Greatest Chase Scenes:

1967 - 1971

Bullitt (1968)

One of the screen's all-time best car chase sequences (at up to 110 miles per hour) was a tense sequence filmed with hand-held cameras on the streets of San Francisco as police lieutenant Frank Bullitt (Steve McQueen) chased after criminals in his car. The audio components of the scene were the most compelling with the sounds of squealing tires producing smoke from burning rubber, skidding turns around sharp corners, and the continual roar of both car engines

Bullitt's car was a Highland Green, 1968 four-speed Ford Mustang Fastback GT (California yellow-on-black license JJZ 109) powered by a 390/4V big block engine, in pursuit of a black, 1968 four-speed Dodge Charger 440 R/T.

The spectacular, high-speed, nine minute car pursuit-chase sequence was conducted up and down the narrow, hilly streets of San Francisco and through hazardous intersections, and then onto a winding 2-lane rural road near Brisbane in the north Bay, with multiple crashes and collisions - and airborne vehicles; right at the start of the scene, Bullitt reversed things and pursued the hitman's car; the classic chase ended when Bullitt side-swiped the hitmens' car and it lost control, veered off the road, and plowed into a gas station - with a fiery explosion.

The Love Bug (1968)

In the first Herbie film, starring the self-aware, intelligent 1963 Volkswagen Beetle named "Herbie," the small VW became a race car.

The famous car would star in four theatrical, chase-filled sequels in 1974, 1977, 1980 and 2005 (the last starred Lindsay Lohan in Herbie: Fully Loaded (2005)) and a TV series.

The Italian Job (1969, UK)

This film had a climactic, well-choreographed car chase in Turin, Italy after an audacious heist of 4ドル million in gold bullion by Cockney ex-con Charlie Croker (Michael Caine).

It involved three Mini Cooper S's (patriotically painted red, white, and blue) laden with gold.

The Italian police were in hot pursuit as the little Cooper S's drove up and down stair-steps, through a shopping plaza, via sewers and over the rooftops and a reservoir for their getaway. They even completed a lap on the Fiat's famous test track in Turin. Remade in 2003.

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969, UK)

There were a number of exciting chase scenes in this sixth James Bond film, with the 007 agent played by George Lazenby for the only time. As Bond escaped from the SPECTRE head Ernst Stavro Blofeld's (Telly Savalas) mountaintop headquarters Piz Gloria, he was chased downhill by a multitude of machine-gun wielding thugs on skis. Two of the henchmen fell to their deaths from a steep precipice when Bond ambushed them.

[The ski chase would be reprised in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977).]

The pursuit continued into the small valley village, where Bond met up with love interest Tracy (Diana Rigg), and she rescued him driving her red Cougar, leading to an exciting car chase from there and onto the snowy race track of a stock-car race. After the demolition derby on the track, the pursuing car overturned and exploded, although everyone survived.

The next morning, there was another downhill ski chase after Bond and Tracy. Blofeld caused an avalanche which engulfed and killed three of his own men and Tracy was also partially buried and taken prisoner.

The final chase scene was Bond's pursuit of Blofeld downhill on racing bobsleds. Bond was blown off his bobsled by a thrown hand-grenade. They engaged in a brutal hand-to-hand fight when Bond jumped onto the back of Blofeld's bobsled - and the SPECTRE chief was severely injured when he became snared and entangled in the low-bough of a tree, breaking his neck in the V-shaped branch (Bond: "He's branched off") - but he survived!

Diamonds Are Forever (1971)

In this seventh Bond film, but the sixth and final official Bond film with Sean Connery as James Bond, the 007 agent was pursued throughout the film by competing diamond smugglers and henchmen. The trail of diamonds, being smuggled out of South Africa through Europe and eventually to Los Angeles (and Las Vegas), was part of a world-domination scheme devised by SPECTRE villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Charles Gray). Everyone who touched the diamonds was becoming a victim.

Bond eventually teamed up with co-conspiratorial diamond smuggler, seductive Tiffany Case (Jill St. John), when she finally realized that each link in the smuggling pipeline had been killed, and she was the next target.

When they came upon a billionaire entrepreneur's remote Las Vegas desert facility, Willard Whyte's Tectronics factory involved in Blofeld's plot, Bond was discovered to be an intruder, and was forced to steal a Moon-buggy from a simulated moonscape used for testing. He crashed through the security gate and evaded pursuing cars through the rough desert terrain. He then stole one of the three-wheeled Dirt-bikes from Whyte's security guards following him, to return to the facility's entrance where Tiffany was awaiting him.

