YMMV / Bullitt

• Adaptation Displacement: Based on Robert L. Fish's crime novel Mute Witness. The movie is a pretty close adaptation, the main difference (besides the setting moving from Boston to San Francisco) is that the main character Lt. Clancy is much more of a working class schlub than the super-cool antihero Bullitt.
• Awesome Music: The film's score, composed by Lalo Schifrin of Mission: Impossible fame.
• Genre Turning Point: After this film came out and wowed audiences with its famous Chase Scene, shooting car chases by just having actors Driving a Desk or speeding up footage of cars moving at normal speed wasn't gonna cut it anymore.
• Heartwarming Moments: It seems when all is said and done at least Bullitt's girlfriend seems to have decided to stay with him.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Robert Duvall has a small role in this film, and half a century later, he would appear in Widows, directed by the other Steve McQueen.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Rightly or wrongly, the car chase scene is this movie's primary draw for a lot of audiences.
• Once Original, Now Common:
  • The famous car chase scene was the first done at full speed, not relying on undercranking. It still holds on its own, which is impressive all by itself, but from modern perspective, it lacks the sheer "wow!" effect of being one of the first "real" car chases.
  • The film introduced and codified the concept of a Cowboy Cop, and one that's deeply flawed at that. Both of those concepts became bread and butter of cop movies and series.
• One-Scene Wonder: The hitman's driver only appears during the car chase (and in a split-second scene following Bullitt shortly beforehand), but is a key part of the movie's Signature Scene.
• Retroactive Recognition: Robert Duvall plays a cab driver.
• Signature Scene: The Chase Scene was the first car chase of its kind and set the precedent for practically every car chase to follow in its footsteps.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The now-hopelessly-obsolete fax machine^note The Xerox Magnafax Telecopier, state of the art in 1968 that Bullitt and the rest of the cops stare at for several minutes as it's printing a photograph, which is being transmitted over a dial-up Telex line.

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