Walter Hill’s LA pulp-noir thriller from 1978 is re-released in cinemas, a film to show you that it isn’t hitmen who need the glacial calm of the samurai; it’s getaway drivers, and The Driver is bookended with two rock’n’roll car chases. This was Hill’s second car-chase movie, after his screenplay for The Getaway from 1972, adapted by him from the Jim Thompson novel and directed by Sam Peckinpah. The Driver is his own lean, mean original script.
Ryan O’Neal stars, with his face of outrageous 1970s pulchritude (as Jacqueline Bisset says to him in The Thief Who Came to Dinner: “You’re too beautiful to be any good.” – “Any good at what?” – “What else is there?”) He is a getaway driver, the best in the business and, in time-honoured fashion he is ultra-cool, composed, affectless but radiating understated and slightly martyred contempt for other criminals’ lack of professionalism. Ryan Gosling picked up on this for his wheelman in Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive. O’Neal doesn’t have the worldly cragginess of Steve McQueen in Bullitt or The Getaway, and is more cherubic, a look to which Edgar Wright paid homage in Baby Driver from 2017.
This unnamed wheelman is such a master that he naturally uses regular cars that he steals (and are therefore untraceable): unpromising automobiles from which he conjures magical feats of speed and manoeuvrability. Petrolheads will thrill to his dexterity behind the wheel of a 1974 Ford Galaxie sedan in the opening scene; his casual trashing of a 1970 Mercedes Benz in the underground car park, and the final confrontation in a 1974 ketchup-red Chevrolet pickup. We see him first as the driver for two guys who have just knocked over a casino, with Isabelle Adjani as the woman whom the gang have paid to be a plausible witness, positioned closer to the culprits than anyone among the stunned, confused onlookers and who will refuse to identify the driver in a lineup. It is to O’Neal’s driver that this troubled woman confesses that she has an income from gentleman callers, but this has dried up. Ronee Blakley plays the driver’s connection to possible employers: effectively his agent.
Most importantly, Bruce Dern gives a deliciously scuzzy, nasty performance as a crooked LA detective set on punishing this driver who is making the police look like fools. He sneeringly calls him “the cowboy”, and the driver does indeed have a sentimental fondness for country music – what Adjani’s character calls “cowboy music”. Dern’s dirty cop, clearly envious of the driver’s insouciant cool, will do anything to bring him down. So off the books, and to the alarm of his partners, this officer sets up an entire bank heist to be carried out by three other criminals on his unofficial payroll to entice O’Neal into being their driver for a mouthwatering fee and then, once the job is done, deliver their man right into the dodgy cop’s clutches. This is, at all events, what he tells his aghast LAPD officers: but there is also a possibility that our horrendous lawman plans to let O’Neal’s driver get away (literally) in return for his share of the loot. Or just kill him.
This is a thoroughly watchable, hardboiled, thrillingly cynical and ruthless drama and Dern’s flinching, beta-male face – in contrast to O’Neal’s tough purity – is a joy.
• The Driver is released on 11 November in cinemas.
