve McQueen’s passion project, one that aims to become the definitive cinematic portrayal of racing and elevate the actor’s clout. Neither happened – the film cursed all those involved and altered the “King of Cool” forever. Documakers Gabriel Clarke and John McKenna have chosen that as the subject, and their final product absolutely deserves a spin.
If, for some reason definitely of the odd kind, the content of The Man & Le Mans isn’t captivating enough, know that Clarke and McKenna are interspersing previously unseen footage and sound bites with interviews with surviving crew members. McQueen’s son Chad, the female lead Louise Edlind, writer/confidant Alan Trustman, driver/racer David Piper,...
If, for some reason definitely of the odd kind, the content of The Man & Le Mans isn’t captivating enough, know that Clarke and McKenna are interspersing previously unseen footage and sound bites with interviews with surviving crew members. McQueen’s son Chad, the female lead Louise Edlind, writer/confidant Alan Trustman, driver/racer David Piper,...
- 8/3/2017
- by Nguyen Le
- The Cultural Post
We love crime movies. We may go on and on about Scorsese’s ability to incorporate Italian neo-realism techniques into Mean Streets (1973), the place of John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle (1950) in the canon of postwar noir, The Godfather (1972) as a socio-cultural commentary on the distortion of the ideals of the American dream blah blah blah, yadda yadda yadda…but that ain’t it.
We love crime movies because we love watching a guy who doesn’t have to behave, who doesn’t have to – nor care to – put a choker on his id and can let his darkest, most visceral impulses run wild. Some smart-mouth gopher tells hood Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), “Go fuck yourself,” in Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), and does Tommy roll with it? Does he spit back, “Fuck me? Nah, fuck you!” Does he go home and tell his mother?
Nope.
He pulls a .45 cannon out from...
We love crime movies because we love watching a guy who doesn’t have to behave, who doesn’t have to – nor care to – put a choker on his id and can let his darkest, most visceral impulses run wild. Some smart-mouth gopher tells hood Tommy DeVito (Joe Pesci), “Go fuck yourself,” in Scorsese’s Goodfellas (1990), and does Tommy roll with it? Does he spit back, “Fuck me? Nah, fuck you!” Does he go home and tell his mother?
Nope.
He pulls a .45 cannon out from...
- 10/30/2012
- by Bill Mesce
- SoundOnSight
Peter Yates, who died this past weekend at age 81, was one of several British directors invited to make movies in The States in the 1960s, all of whom had a particular and rare filmmaker’s gift for capturing a sense – the feel — of a setting often better than native-born filmmakers could. Yates’ obits talked about the car chase in Bullitt (1968), the Oscar nods for Breaking Away (1979) and The Dresser (1983), but they missed how this gift he shared with his UK colleagues was such a critical part of what made his best work so special.
Think of the hundreds – the thousands – of American-helmed movies set against the country’s great metropolises where the city sits inertly behind the action, as undistinguished and indistinguishable as a generic theatre backdrop. Then compare them to the almost hallucinogenically surreal Los Angeles of John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Manhattan’s desperate, grubby demimonde in John Schlesinger...
Think of the hundreds – the thousands – of American-helmed movies set against the country’s great metropolises where the city sits inertly behind the action, as undistinguished and indistinguishable as a generic theatre backdrop. Then compare them to the almost hallucinogenically surreal Los Angeles of John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Manhattan’s desperate, grubby demimonde in John Schlesinger...
- 1/12/2011
- by Ricky
- SoundOnSight
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