As an impressionable teenager I saw the Vanishing Point on late night cable. I missed the first 20-minutes or so but the remaining movie sucked me in. At the time I was working at Blockbuster Video and we didn’t carry it. This was an era before Netflix, Amazon.com and the ability to get almost any movie instantly.

I ordered it through our store’s mail order catalog and my VHS copy, DVD’s were just coming out and were prohibitively expensive, arrived on my birthday. Ecstatic, I rushed home and watched it twice in a row. Because I initially missed the first part of the flick during my initial viewing I had no idea that Kowalski’s chase was based on a bet over a Benzedrine tab with one of his friends. I didn’t know it at the time but this odyssey was an Existential one. There was no real reason to try to go from Denver to San Francisco in 15 hours. (which MapQuest indicated is 1,268.68 miles journey and will take 18:37). The Benzedrine was Kowalski’s fuel and the journey was his way of righting certain wrongs in his life, to prove that he alive.

The movie is one long car chase with the occasional break to show the various cultures that were prevalent at the time. It’s1971 and as Kowalski weaves his way through the West he becomes a counter culture hero by refusing to be brought down by the “Blue Meanies” that are trying to arrest him for various breaches of driving laws. His legend carries through the West by a blind DJ in Goldfield, Nevada that broadcasts the latest developments of Kowalski’s trip. In many ways the DJ, Super Soul, is Kowalski’s eyes and guides him through a climate that would love to arrest him.

Crashing through American culture, the cinematic super-charged, white-lightning Vanishing Point presses ever onward — solidifying its legacy as one of the greatest car chase movies to ever be capture on celluloid. While hell-on-wheels anti-hero barrels through police blockades, the film takes a more subtle approach when spinning its social commentary on early-’70s America. Fast cars, cliché cops, and naked chicks veil Vanishing Point’s attack on American censorship, conformity, and racism — cruising toward the moment when American liberties disappear into the horizon. – Jason Morgan, 2.10.2008, FilmCritic.com

Vanishing Point 1971 (2) by Coyote63000

Bullitt is much more than the iconic car chase through the streets of San Francisco It has a legit plot that would make an interesting episode of Law & Order. Because of Steve McQueen’s coolness, a Ford Mustang GT and an evil Dodge Charger the plot is forgotten. Personally I think Robert Vaughn gives a top performance and I have watched this movie numerous times, beyond the famous car chase.

Bullitt set the standard for car chases. It was raw and real. The speeds were realistic and McQueen did a lot of his own stunt driving. Bullitt is the axis point for all car chases before and after. Car chases before Bullitt were campy. Car chases after Bullitt owe the movie a debt of gratitude.

Ny Times Review – Renata Adler 10.18.1968

Bullitt, which opened yesterday at the Music Hall, is a terrific movie, just right for Steve McQueen—fast, well acted, written the way people talk. The plot is dense with detail about the way things work: hospitals, police, young politicians with futures, gangsters, airports, love affairs, traffic, dingy hotels…

There are excellent chases, one around and under jet aircraft taking off by night, the other, by car, over the San Francisco hills. The car chase in particular is comic and straight. (Nobody drives better than Steve McQueen.) McQueen, quietly stealing a newspaper because he hasn’t got the dime or exchanging just the right look with a Negro surgeon who understands, or even delivering a line that consoles and sums up the situation with his girl (played by Jacqueline Bisset) embodies his special kind of aware, existential cool—less taut and hardshell than Bogart, less lost and adrift than Mastroianni, a little of both.