A lot of worthy entries here, but you guys left out the granddaddy of all chase scene movies:
Stagecoach.
Mine goes to Ronin. Ooooh, those engine sounds!!!
Also Bullit, despite the lack of traffic…
But there is another car on the street…don’t you remember he passed the same green VW Bug like 18 times? LOL (Overrated, and a crime to treat a Shelby like that. My husband was almost in tears.)
I’m going to be a freak and say the best chase was in the (I’m guessing) little-seen movie Gleaming the Cube about a rag-tag bunch of misfit skateboarders led by a young, pimply Christian Slater. At one point he’s hanging on the back of a car (on his skateboard, natch) doing like 70 miles an hour down the freeway. He lets go of the car, crouches down, drifts UNDER a semi truck, and comes out the other side to latch onto the “bad guys” car. I’d probably laugh if I saw it today but at the time it freaked me the hell out.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!! “Them Dukes, them Dukes!”
lieu’s mention of David Carradine brought to mind one I’d almost forgotten:
Death Race 2000
Trivia question: how many hubcaps do the two cars shed in the chase scene from Bullitt?
(And could a hubcap count serve as an objective measure gauging this sort of thing?)
The last time I saw it, I counted four. I don’t think I missed any…
Also, the Vegas strip/parking lot/alley wheelie chase in Diamonds Are Forever deserves mention.
And while not strictly a car chase, the truck/motorcycle chase in T2 was awesome!
I have not seen all of the other films mentioned here, but when I saw this thread title, my sole thought was, “The Road Warrior”.
Sorry, Spart, got you beat by at least twelve years. Go see The General.
Well, since everyone else is justifying their picks and no onehas seconded mine-
The reason I think the car chase in Go is the best ever is in large part due to the fact that it is the only car chase I’ve ever seen where the audience is actually in some doubt as to the outcome. The first act of the movie ended with the character who had been presented as the protagonist being run down and apparently killed- by the time the car chase comes around, the audience isn’t so sure the guys are going to survive…
I vote for The Blues Brothers because so much of that movie was real.
Yes, they filmed the chase in a real mall. It was set to be demolished after they filmed there.
Yes, they drove at 120 mph on the streets of downtown Chicago. In fact, John Landis reshot some of the downtown scenes with people on the sidewalks so you could see that they really did drive this fast and didn’t just speed up the footage.
Yes, they really did drop Pintos onto the street. They had to do FAA tests to prove that they could land them within a determined range.
Landis is convinced that this movie would never have gotten made a mere 10 years later because of the amazing concessions that Cook County granted them to film it, and the circumstances of the mall shoot.
Hey, I recommended a movie, and as far as I can tell no one else has even heard of it.
Rendezvous, because the whole thing IS real.
How high up was the Pinto? It looked mighty high to me? And where was it dropped? It looked sorta like Midway airport, but I could be really wrong.
/Illinois Nazi driver/
You know, I’ve always loved you.
/Illinois Nazi driver/
One more vote for The Blues Brothers.
I agree that the realism is what does it. One detail I have always noticed is how all of the crap on the dashboard flies from side to side on the head-on shots whenever they turn.
They dropped the Pinto onto an empty piece of land nearby. I don’t know exactly where, but it’s all on the documentary on the DVD.
The General? Yeah, it was a great chase. Train, not car.
Hugely influential, of course, as was Bullit.
No, before that. Rendezvous, directed by Claude Lelouch. Definitely a car; not so much a chase.