Bullitt

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.