Day for Night

Year of Release:  1973
Director:  François Truffaut
Screenplay: François Truffaut, Suzanne Schiffman, Jean-Louis Richard
Starring:  Jacqueline Bisset, Valentina Cortese, Dani, Alexandra Stewart, Jean-Pierre Aumont, Jean Champion, Jean-Pierre Léaud, François Truffaut
Running Time:  116 minutes
Genre:  Comedy, drama

In the balmy South of France, a film crew are working on a trashy, romantic melodrama called Meet Pamela.  As the cast and crew negotiate romantic entanglements, various personal and professional crisis, the dedicated but increasingly harried director (Truffaut) is just determined to get the film finished.

François Truffaut was one of the cinema's great directors, and this is one of his finest, and most purely joyful films, a celebration of film and film-making.  The film features Truffaut's regular alter-ego Jean-Pierre Léaud as the sulky, neurotic leading man who has an affair with brittle, British star Jacqueline Bisset, while Valentina Cortese plays a formidable Italian diva, who has a past relationship with the ageing Lothario Jean-Pierre Aumont cast opposite her, and Truffaut himself plays Meet Pamela's put-upon director.  The celebrated author Graham Greene has a cameo as an insurance agent, credited as "Harry Graham". Everyone seems to be having a great time in their roles, and the film, which opens with a dedication to Lillian and Dorthy Gish, two great stars of the silent screen, is full of references to films and filmmakers.  The story focuses just as much attention on the nuts and bolts of making a film, as it does on the interweaving stories of the actors and crew.  The film-makers have to deal with lack of time and money, journalists, investors, costumes, sets, even a seemingly simple shot of a cat drinking from a saucer of milk takes forever to put on film, and the film's most expensive and elaborate scene is destroyed due to an accident in the development lab.  The film is at times, surprisingly dark and has moments of real emotion, but the mood, predominantly, is one of joyful celebration, and crucially is very funny.

François Truffaut and Jacqueline Bisset in Day for Night

Bullitt

Year: 1968
Director: Peter Yates
Screenplay: Alan Trustman and Harry Kleiner, based on the novel Mute Witness by Robert L. Fish
Starring: Steve McQueen, Robert Vaughn, Jacqueline Bisset, James Hagan, Robert Duvall
Running Time: 113 minutes
Genre: Crime, thriller, police, action

Summary: Tough San Francisco police lieutenant Frank Bullitt (McQueen) is requested by ambitious politician Walter Chalmers (Vaughn) to safeguard a witness over a weekend so that he can give a deposition to a Senate sub-committee about Organized Crime. However, the witness (Felice Orlandi) has stolen $2,000,000 from the Mob in Chicago and the gangsters are hot on his trail and will stop at nothing to get him.

Opinions: This film has become something of a classic now, with it's smooth jazzy theme music by Lalo Schifrin (surely a favourite of cocktail parties the world over), ice-cool central performance by Steve McQueen and now legendary car chase sequence it's almost a template of late sixties cool. The storyline is fairly predictable and contains few surprises. There are also several times where the pace lags severely, and the movie as a whole has not aged partcularly well, but there is much to enjoy. First of all the car chase sequence through the streets of San Francisco which is one of the most famous and influential car chases in the history of movies and is still stunning today. Then there are the performances, most notably Steve McQueen in one of his most iconic roles as the tough, cool and charismatic Bullitt. However, Robert Vaughn, best known as the suave secret agent Napoleon Solo in the TV series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968), is impressive as the ambitious, slippery politician who involves Bullitt in his machinations.
While not the instant classic it's sometimes seen as, this is a good crime thriller with plenty of memorable action scenes, and not just the car chase, and features one of the most iconic actors of the 20th Century, Steve McQueen, in one of his best roles.



Steve McQueen in Bullitt