Why the car’s the star
OUR MAN Stephen Bayley operates on a rather higher intellectual plane than me. That’s why, while he perceives that cars have had a limited impact on film because they seldom embody the meaning and essence of the movie or lead character (or something), for me they have absolutely dominated cinema.
Perhaps that’s because these two epochdefining inventions have grown up together, or more likely it is simply that, for me, the cars are the stars and the humans the extras. I mean, why else would you sit through an hour-and-a-half of a desperately miscast Ryan O’Neal in The Driver if it weren’t for the genius scene in which his character dismantles a Mercedes-Benz 280S by scraping it against the walls of a multi-storey car park?
Truth be told – and here’s the heresy – I feel the same way about Bullitt. This is not a bid to make sure our Letters pages are full for the coming months but, however achingly cool it is, I’ve never been that much of a fan of McQueen post-The Great Escape, Robert Vaughn seems more wishy-washy than sinister, and what there is of a plot stumbles awkwardly towards an anticlimax.
I have learned all this by watching the movie countless times solely thanks to two notable highs: the Lalo Schifrin soundtrack (to my mind rivalled in period only by Quincy Jones’s for The
Italian Job and Roy Budd’s for Get Carter) and Frank Bullitt’s Ford Mustang. This movie doesn’t just star a car, it puts it on a pedestal, instantly elevates it to cultural icon status, and prostrates itself before it like no film has before or since.
So, to discover that the very car from the film, long thought lost, had come out of hiding after 50 years got us excited. Then to learn that it had been so carefully guarded and cherished by one devoted family for all those years compelled us finally to tell the comprehensive story of this very special machine.