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.
