Fraker’s camerawork, Frank Keller’s Academy Award-winning editing, and Yates’ sense of geography for the action, if not the actual geography of the city itself, join together in a harmony of purpose that keeps a ten-minute long car chase fluid, frenetic, tense, but still a treat to follow along. The crew modified the cars pretty heavily to ensure they could make the turns necessary to achieve some of the more fantastic shots, and despite rumors to the contrary, McQueen only drove the ‘68 Mustang 390 GT himself on straightaways after he nearly crashed trying to pull off one of the more strenuous high-speed corners. His friend and master stuntman Bud Ekins (who also pulled off the famous motorcycle jump from The Great Escape) did most the driving stunts for him. Still, during those straightaways, Yates had said McQueen tried to keep his head out the driver’s side window so the audience would see it was him behind the wheel. Bill Hickman, however, who played one of the killers in the film, did do the driving of the Charger, which got him the gig to do the driving for our previous entry, The French Connection.

These cars thread more needles in this chase than most modern car chases do with CGI, and these were real cars on real streets! More than one corner is taken at speed, where other vehicles are cutting off the radius on either side of the intersection.

No dialogue or music is found during this chase — it’s just the grit of the road, the roar of Detroit steel, and a purely distilled celebration of American muscle, as a San Francisco cop hounds after the heels of the men who killed his witness and threw his career into turmoil. It’s a clear, thrilling cat-and-mouse game, using nothing more than the real world, physics, and a few heavily modified classic sports cars to tell its story. And if it weren’t for producer Philip D’Antoni wanting to tailor the script to McQueen’s rep as a steely-eyed “car guy,” the chase never would’ve been shot at all.