During the chase sequence, the same green Volkswagen Beetle is seen at least 4 different times in 4 different locations in a period of not more than 1 minute.
During the chase, the Dodge Charger loses more than four hubcaps.
When Bullitt leaves the hospital, taking Ross' body to the morgue, he is still dressed in the clothes he wore when he responded to the shooting the night before: brown cardigan over a light blue shirt. Very next scene, when he pulls up and parks the Mustang, steals the newspaper, visits local grocery, he is now wearing the trench coat over the trademark green sport coat and blue turtleneck, BEFORE he goes home, showers and is seen changing into these very same clothes for the remainder of the film.
The Mustang has no wing mirrors when parked at the carwash, but upon leaving it does.
After Mike (Paul Genge) is spotted in the hospital, the cops are alerted on the ground floor. One walks outside where it is quite dark. Later, Bullitt chases the man outside, where it is daylight.
When Bullit calls Sgt. Delgetti from the restaurant,the call goes through direct to the hotel room. This hotel had an old switchboard and all calls in and out had to go through the hotel operator to get connected.
On the sign outside the hotel where Bisset drops off McQueen, it says, Mother's Day Brunch May 11th. In 1968, Mother's Day was May 12. Since Mother's Day did indeed fall on May 11th the following year, 1969, this may have been a deliberate error in anticipation of the film not being released until 1969.
During the car chase Bullitt shifts up a gear 16 times without changing down a gear one single time. There is no Mustang with 16 forward gears.
During the CPR scene where they are attempting to save Ross, the nurse asks the doctor "do you want to defibrillate." The doctor replies " not now not with that complex." There is no complex, the patient is flat line. This is a major error, when a patient flat lines the only treatment is defibrillation (electricity). The CPR will help keep his brain alive. But the only thing that will get his heart going again is electricity and possibly epinephrine.
Also the patient has no heart rhythm throughout the procedure but there is no alarm until the last few seconds. It is possible to silence the alarm, but no goes near the monitor. Alarm seems to have started for effect.
Also doctors almost never actually do chest compression during a code. RN's, respiratory techs, emergency techs almost always do the chest compressions. In the cases where the doctor is doing them. It's almost always because no one else was around at the first sign of arrest, and once a code is called and others arrive they would take over. In this there's on nurse just standing around. In this the doctor actually stopped compression to look at a monitor, a doctor would never do that. Compressions have to be maintained until the patient has a cardiac rhythm to supply their brain.
This patient was already intubated so the doctors responsibility in this code would have been to watch the results of CPR, order medication to control the patients response of CPR and then if successful support the patient, not do chest compressions.
Since the setting for the film is ostensibly on the 2nd weekend in May (around Mother's Day), it would not be dark when Bullitt arrives at SFO around 7 PM in pursuit of Rennick.
During the chase scene, there is a green V W Bug that is passed at least 4 times.
The newspaper Delgetti is reading at Frank Bullitt's flat on late Saturday morning (a Warner Brothers print prop) is the same one as he buys (borrows) supposedly on Sunday morning after the ambulance trip to the morgue, the next day with the same headline i.e. "A PEACE TALK FLURRY".
Despite claims nothing was "sped up" in the filming, during the chase the Charger makes a 90 degree right turn whose radius of curvature was about 65 or 70 ft ~ 20 m, in about one second, as if it were a Formula I car. To do so would mean the car pulled about 4.5 g which is far beyond even the modern version of the Charger (.85 g), especially on bias-belted wide oval 70 series tires. Centrifugal force = radius * angular velocity (90 deg=2*pi/4), squared, or 20*(2*3.14/4)^2.
The DVD's subtitles read "mess and baum scissors" instead of "Metzenbaum scissors" which were named after the American surgeon/inventor Myron Firth Metzenbaum.
DVDs had yet to be invented when this movie was made, so incorrect subtitles are not mistakes on the part of the film makers.
DVDs had yet to be invented when this movie was made, so incorrect subtitles are not mistakes on the part of the film makers.
At one point during the chase scene, the black Charger produces a fresh skid mark and subsequently crashes into a parked car, moving it slightly to the side. A split-second later the skid mark and the Charger disappear and the parked car is back in place. The weird editing was due to the Charger smashing the camera, as shown in behind-the-scenes footage.
When Bullitt goes back to the scene of the shooting, he looks at a crime scene diagram, and two police photos of the witness in the position he landed in when shot, taped on the wall. Since the ambulance would have gotten there before the crime scene technicians, and the witness was still alive and removed quickly in an ambulance, they wouldn't have been able to take what look like crime scene photos of a body.
When Bullitt spins off into the dirt when trying to avoid the motorcyclist, you can tell that Steve McQueen is actually doing donuts.
When the cab drops off Frank Bullitt to pick up his mustang at the car wash; as the car door swings open, the reflection of the camera crew is visible in the door glass.
A forward aerial shot of the two cars about to turn right (on a street called "Mansell") shows a crew member on the right side of the screen waving the cars through.
In the scene at Enrico's restaurant, a policeman with a walkie-talkie doing crowd control is visible through doorway.
The address of the hotel where Johnny Ross is killed is twice given as 226 Embarcadero Road. The address is real, but the correct name of the thoroughfare on which it is located is The Embarcadero, not Embarcadero Road.
When the detective in the hotel with Ross calls Bullitt at 1:00am, Bullitt says he will be there in 5 minutes. Yet when he gets there multiple police, ambulances, and detective Delgetti are already there.
A microphone is visible as Mike (Paul Genge) questions the doctor.
When Chalmers tells Bullit on Friday that he needs to keep Ross out of reach of the organization for 40 hours until the senate sub committee hearing on Monday, it should be 64 hours. 40 hours would put the sub committee hearing on Sunday.
In their rush to identify and capture a suspected felon - or worse, murderer - on the run, Bullitt and Delgetti go through Rennick and his murdered wife's luggage, handling every single item without wearing gloves. When they are done Bullitt asks the evidence guy for "fingerprints on this stuff." Clearly the pair should have been wearing rubber or linen gloves, and taken care not to smudge any latent fingerprints on the contents. It is obvious though from how they smash their way into the trunk and suitcase that their bigger priority right then is speed, a questionable display of judgment as "Rennick's" subsequent identity confirmation relies on prints successfully lifted from the contents, putting the detectives onto the trail of the real Johnny Ross.
Bullit thumps a newspaper stand to make it open and takes a paper, as he doesn't have the correct coin. However he then goes into a nearby shop, holding the paper, to buy some groceries. Surely he could have asked for an appropriate coin in his change which he could have then used to buy the newspaper.