Where in the World Is Frank Bullitt?

A few months back, I posted on this page the famous car chase scene from Bullitt, the 1968 Steve McQueen thriller that was shot on location in San Francisco. I remarked that, while that nine minute, 42 second high-speed pursuit is one of the finest such scenes ever committed to celluloid, it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to people who are familiar with the streets of the Bay Area’s foremost city. Pieces of footage spliced together for dramatic purposes create a surrealistic tour of San Francisco, with Bullitt’s black Mustang making more than a few astounding geographical leaps.

Now novelist Mark Coggins has turned me on to a Web page offering a side-by-side comparison of the car chase as it appears in the movie and a Google map showing where Bullitt and the Dodge Charger he’s following were actually located at any particular point in the footage. As Coggins notes, “It’s funny to see how they blip in and out of neighborhoods between shots.”

See it for yourself here.