Car Chase in The Seven-Ups

Car Chase in The Seven-Ups, 1973 Hickman performed yet another memorable chase sequence for the 1973 film The Seven-Ups (in which Hickman again worked with Philip D’Antoni, who had also produced Bullitt and The French Connection). In The Seven-Ups, Hickman drove the car being chased by the star of the film, Roy Scheider, who is heavily doubled by Hickman’s good friend and fellow stuntman, Jerry Summers. The chase itself leans heavily on the Bullitt chase, with the two cars bouncing down the gradients of uptown New York (à la San Francisco’s steep hills) with Hickman’s 1973 Pontiac Grand Ville pursued at wheel-breaking speed by Scheider’s Pontiac Ventura. Even the engines of Scheider’s Pontiac and McQueen’s Mustang sound alike, and during the car chases in both films there is an almost complete lack of dialogue, although the reason why these chases work so well (and why Hickman himself was so highly regarded) is their gritty realism and the danger of each tire-busting slide, accompanied by close camera angles and camera-cars moving at high speed and parallel to the action car so you actually get to see the nervous faces of the actors behind the wheel. In the accompanying behind-the-scenes featurette of the 2006 DVD, Hickman can be seen co-ordinating the chase from the street, where we also see another example of how memorable (and dangerous) these sequences were: on cue, a stuntman in a parked car opens his door, only to have Hickman’s vehicle take it completely off its hinges, where (from the behind-the-scenes footage) we see the door fly off at such a force it could easily have killed the close-quarter camera team set-up only yards away (it missed them only by chance). The end of the chase was Bill’s own idea, an ’homage’ to the death of Jayne Mansfield, where one of the cars smashes into the back of an eighteen-wheel truck, peeling off its roof like a tin of sardines.