After they drove back to Las Vegas that evening, they were pursued in Tiffany's red 1971 Ford Mustang Mach 1 by the alerted local police. After weaving through the neon-decorated fronts of the casinos on the Strip and causing multiple crashes/pileups in a parking lot, they eventually escaped when Bond steered Tiffany's car onto two-wheels down a narrow alleyway.

Duel (1971)

Director Steven Spielberg's feature-length film debut was this low-budget picture shot in less than two weeks (it was an ABC-TV "Movie of the Week" offering originally) - adapted from Richard Matheson's short story published in Playboy Magazine.

Mild-mannered, distressed traveling salesman David Mann (Dennis Weaver), an LA electronics vendor, was driving in his red 1970 Plymouth Valiant, when he was relentlessly pursued on a rural California highway road by a demonic, killer diesel-engine truck (a 1955 Peterbilt 281 towing a tanker trailer).

The greasy, grungy truck (with a FLAMMABLE warning) was driven by a hidden, faceless psychopathic driver (wearing cowboy boots) (stuntman and character actor Carey Loftin), although the truck itself personified a person (front window eyes, headlight pupils, front grill nose, front fender mouth, etc.). The driver exhibited stalking and many kinds of 'road rage' behaviors:

• loud-honking
• pursuit
• blocking maneuvers during attempts to pass
• tailgating and chasing at high speeds
• car-bumping, in one instance to force the Plymouth into a moving freight train at a railroad crossing
• attempted collisions

During Mann's last-stand confrontation with the monstrous homicidal truck, he gunned his overheated engine and proceeded to ram the truck - diving out at the last second. The explosive crash sent the truck (in slow-motion) over a cliff into rocks below. Mann stared at the burnt wreckage, as the credits rolled.

The French Connection (1971)

This film has probably the most intense chase sequence ever filmed - it was an incredible, hair-raising scene of unbelievable car-chasing. New York City detective Jimmy "Popeye" Doyle (Best Actor-winning Gene Hackman) drove 90 mph in pursuit in a hijacked civilian car, a 1971 Pontiac Le Mans: ("Police emergency: I need your car") of a suspected drug dealer's sniper-hitman in a hijacked elevated subway train above him in Brooklyn (the BMT West End line).

To keep pace, Doyle drove 90 mph and barely missed pedestrians and other vehicles on the narrow two-lane road beneath the elevated tracks; he half-collided with another white car at an intersection, was clipped or side-swiped by a delivery van/truck, dodged a mother and her baby carriage, and crashed into garbage, all the while furiously honking the car's horn and frantically switching from his brake to accelerator; he banged his fists on the steering wheel, angered at the delays and frustrations.

Two-Lane Blacktop (1971)

Maverick director/editor Monte Hellman's 'bare-bones' existential road movie told about a group of self-destructive, essentially lonely, restless and boring counter-cultural drag racers in the SW USA. They entered into a competitive cross-country race to the East Coast, but were actually heading nowhere. The trajectory of the film's road trip-race partially along Route 66 (before the interstate highways were built) from California to Tennessee provided an incredible time-capsule of the period. The film was shot on location with both scripted and impromptu scenes, and was filmed in the order of the road trip.

In the low-budget film, the two car-obsessed, rootless, un-named, uncharismatic, emotionally-inert road racers and nomadic car-freaks - The Driver (singer/composer James Taylor) and The Mechanic (Dennis Wilson of the Beach Boys) - were driving eastward from California along Route 66 in their primer gray 1955 Chevy 150 coupe hot-rod, looking for racers to bet against. As the film opened, an unidentified teenaged hitchhiker-vagrant - later identified as the Girl (17 year-old model Laurie Bird in her feature film debut) - exited from a hippie van with her belongings and duffel bag to enter (without their permission) into the back-seat of their parked Chevy.

An aggressive, middle-aged, glib driver named after his vehicle G.T.O. (Warren Oates) - a brand-new, fancy, souped-up, bright yellow 1970 Pontiac GTO, challenged the pair to a cross-country race after they had repeatedly crossed paths and finally met up at a gas station on the outskirts of Tucumcari, NM. The two drivers agreed to challenge each other to a cross-country race from New Mexico to Washington DC. The winner would receive the other's car as the prize: "Pink slips...for cars... all the rolling stock"; the prize for winning the race would be the "pink" (the title) of the losing car. The Mechanic drew the route along Rte. 66 on a map - and insisted that that they compete only on backroads:

"We stay on the country roads. Less heat that way. Never say you're racing, or they'll bust you for it."

