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BULLITT

Right in time for Father’s Day, TGTPTU with special guest Erik W. Van Der Wolf introduce their fourth of four directors for Season 17’s 4x4 HACKS with director Peter Yates entry into the Dad Film canon: BULLITT (1968).

Starring the coolest Caucasian cat to strut the silver screen, the American Great Escapee himself, Steve McQueen (no, Zoomer, not that Steve McQueen, he’s Black and a director, British and alive) plays the titular SFPD Lt. Frank Bullitt responsible for protecting against organized crime the DA’s witness who, no spoilers if it’s in the first act, gets got in his safehouse hotel room. Bullitt’s partner also gets the gat and instead of a this-time-it’s-personal, Yates plays the action procedural as Bullitt keeps his gun(s) holstered and his artist-architect girlfriend groovy and there’s that car chase action sequence we all know and love. Robert Vaughn plays the DA whose actions not villainous but smarmy all the same; Jacqueline Bisset plays the girlfriend whose uncertain whether Bullitt’s dark world and hers of hope and peace and beauty can coexist; and Don Gordon plays his normal role (as he would later in Papillon and The Towering Inferno) as second fiddle to whomever McQueen (again, Zoomer, the White dude who raced cars and defied death in his spare time and might have had dyslexia, not the enfant terrible of British designer fashion) plays. Also, Robert Duvall plays a taxi driver. Scored by Lalo Schifrin, the West Coast jazz sound really swings to make a film that vibes like few others.

This week, host Ken goes deep on McQueen, Ryan on Quentin Tarantino, Erik mansplains Dad Films to Thomas, and together guest and Zoomer develop a working dichotomy of Vietnam vs. WWII Dad-Films. We also learn !!!EXCLUSIVE!!! that Steve McQueen faked his death.

That McQueen’s one hep cat, daddy-o.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.
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As prefunk to next week's first Peter Yates episode, BULLITT, for his HACKS 4X4, we re-present our first Yates film, covered last year, THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE. Coyle is so good and co-host Ken's befuddlement so severe that Yates also directed KRULL is what eventually led to this season of HACKS. Below is the sadly prescient original show notes for our Coyle episode written by show note genius, Thomas:

• The second 1x1 feature rounding out Season 14 and, chosen by Jack, the film is THE FRIENDS OF EDDIE COYLE (1973). Directed by Peter Yates, whose career TGTPTU is unlikely to cover in a future 4x4 despite having Krull and Bullitt in his credits, TFOEC is an adaptation of George V. Higgins’ inaugural novel and notable as a unromanticized depiction of crime in artistic response to The Godfather, the Puzo book and Coppola film each preceding, respectively, the book and movie versions of TFOEC by one year.
• Higgins would take issue with the book as his debut novel. The former deputy assistant attorney general claimed to have written and burned 14 novels over 17 years prior to TFOEC and would go on to author over 30 books, both fiction and nonfiction before his fatal heart attack in 1999, but none with the impact of his first. As seasonal guest host Jack points out, nearly all the dialogue in the film is as it is on the page, and the pages are dripping with dialogue that creates the setting and action for this ironic story of “friends” who double-cross and live less than glamorous lives as Irish mobsters and criminals in Boston.
• Yates populates the film with faces, faces that we don’t see much anymore, distinct faces and every one telling a story, from the titular Coyle plated by Robert Mitchum who earlier in this life reluctantly left the assembly line to be an actor to actor Alex Rocco who starred as Moe Greene in The Godfather and helped Mitchum meet some of his old criminal friends whom Rocco had to leave behind after he (the actor Alex Rocco) was held for questioning in relation to the murder that kicked off the Boston Irish Gang War of the 1960s to James Tolkan before he’d lost his hair a decade prior to portraying Principal Strickland in the Back to the Future movies and Detective Hugh Lubic in the Cannon Films classic Masters of the Universe.
• For this episode, everyone did research: Jack and Thomas pair off for book report; Ryan covers the career of Mitchum; and Ken covers Yates and laments how now Hollywood lacks hacks as well as provides a new shaggy dog with The Pals of Charlie Brown.
• Make sure to wipe your prints clean on this one before listening with a friend.

NEXT WEEK: Peter Yates, HACK, Episode #1: BULLITT.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.

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Season 17 of TGTPTU calls a wrap on its third of four directors in its 4x4 this week with Ron Howard’s THE DA VINCI CODE (2006).

Starring Tom Hanks, father of musician and male model Chet Hanks but also known for leading roles in such earlier Howard films not covered on this podcast as Splash (1984) and Apollo 13 (1995), with a grotesque haircut as supersleuth symbiologist Robert Langdon from Dan Brown’s 2003 best-selling page-turner of the same name, the movie is a bunch of nonsense that got some Catholics upset for suggesting Jesus Christ of Nazareth, the disputed son of a disputed desert deity, had children, likely through consensual intercourse unlike the legend of his siring. Howard’s The Da Vinci Code also has great French actors used poorly in this flick mostly set in France and at least one Jellicle cat, one Sony Spiderman villain, and one Avenger (MCU, not BBC) actor of British lineage to help out the American Langdon in his quest for an ultimate truth that could rock the world to its core assuming it’s not flat (see Revelation 7:1 and Isaiah 11:12, ya heathens).

Holy host Ryan goes above and beyond in his research for this ep; the son Jack passes the season’s assignment; the father Ken is unimpressed by the chase scenes; and Doubting Thomas in real time processes that the female lead is the same actress as the titular Amélie (2001).

If you like anagrams and unstimulating action sequences, this might be the movie for you.

Skcus eivom siht.

P.S. You know that I am Opus Dei.

THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I.
Email: thegoodthepodandtheugly@gmail.com
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Podcast: goodpodugly
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