Screened the Bourne bits last night.. Matt Damon wasn't half bad.. but, Damn!.. the car chase through Moscow? was a rush.. whoohaw!!..

got me thinking about a number of flicks over the years with cool car chases, etc..

wondered what you lot had on your ' Hot Damn !' list..

I'm recalling:

Bullitt [ a must ]
French Connection [ though technically not a 'car chase' ]
Vanishing Point [ for true afficionados.. and not the crappy remake with the happy ending ]
Ronin
Italian Job [ again the original for sheer enjoyment ]
Death Race 2000 [ David Carridine at his monosylabic best ]

Mad Max [ maybe ]

don't even think about Smokey and the Bandit..just crap...

any others out there I should hit up Blockbuster for?

of course, all of these 'car chase ' sequences owe their origins to the American Western genre wherein Stagecoaches careened down gullies and around cliffs chased variously by banditos or savage Indians in hair-raising sequences.. :John Wayne - Stage Coach the exemplar of the idiom., of course...

any other fave's amongst the Milspot Crowd??

You've already named all the good one's!

I do have one that was never made into a movie though:

Back in the day when I had a Cobra Mustang, I had the car kicked off the base for getting too many tickets (it was a very fast car an I couldn't help myself)...had the base stickerscrapped, so I took the car to my dad's house back in Tennessee to store it. Put it up on blocks and removed the wheels and prepped it for a year or so storage and went back to Camp Pendleton.

Got a call from one of my brothers detailing what my younger brother did. (this was before he joined the Army and went on to be a Sgt Maj) Well, one weekend, he (Bobby)decided to bolt up all the wheels, put oil an gas in it and have some fun with the car.

My mom while driving back home from the store saw my car pass at a very high rate of speed (she swears he was doing better than a 85 plus) her going in the other direction so she flips a u-turn and floors it to catch up with him. Bobby saw that she did this, and he in turn opened up the throttle even more on the cobra and proceeded to leave her in the dust. What he didn't take into account that the big ass Mercury mom was driving had a 429 in it and it hauled ass even for a car as large as it was. Mom was determined to catch him and she eventually did just that. This chase went on for a good thirty minutes through town and eventually got the attention of local law enforcement with 3 Sheriff cars that joined in the chase.

In the end, my car had been driven through several ditches on the sides of the road, I was told that he took out rows of mailboxes for a 5 mile stretch along with him tooling through a cemetary fence, several headstones, and multiple concrete curbs. During all this he tore out the bottom of the oil pan, smashed in the radiator, crushed the tranny pan and bent the real axle before it finally ground itself to a stop.

Mom got more than a few traffic tickets out of all this herself, and she pressed theft charges against Bobby...so he went directly to jail. Me, all I got out of this was a wrecked car. I had stopped the full coverage insurance to save money while in storage. And he wonders to this day, why I told him I didn't want him in the Marine Corps.

HAHAHA
Gunny:

That sounds like a scene right out of another Steve McQueen film..Hunter, I think... where he wreaks a rental car chasing crooks through farm fields while they try to crush him with a bigass harvester or combine or sumthin.

flying mailboxes...right out of a B movie or Dukes of Hazzard episode for sure...

yeah, family, what can ya do?

quote:

Vanishing Point

I thought I was the only one who knew that movie -- good choices Rocketeer!

Gunny -- my sister wrecked my car while I was off to College, noting spectacular but painful nonetheless.