How Car Chase Scenes Have Evolved Over 100 Years: The Technology Behind Bullitt, The French Connection, Driver, and Other Action Movies

For many a clas­sic action-movie enthu­si­ast, no car chase will ever top the one in Bul­litt. The nar­ra­tor of the Insid­er video above describes it as “the scene that set the stan­dard for all mod­ern car chas­es,” one made “icon­ic part­ly because of the char­ac­ters, but also because of their cars.” The pur­suer dri­ves a Dodge Charg­er, a mus­cle car that “explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty dur­ing the late six­ties in the U.S.,” with a V‑8 engine and rear-wheel dri­ve that made it “basi­cal­ly built for infor­mal drag rac­ing.” The pur­sued, Steve McQueen’s detec­tive pro­tag­o­nist Frank Bul­litt, dri­ves an instant­ly rec­og­niz­able High­land Green Ford Mus­tang, “the first major pony car, a more com­pact, sporty take on the mus­cle car.”

Bul­litt could change the game, as they say, thanks not just to the cars but also the cam­eras avail­able at the time, not least the Arri­flex 35 II. “Small­er and more rugged” than the bulky rigs of ear­li­er gen­er­a­tions, it made it pos­si­ble to shoot on actu­al city streets rather than just stu­dio sets and rear-pro­jec­tion setups. (To get a sense of the dif­fer­ence in feel that result­ed, sim­ply com­pare the Bul­litt chase to the one in Dr. No, the first James Bond pic­ture, from six years before.)

This threw down the gaunt­let before all action film­mak­ers, who over the sub­se­quent decades would take advan­tage of every tech­no­log­i­cal devel­op­ment that could pos­si­bly height­en the thrills of their own car chas­es.

The video also includes vehic­u­lar action movies from The French Con­nec­tion and Van­ish­ing Point to Ronin and Dri­ve. But the most impor­tant devel­op­ment in recent decades actu­al­ly owes to the horse-rac­ing movie Seabis­cuit, whose pro­duc­tion neces­si­tat­ed a rig, now known as “the bis­cuit,” that “makes it look like an actor is doing the dri­ving, while a stunt per­son actu­al­ly steers from the dri­ver’s pod.” Gone are the days when a star like Steve McQueen, a gen­uine rac­er of both motor­cy­cles and cars, could han­dle some of the stunt dri­ving him­self; gone, too, is the era of the mus­cle car not pro­grammed to shut down auto­mat­i­cal­ly when it goes into a drift. But for view­ers in con­stant need of ever more spec­tac­u­lar, tech­ni­cal­ly com­plex, and expen­sive car chas­es, it seems the Fast and the Furi­ous series will always come through.

Relat­ed con­tent:

William Fried­kin, RIP: Why the 80s Action Movie To Live and Die in L.A. Is His “Sub­ver­sive Mas­ter­piece”

The Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Title Sequences and Trail­ers Cre­at­ed by Pablo Fer­ro: Dr. Strangelove, A Clock­work Orange, Stop Mak­ing Sense, Bul­litt & Oth­er Films

The Dark Knight: Anato­my of a Flawed Action Scene

Take a Dri­ve Through 1940s, 50s & 60s Los Ange­les with Vin­tage Through-the-Car-Win­dow Films

Some of Buster Keaton’s Great, Death-Defy­ing Stunts Cap­tured in Ani­mat­ed Gifs

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.