"Bullitt" (1968) Frank grits his teeth and waves off his last chance to not get the busty green mermaid inked unto his right forearm. Instead, he wonders, why he’d ever gotten himself into this particular racket. That damned so-n’-so of a recruiter! Frank had enjoyed spinning vinyl in the clubs. An art form few truly understood. Riding the gains, skipping over the muds. Deftly, maneuvering a cross-fade with a snappy outro timed to not step over the vocals. And of course, the US Military kept its own radio stations, and the bigger the ship commission, the more non-coms it needed that at least knew their way around an audio console and a mic. But now, as the rains came down in huge dollops watering down soup cans full of ink and teacups full of gin on a back street in the Wan Chai district, he knew the real reason he had signed up for the Navy and headed off for the East: Steve McQueen in the Sand Pebbles (1966). Of course, McQueen himself was a tank driver in the Marine Corps, and died horribly in the movie, (shot by the Chinese), and in life (lung cancer at age 50, 1980). But in his tragically short career he packed in a whole lot of cool. Sheer, unadulterated cool, from his Italian driving shoes to his Rolex to his Jaguar XK-SS. He was “The Essence of Cool,” as proclaims the documentary contained on the new double-disc release of Bullitt (1968), which Frank had picked up on bootleg on Arsenal Street this morning along with some hand-stitched silk shirts of the kind you can’t get state-side. Of course, our law-abiding, upright readers will have to wait until June 7th for the Warner Bros. re-release. Bullitt stands out not only as McQueen’s debut as a good guy---a cop, here, later a fireman in The Towering Inferno (1974), but often a bank robber or thief on the run---but also as the first film in a genre movement toward gritty police “reality-based” films later epitomized by Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry (1971). The dialogue is as curt, terse and occasionally stoic, as would befit real police officers following Mafia hit men in San Francisco. Not to mention an unprecedented use of the word “bullshit.” And there is some realistic commitment to procedural matters ranging from the tedium of McQueen and partner searching suitcases, to intense ER scenes following the hit on Bullitt’s star mafia witness. And plenty of action goes down, too, including a runway foot chase at San Francisco International and, of course, the infamous Mustang/ Charger car, which became the standard for all future cop movies. The French Connection (1971), note, offers a viable alternative, but cannot compete, to the simple ballet of Ford vs. Dodge (vs. Green Beetle. One cannot deny the scene, shot at multiple angles, contains the same VW and tire skid marks a distracting amount of times as the chase, seems to progress through the city.) The cast is rounded by Jacqueline Bissett (The Deep; 1977) as a weepy, disapproving girl friend and Robert Vaughn (also with McQueen in The Magnificent Seven; 1960), as a sleazy politician.But the true treat of the film is in McQueen himself. It’s in shotguns vs. his Colt in its quick-draw holster. It's in black turtlenecks and Tod’s boots. It’s in a GT Mustang Fastback vs. a Magnum Dodge Charger. After all, what other actor managed the covers of both Harper’s Bazaar and Sports Illustrated? Could read the Bible and suck down the Milwaukee’s Beast? Or rode horses flew planes with equal ease? Frank, meanwhile, feels racked with aches and fever, somewhere between the tattoo parlor and the dance club. But still his own, clunky boots (Frye’s Engineers, not up to McQ’s standards!) wearily drag him through the Hong Kong rain as he decides between liquor store and returning to his bunk for the night. He sighs, remembering her as the savviest, coolest, bitchin’-est chick he had ever known. But she was no Bissett, and he no McQueen, and so, whoosh ---she had run out between his fingers like sand through a goose---no, that wasn’t right.