The House Next Door

By Chris Anthony Diaz

[A contribution to the Close-Up Blog-a-thon.]

Bullitt will always be remembered for the great car chase sequence, but there is another unforgettable scene in the film, which is often overlooked. The scene could have been in an Ingmar Bergman film. It begins in telephoto with Steve McQueen and Jacqueline Bisset pulling off the freeway in the direction of the audience, foreshadowing the scene going into close-up. Incidentally, automobile traffic, which bookends the scene, is the common link to the famous car chase earlier in the film, and signifies this moment being just as memorable, but as a quieter emotional spectacle:

Distraught, Bisset leaves the Porsche and runs off toward the weedy shoulder of the freeway to gather her composure. (Moments earlier, she inadvertently walked into a hotel room containing the corpse of a murder victim and was shocked by the encounter—this scene’s impetus.) Just as Bergman would go into close-up as the characters in his films begin to talk about their emotional crisis, director Peter Yates does the same here too.

Once the scene zooms in to close-up, Yates chooses an arresting point-of-view—that of the weedy brush rather than McQueen’s. Furthermore, Yates chooses to partially obscure Bisset’s mouth as she speaks to McQueen. This works for me because the close-up’s focus and intensity are squarely in Bisset’s eyes as we listen to what she says to McQueen:

McQueen downplays his close-up and does not engage Bisset’s gaze immediately. His reaction to Bisset is better conveyed through the tension in the lines of his face in addition to the way he looks downward with a slightly hunched stance, simply listening, his eyes blinking unsteadily. McQueen is a terrific physical actor, especially in a silent and quiet close-up. And I prefer to watch him in action rather than hear him say lines:

I am completely mesmerized both by the artistry of these close-ups in two-shot and by McQueen’s silent presence. But once McQueen stares directly at Bisset and is about to deliver his line in the flattest way possible, the scene’s resonance is lost. At this juncture, McQueen proves my point and breaks the spell of his evocatively spot on silent performance by speaking:

Bisset regains the sublime moment with a sullen, downward gaze, which conveys her uncertain future with Bullitt. The quietness of this scene is at the opposite spectrum of cinematic spectacle, an internal one rather than, as in the film’s famous car chase, an external one:


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Chris Anthony Diaz is the creator of the blog CAD Pictures. He takes photographs, makes short films and writes about movies too.