DT Moviehouse Review: The Driver

A Hiatus DT Moviehouse Review: The Kid Detective

DT Moviehouse Review: The Driver

Time once more for my blog feature, DT Moviehouse Reviews, in which I make my way through my 300+ DVD/Blu-Ray collection (you can see the list right here) and decide if each one was worth the money. Today, I review 1978’s The Driver.

Screenplay by Walter Hill

Directed by Walter Hill

Tagline: To break the Driver, the Cop was willing to break the law

What’s It About? An ice-cold professional getaway driver (Ryan O’Neal) attracts the attention of an obsessive detective (Bruce Dern), who risks his career to orchestrate a setup to trap him.

Why I Bought It: This one was a recent discovery and quickly rocketed up my personal listing as one of the hands down coolest movies ever made. Walter Hill anticipates and inspires Mann’s Thief and Refn’s Drive (as well as Edgar Wright’s Atlanta-based Baby Driver) with slick blue-lit car chases, nameless, deadpan characters, and terse, tough guy lines. The titular Driver navigates the reflective streets of nocturnal L.A. with ice water in his veins, sending squads and rivals caroming off his indomitable vehicles in destructive flips that would make George Miller’s pulse flutter.

I love the hyperrealism, the monolithic archetypal titling of the characters (The Connection, Glasses, The Player, Teeth), and the wildness of the plot.

Bruce Dern, perhaps inspiring To Live And Die In L.A., inebriated on his own swaggering confidence, literally plays a game of life and death, blackmailing a failed stickup crew into committing a bank robbery solely to hire, implicate, and nab his white whale, The Driver. And when The Driver rebuffs the numerous advances of the obvious small-timers, The Detective just shows up at his door and tells him straight up. “I’m better at this then you” and challenges him to take the job. “If I win, you get fifteen years.” The Driver takes him up on it in order to prove himself a better crook than The Detective is a cop! A series of double crosses ensue, but mostly among the scrabbling minor players in the drama. For The Detective and The Driver, the money, life and death, they don’t matter at all. All that matters is the collar or the getaway and who can pull it off.

In the end, when The Detective shows up at the locker in Union Station as The Driver is retrieving the clean money (I love that he simply noiselessly appears with an entire phalanx of spit and polish LAPD patrolmen – it’s so surreal it works) and it turns out the Exchange Man has ripped them both off, the wager is over. The Detective knows he’s probably going to pay with his career. The Driver doesn’t gloat. He just walks off into the night, proven the better operator.

Refn’s Drive owes a couple of shots and scenes to this movie. Notably, when Teeth threatens The Connection in her room with a gun down her throat, the angle is the same as when Gosling’s Driver threatens Christina Hendricks (Blanche) in the motel room with his gloved hands.

The opening chase with The Driver evading police cars with two terrified robbers in his backseat is clearly referenced in the opening chase of Drive, right down to O’Neal assuring the stickup men they won’t work together again because one of them was late.

In turn, the early sequence where Isabelle Adjani deliberately misidentifies The Driver in a police lineup is right out of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai.

Adjani (of Herzog’s Nosferatu, The Tenant, The Story of Adele H and memorably, Possession) is fine as the aloof poker-faced Player, a nominal love interest. O’Neal has never been cooler. Dern plays The Detective like a barely contained wildman – a cocksure drunk. The other actors are mainly interesting faces, though Matt Clark (of The Outlaw Josey Wales) gives the most human performance as the Red Plaineclothesman, the put upon cop who rightly sees Dern as out of control.

Frank Bruno as The Kid, a young rival driver, sure looks like he stepped out of Walter Hill’s The Warriors, but this and a TV movie are his only credit.

Best Dialogue/Line:
The Player: You don’t care about the money.

The Driver: I might even send it to him.

Best Scene:

When The Driver grudgingly agrees to take on the setup job, he meets with the stickup men, Glasses (Joseph Walhs), Teeth (Rudy Ramos), and an old acquaintance, Fingers (Will Walker), in a multilevel parking garage. They arrive in a pristine yellow Benz.

The Driver and Fingers exchange pleasantries and The Driver asks Glasses why they need him if they already have a driver. Glasses replies that Fingers has no balls for it anymore. There is a look between Fingers and The Driver – Fingers is almost apologetic, cowed. He knows this is a police setup and doesn’t want the Driver involved. Maybe The Driver doesn’t pick up on that, but the slight against his old partner annoys him.

When The Driver cites his price, Glasses wonders if his driving is worth that much money, to which The Driver replies, “Get in.”

He slides behind the wheel and proceeds to execute a number of high speed bootlegger turns, expertly weaving and braking between concrete pylons. When Glasses shouts that it’s enough, he’s convinced, The Driver proceeds to systematically destroy the car, smashing it deliberately into walls, clipping off the rearview mirrors on protruding spigots, peeling off both bumpers, and the driver’s side door, and finally ending by steering it directly underneath a parked truck of telephone poles, so close to shearing off the roof everybody in the car but him ducks.