The actual race began to fall apart, however, as they stopped to cooperate with each other, and also vied for the attention of The Girl. She was pondering a choice and/or decision about which racer she would ultimately end up with, since they were getting close to their destination, Washington, DC; she was basically dissatisfied with all of her fleeting relationships with them; she knew that she was interfering with the previously untroubled, car-obsessed lives of the Mechanic and the Driver.

The film concluded at a roadside gas station-restaurant in TN near the NC border, where the foursome gathered around a breakfast table. Realizing that she would be tied down if she remained with G.T.O. or with the other two males, the Girl simply announced: "No good"; she left the diner to follow after a young, long-haired motorcyclist (Kreag Caffey); she dropped her duffel bag of belongings from the G.T.O. onto the ground in the front parking lot next to the motorcycle before she hopped onto the back of the motorcyclist's bike and he sped off. G.T.O. continued on his way and more hitchhikers, while the Driver and Mechanic were preparing to race against locals on a local airstrip.

In the film's final and somber ambiguous scene (with a very abrupt non-ending), on another two-lane blacktop, they metaphorically ended their journey. As the soundtrack went silent, the celluloid reel of film began to run in slow-motion, froze and then disintegrated and burned (with fiery bubbling) within the stalled projector; the image turned to complete blackness (followed by the credits - white letters on the black background); the burned image at the end of the film represented the characters who - if they lost and would be forced to quit racing - they would 'burn out' and forfeit their freedom on the road.

Vanishing Point (1971)

Director Richard C. Sarafian's action, car-chase road film and B-movie cult favorite, with early 1970s counter-cultural elements, was shot over a period of a few months in the summer of 1970 on location in the states of Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and California.

Although the film began with a fast-forward to the cusp of the film's future ending, it actually opened with a late Friday night scene in Denver, CO, where the driver character was identified. He was an alienated, disgruntled, pill-popping, Medal of Honor-winning Vietnam Vet in the early 1960s - an ex-cop and former professional race car driver named Stanley Kowalski (Barry Newman). He was currently employed as a car courier for Argo's Car Delivery Service; Kowalski was making his latest late-night Friday car delivery (a black luxury 1970 Chrysler Imperial LeBaron) to his work headquarters in Denver, CO.

He was determined to keep working and immediately get back on the road; his next car-delivery job was to drive to San Francisco (by Monday), to deliver a customer's new muscle-car - a white 1970 2-door Dodge Challenger R/T (at 375 hp with a 440 cubic inch V8 Magnum) that was capable of speeds up to 160 mph. He bet his black drug-dealing friend Jake (Lee Weaver) the cost of his Benzadrine ("bennie") pills that he could retrace his route on his next job back to the west in record double-time (under 15 hours); although the Dodge Challenger R/T car wasn't expected in San Francisco, CA until Monday, he bet that he could be in "Frisco" by Saturday afternoon at 3:00 pm, only taking 15 hours.

Police chased Kowalski from Denver, across Utah and Nevada's deserts, and toward his destination San Francisco, CA - accompanied by a rock-soul soundtrack and helpful directions broadcast on radio station KOW (in Goldfield, NV) from blind disc jockey Super Soul (Cleavon Little), to evade the authorities. During his journey, Kowalski would continue to face obstacles, police in pursuit (via cycles, cars, and helicopters), near-fatal racing and car accidents, bad-luck, and unusual characters; there were many flashbacks revealing Kowalski's background, his past jobs and his girlfriend while he continued to be pursued by police cars.

The film's fiery and climactic ending had already been telegraphed in the opening fast-forward sequence. By late Saturday afternoon, Kowalski phoned his betting buddy to admit that he couldn't deliver the car as promised on time due to numerous delays in his trip, and would therefore lose their bet.

On Sunday morning, the highway ahead of Kowalski in the small California town of Cisco was being prepared with a blockade comprised of two giant bulldozers. A CBS-TV news truck and CA HP patrol cars were standing by, as other spectators gathered and watched from afar; a Highway Patrol helicopter soared over the suspect's vehicle as it entered the town and accelerated at full speed toward the bulldozers (the slight gap between their two buckets was flooded with bright light); he enigmatically smiled (self-satisfied as he envisioned finding his existential escape and ultimate freedom) before his car crashed and exploded in a ball of fire.