The Driver
AFTER MAKING HIS directorial debut with 1975’s bare-knuckle boxing/crime drama Hard Times, aka The Streetfighter, Walter Hill helped kickstart the modern action movie with his sophomore feature, transforming the simple story of an ace getaway driver and the cop after him into a lean, stylish, elegiac, high-octane thriller. “Suddenly the action movie was more adult,” Hill would recall of his inspiration. “You could make crime movies without cops, with criminals as protagonists. They were darker, less melodramatic, more influenced by Europe.”
Hill had written The Driver with Steve Mcqueen in mind. But the Great Escape actor, who’d starred in Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway,
which Hill also scripted, passed, claiming he didn’t want to do “another car thing” after Bullitt. So Hill wound up with Ryan O’neal, on a hot streak after Love Story, What’s Up, Doc? and Paper Moon; he had previously appeared in the Hill-penned The Thief Who Came To Dinner
and was looking to stretch himself and break out of his romantic-comedy box. O’neal saw The Driver as, well, the perfect vehicle for him. In return, Hill got himself a charismatic and bankable star.
Modelled on Alain Delon’s ice-cool hitman from Jean-pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï,
O’neal’s impassive Driver is described in the script as the “best wheelman in the city” who “always wears a suit, never wears a tie”. (It was the film’s producer, Larry Gordon, who suggested making a movie about a getaway driver, but it was Hill who decided not to ascribe his characters names beyond ‘The Driver’, ‘The Detective’, ‘The Player’ and ‘The Connection’.) Famously, O’neal’s laconic lead doesn’t speak until 16 minutes in, and barely utters 350 words in total, his character living frugally in flophouses and cheap hotels long before Jack Reacher made it fashionable. And while The Driver’s only possession is a portable cassette player — his music of choice being country — he has a strict professional code. Break it and find yourself another wheelman.
In marked contrast, Bruce Dern’s livewire Detective has no code, fewer ethics and a motormouth. (Robert Mitchum was Hill’s first choice.) Determined to catch the man who’s never been caught, his arrogance and obsession leads him to take the law into his own hands. He blackmails a gang of grocery-store thieves into robbing a bank and setting up The Driver to take the fall, initiating a game of cat-and-mouse between the two men for whom crime is a game and the thrill is in the chase. The Driver agrees to the job against his better judgment, not because he wants the money, but because he wants to prove he’s better than the policeman hunting him. (Like much of Hill’s output, The Driver is a Western in disguise, with Dern’s cop constantly referring to The Driver as “cowboy”.)
Thrust into the middle of this clash of egos is French actor Isabelle Adjani as The Player, an enigmatic gambler in a floppy hat who “witnesses” the casino heist, but is paid not to recognise The Driver when he’s hauled in by Dern’s cop. Later, she helps The Driver launder
his money, since her sugar daddy is late with the rent, and she needs some quick cash.
Hill worked as an assistant director on Peter Yates’ Bullitt and evidently learnt a thing or two about car stunts, as The Driver is a masterclass of auto action. Cinematographer Philip Lathrop, who shot Hill’s debut as well as John Boorman’s Point Blank — another brutal crime story with a taciturn anti-hero and a strong visual aesthetic — brings a neo-noir majesty to the night-time streets, dark alleyways and buildings of downtown Los Angeles, turning this urban landscape into a mythical playground.
The film opens with an exhilarating chase that predates the Grand Theft Auto video games in its chaos and destruction, as O’neal’s emotionless Driver picks up a pair of hockey mask-wearing thieves who’ve just turned over a casino and whisks them away with the cops in hot pursuit. Choreographed by veteran stunt co-ordinator Everett Creach, it’s crisply edited and impeccably shot. Building on the chases in Bullitt and The French Connection, shots of The Driver’s car speeding along are intercut with those inside, showing O’neal behind the wheel. The sequence culminates with The Driver, headlights off, lying in wait in the dark for the final two police cars to show, then barrelling towards them in a deadly game of chicken.
Later, when The Driver meets the grocerystore gang in an empty parking garage, his skills are questioned by Rudy Ramos’ weaselly Teeth, so he trashes their orange Mercedes in a tyre-squealing, metal-screeching display, flinging the car around — and against — the concrete pillars to illustrate just how proficient he is. But Hill and Creach save the best ’til last, as O’neal’s red Chevrolet C10 Stepside pick-up, with Adjani riding shotgun, relentlessly hunts down Teeth’s Trans Am from Union Station, through the iconic Second Street Tunnel, to a tense showdown inside a factory. There the vehicles stalk each other like gunslingers, before The Driver again plays chicken with his foe, and Teeth’s car winds up wrecked.
When The Driver opened on 28 July 1978, reviews were lukewarm at best — the New York Times dubbed it “pretentious” and “singularly unexciting” — and the film fizzled in the US, although European critics and Japanese audiences were more discerning. (Hill was already making The Warriors when it was released.) But time has been kind to The Driver
and its influence on film culture is now undeniable. Hill’s script was written in a spare, punchy haikulike style that’s popular with screenwriters, although it should be noted he wasn’t the first to adopt that approach, having appropriated it from Alex Jacob’s script for Point Blank.
Similarly, The Driver’s neo-noir aesthetic has been mimicked by many, not least Michael Mann, whose Thief and Heat are straight out of The Driver playbook, with the relationship between De Niro’s criminal and Pacino’s cop in Heat clearly inspired by that of The Driver and The Detective. Nicholas Winding Refn’s Drive, with its slick night-time cinematography, vehicular action and Ryan Gosling’s brooding wheelman, owes a major debt to Hill’s thriller. It’s an archetype that can also be found in Clive Owen’s chauffeur from the Bmw-sponsored series The Hire, in Jason Statham’s Frank Martin from the Transporter films and, most recently, in Ansel Elgort’s music-loving Baby in Baby Driver;
a film for which writer-director Edgar Wright, a huge admirer of what he calls Hill’s “diamondtight, minimalist masterclass”, had him provide a voice cameo. Forty-three years on, The Driver
continues to put fuel in the tanks of filmmakers and fans alike. MARK SALISBURY