Tunesday: Lalo Schifrin's BULLITT

If you're me, one still image from Bullitt is enough to cause you to whistle and hum Lalo Schifrin's pop score from the 1968 film. That's exactly what happened last week when AAGG's Derek Scarzella decided to do back to back tributes to Steve McQueen's influential crime flick.

With film music, I have a theory that there is only room for one superstar composer at a time. If the 1980s belonged to John Williams and the 1990s to Danny Elfman, then the late 1960s to mid-1970s belonged to Lalo Schifrin.

With a catalog of soundtracks that are cooler than cool (Enter The Dragon, Dirty Harry, and the greatest TV show theme of all-time), Schifrin's Bullitt encapsulates the jazzy, sixties assured-ness that is the trademark of his entire career. So much in fact that decades later it was used to promote the Ford Puma, proving that bad ass never stops being bad ass even if it's inside a lame, silver pea pod.

Troy-Jeffrey Allen writes about action/adventure for Action A Go Go. He is a comic book writer whose works include Bamn, The Magic Bullet, and the Harvey Award nominated District Comics. His work has been featured in the City Paper, The Baltimore Sun, Bethesda Magazine, The Examiner, and The Washington Post.