The Driver (1978)

Walter Hill’s The Driver, released in 1978, is a tough edgy neo-noir crime thriller with a distinctive flavour of its own.

The characters are all unnamed. The Driver (Ryan O’Neal) is a getaway driver and he’s just about the best in the business. He can pick and choose his job. He doesn’t work for amateurs or second-raters.

The Detective (Bruce Dern) is obsessed with nailing The Driver. The Driver has never been caught and that really bugs The Detective.

The movie opens with a superb car chase after a casino robbery. This time The Detective has finally got his man. It should lead to an easy conviction, but The Player (Isabelle Adjani) puts paid to that. She’s the key witness, she got a really good look at The Driver but when she’s asked to identify him she says she’s never seen this guy before. The Detective is outraged but there’s nothing he can do. The Driver has to be released.

The Player has of course been paid off by The Driver.

The Detective is now even more obsessed. He comes up with a plan that should land The Driver behind bars. The Detective’s plan is illegal, unethical and immoral but he’s the kind of cop who doesn’t worry about such things. The plan involves The Detective organising an armed bank robbery. When The Driver makes the drop-off of the money the cops will be waiting for him.

The problem is that, as you would expect with such a crazy reckless plan, everybody is planning to double-cross everybody else. The other guys involved in the robbery were forced into it by The Detective so they are really keen to pull a double-cross. And the reason The Driver has never been caught is that he is smart and ruthless.

It all gets messy. People get killed. It culminates in another spectacular car chase.

The ending is terrific and totally satisfying and that’s all I’m going to say about it.

There are three major action set-pieces involving cars and they’re all superbly done.

Ryan O’Neal is excellent as The Driver. When it comes to coolness O’Neal proves himself to be in the same league as icons of cool such as Steve McQueen and Alain Delon. O’Neal in this movie reminded me quite a bit of some of Delon’s 1960s and 70s anti-hero performances.

Bruce Dern is delightfully over-the-top as The Detective, his extravagant performance providing a perfect counterpoint to O’Neal’s tightly controlled performance. The Detective is so sleazy and creepy and unethical that even other cops don’t like him.

Isabelle Adjani is very good as The Player.

An interesting feature of the movie is that Hill resists the temptation to add a romance subplot. The Driver is interested in The Player only insofar as he can use her to thwart The Detective’s plans, and The Player’s only interest is in the money he pays her.

The Driver was a commercial flop in the U.S. and critics for the most part entirely failed to understand Hill’s intentions. On the other hand it did extremely well in some other markets. 20th Century Fox and EMI co-financed the movie, with Fox getting the US distribution rights and EMI the rest of the world. Fox didn’t do well out of the deal but EMI made lots of money.

It may have failed in the U.S. because American audiences were not prepared to accept Ryan O’Neal in such an unexpectedly dark rôle.

I suspect that the movie’s total lack of sex and nudity may have also hurt it at the American box office. Fox must have been frustrated that they couldn’t put out a trailer promising steamy love scenes between O’Neal and Adjani. While The Driver offers American-style action overall it’s a movie which to me has more of a European sensibility.

The Driver was not the first movie to have unnamed characters. Two-Lane Blacktop back in 1971 had done the same thing. There are other similarities between the two movies. They have a similar rather detached tone and minimalist approach and both deal with a contest between men which is motivated purely by an obsession with being a winner.

The Driver is one of the great action movies and one of the great neo-noirs of the 70s. Very highly recommended.