Bullitt

 Bullitt is a 1968 action thriller, police drama film which starred Steve McQueen, an actor known as "Mr. Cool."  The film received one Academy Award: Frank Keller for Best Editing.  

San Francisco police Detective Frank Bullitt (McQueen) and his team are assigned the job of protecting a government witness (a Chicago gangster).  While two of his team are guarding the witness in a cheap hotel, two assassins arrive and fire shots, leaving the witness gravely wounded.

Bullitt starts investigating how the hitmen knew where the government witness was hiding out.  While driving his Ford Mustang, he becomes aware he is being followed by two men in a Dodge Charger.  

Bullitt is able to get behind the other car and starts following it.  An extended chase ensues lasting almost eleven action packed minutes along the extremely hilly streets of San Francisco.  Eventually, the Dodge Charger crashes into a fiery ball, leaving its occupants dead.  

Film critic Leonard Maltin called the car chase "a classic, one of the screen's all-time best."  Emanuel Levy, another critic, wrote that "Bullitt contains one of the most exciting car chases in film history, a sequence that revolutionized Hollywood's standards."

Steve McQueen was born in a small town in Indiana in 1930.  In 1958, he became a household name in America with the success of his TV western series Wanted: Dead or Alive, playing a bounty hunter.

Some of McQueen's other films are The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Love With the Proper Stranger, The Cincinnati Kid, The Sand Pebbles, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Getaway, Papillon, The Towering Inferno and Tom Horn.

Sadly, Steve McQueen died in 1980 while in Mexico (seeking medical treatment) as a result of cancer from asbestos exposure.  He was only fifty years old.

In the 2019 film, Once Upon a Time in...Hollywood, Steve McQueen was more than ably portrayed by English actor Damien Lewis.