- The Observer,
- Sunday February 6 2000
'People came up and asked me what HE was like to work with,' says Paul Street who, in 1997, literally brought Steve McQueen back to life by re-creating his finest moments from the film Bullitt in an ad for the Ford Puma car. 'They didn't realise that he was dead.' In fact McQueen had been dead for 17 years. And the closest Street got to the screen legend was via a hefty dollop of editing equipment. The ad put McQueen back on the streets of San Francisco, back on our television screens and, I suspect, Bullitt on this list.
Rather than just pinching a scene and re-creating a pale pastiche, the makers shot new footage, spliced them together with the original film and hired Bullitt cinematographer William Fraker as a consultant to make sure we couldn't see the join.
With visual references back to other McQueen films including The Great Escape and The Thomas Crown Affair - which also make this list - the ad is more a homage to the actor than a simple device to use him to sell cars, although there is no doubt that it also did that. But it is the exception. Advertising has stolen from film and not always treated it well. The Sound Of Music, The Great Escape, Ben Hur, Singing In The Rain, Casablanca, Star Wars, Ice Cold In Alex, Thelma And Louise, The Birds and numerous other films mentioned in this list have been lifted to sell everything from beer to cough sweets to cars. Especially cars where, because of either the epic nature of the sell or the fact that there are big budgets available, advertisers seem to find the movies irrestistible.
'I quite liked the ad,' says Peter Yates who directed Bullitt back in 1968. 'My only complaint is that they didn't ask me to direct it. It was very well made and nicely exploited McQueen's intriguing persona. In principle I don't object to that sort of plagiarism when it's done well. But I've seen ads in the past using stars like Fred Astaire and John Wayne which were just terrible. It was really quite flattering.'
For advertising agencies, the attraction is clear. If there is no creative idea for the ad, it is much simpler to re-create a scene with which people feel comfortable. It is immediate. There is no need to explain the meaning of certain iconic images. But most of it is cheap plagiarism.
However, it is not just advertisers who pinch from film, but also other filmmakers. The red coat in Schindler's List looks remarkably like the red coat in Nicolas Roeg's 1973 Don't Look Now. The fact that the coat then cropped up in a 1997 Peugeot ad confirms the idea that a good image is never too old to be resuscitated.
But it is a simple formula that doesn't always work. In the same year that Ford ran the Bullitt ad it also ran a campaign which it would rather forget. It was a skit on The Full Monty where a team of male strippers used a Ford Escort for getting to gigs. But the ad featured five white strippers and was immediately accused of racism for omitting the black character Horse. The ad was pulled. Ford apologised.
That only leaves the likes of Renault for its awful Sound Of Music rip-off, Tunes for Star Wars, and numerous other advertisers to apologise for their small screen 'borrowing' from their big screen cousins.
