Best known for the exhilarating and remarkably choreographed car chase that made bold and highly creative—i.e., non-geographically possible—use of actual San Francisco streets, Bullitt is in fact carefully modulated between intense bursts of action and the cool restraint embodied in Steve McQueen’s portrayal of the laconic eponymous detective. Peter Yates’ sharp eye for telling detail gives way to a crisp survey of San Francisco’s extremes, from a seedy Embarcadero flophouse hideout to a ruthlessly career-driven politician’s Pacific Heights mansion, while also offering a quieter interlude that follows McQueen shopping for TV dinners in his Nob Hill neighborhood bodega. In contrast to the rich urban texture explored throughout Bullitt are taut, extended action sequences set within institutional non-spaces—San Francisco General Hospital and the SFO International Airport—which seem to embody the tightening vice of corporate omnipresence and the rapid death of the American city described vividly by Jane Jacobs and others.