Lyric of the Day (Crow, on Steve McQueen)

“Like Steve McQueen
All I need's a fast machine.”—“Steve McQueen,” written by Sheryl Crow and John Shanks, from Crow’s album C’mon, C’mon (2002)

(Bullitt, the police procedural thriller that cemented McQueen’s status as an “all-American rebel”, was released on this date in 1968 by Warner Brothers/Seven Arts. I doubt if you’ll find many people who remember much about the plot--for the record, it concerns a detective’s assignment to guard a criminal witness and the ensuing complications—but nobody who's seen it can forget its seven-minute car chase scene, featuring the bad guys' black 1968 Dodge Charger R/T 440 vs. McQueen’s Highland Green 1968 Ford Mustang GT 390 fastback. It was made all the more memorable by location filming on the streets of San Francisco.

The sequence, designed by Carey Loftin, was surely instrumental in winning an Oscar for editor Frank Keller. Director Peter Yates would go on to direct, 11 years later, a far different—but to my mind, no less exhilarating—chase scene, this time involving bicycles, in Breaking Away. But the one from 1968 was undoubtedly more influential, spawning, three years later, Gene Hackman’s breakneck pursuit of drug dealers through the mean streets of New York in The French Connection—as well as far, far inferior knockoffs.)