Bullitt | Full Movie | Movies Anywhere

Fifty years later and the closest anyone has ever come to this is simply stealing plot points here, an action beat there, and wishing that their leading man was a tenth as cool as Steve McQueen.

Here is lean, mean perfection in the treatment of a screen standard, the detective melodrama. Steve McQueen is in top form as the convention-flouting cop involved in thwarting gangsters.

...seems to have established the template for a certain kind of cop movie (and television show).

Fast cars, a go-it-alone cop who doesn't trust the system, Steve McQueen, jazz, and 1968 San Francisco - it just doesn't get more quintessentially American than that.