Bullitt
Not too shabby for the inventor of chase scenes.
Frank Bullitt is a just a low-level cop in San Francisco. He has a girlfriend, but she lives in a different world, designing fountains and shit.
The DA is trying to score political points, so he sends him to protect some mobster willing to testify. They keep talking about the Organisation, not to be confused with The Company, spooks.
This being pre-internet, they don’t know what he looks like, just the hotel room. Everything is done by the book, but the jabroni unlocks the door and he gets shot. Complete cockup.
That was a professional job, so our hero wants to catch the one responsible, political considerations be damned! This even involves “kidnapping” a corpse! After some chase scenes on foot, and plain old detective work, there’s the big chase scene, the killers crash into a fuel station and explode. This ain’t no The French Connection.
But it’s not the end. The guy they were protecting is not the mobster, just some plant. The real guy is flying to Europe, and our hero will get him, Heat-like. Ultimately, he is shot after killing a cop. The DA stays out of political scene, and our guy will take the fall.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.