Stripped to its bare essentials, this Melville-esque car chase thriller sees Ryan O’Neal and Bruce Dern go head-to-head as a getaway driver and dirty detective respectively.
Review #2,630
Dir. Walter Hill
1978 | USA | Action, Crime, Thriller | 92 min | 1.85:1 | English
Not rated – likely to be NC16 for some coarse language and violence
Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabelle Adjani
Plot: An enigmatic man of fast cars and few words, the Driver excels at manoeuvring getaway cars, making him quite in demand in criminal circles. His notoriety infuriates the Detective, who becomes obsessed with taking him down.
Awards: –
Distributor: Studiocanal
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Cat & Mouse; Getaway Driver
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Normal
Audience Type: Slightly Mainstream
Viewed: MUBI
Spoilers: No
If Jean-Pierre Melville had lived long enough to make an English language film in America in the ‘70s, it might have looked and felt like The Driver.
Although a critical and commercial flop upon its release, The Driver has since become a cult item. Many now praise it for its influence on films like Drive (2011) and filmmakers like Michael Mann (particularly his Thief (1981) and Collateral (2004)).
At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be anything particularly attractive about this genre exercise. A confident getaway driver goes head-to-head with a dirty detective who is frustrated at not being able to nab him.
Bruce Dern is solid, whose stinking arrogance gives The Detective an air of repugnance. As a viewer, it is easier to side with the law-breaking Ryan O’Neal, whose wooden expression perhaps gives the eponymous character a kind of nonchalant cool, much like Alain Delon in Melville’s own Le samourai (1967).
“There’s not going to be a next time. You were late.”
Plot-wise, there is nothing substantial to begin with—in fact, The Driver is stripped to its bare essentials by director Walter Hill (his follow-up was another cult film, The Warriors (1979)), who doesn’t even give it any stylistic sensibility.
The cinematography is more functional than artistic, and as such, this kind of raw, somewhat unpolished approach, gives the film’s multiple car chase sequences a kind of unfettered power.
When the action is distilled to the sounds of tyres screeching, engines revving and metal scraping, the hunt is truly on in this urban traffic jungle.
While the car chases aren’t necessarily some of the greatest ever committed to screen, Hill shows us that action need not always be Hollywood-style thrilling, it can also be gruelling and an act of skilled labour.
In other words, the film doesn’t just operate in the realm of cat-and-mouse but also life-and-death, played out like an existential game.
Grade: B+
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Eternality Tan 