The Driver

Walter Hill’s The Driver (1978) has an abstract quality, intensified by the absence of names, as well as by the unqualified opposition between a cop and a criminal. The characters are listed in the credits as The Driver (Ryan O’Neal), The Detective (Bruce Dern), The Player (Isabelle Adjani), The Connection (Ronee Blakely), and so on. The Detective’s obsession takes extreme lengths, from witness intimidation to arranging a bank robbery, to nail his quarry. It’s as if Dern is concerned with the idea of O’Neal getting away with his crimes and not so much objecting to the actual criminality. Hence, the casting of the antagonists intensifies their opposition: the good-looking, unflappable O’Neal vs the rough looking and sarcastic Dern. It almost seems as if their acting styles and previous cinematic credits are in conflict.

The Driver is a professional, wants his clients (casino and bank robbers) to have a clear idea what they are doing. Because his success depends on it. The casino heist, which starts the film, is a case in point. The two robbers are late, which allows the police to close in quickly and, worse, several people see the Driver and might identify him in a lineup. The Driver takes a precaution, however, by having a woman, the Player (Adjani), be at the casino and near the exit when the robbers get in the car. At this point, we don’t know her status.

In the next scene, Driver’s appears to have been nabbed by the cocky Detective. Oddly, it’s a lineup in reverse. Several witnesses, including Adjani, check out O’Neal. Unfortunately for the Detective, three of them are uncertain and not absolutely sure O’Neal is the Driver. Adjani is certain: it definitely wasn’t O’Neal at the wheel. This near miss sets the wheels in motion for the Detective to obsess further to get his man, whom he refers to as ‘Cowboy’, by any means possible.

We have car chases, but the detective is also chasing his prey differently. There are other minor characters, Dern’s assistants and the separate robbery crews, whose actions inflect and deflect the central pursuit. The Driver’s basic skill, thinking on the run, includes great dexterity in the larger, somewhat hidden machinations working against him.

This brings us to the greatest challenge for The Driver: how can it stand out in the cinematic landscape of car chases? Walter Hill had to know his film would be compared to previous ones, starting with Bullitt (1968), which many believe the best. And I can attest to its impact, having seen it in a theater in 1969. The visceral effect was jolting, going up and down the San Francisco hills, the camera inside McQueen’s Mustang as it flew in the air and bounced on the road. Peter Yates directed Bullitt, only a year after he made the film, Robbery, notable for a thrilling car chase in the outskirts of London. Also on the other side of the Atlantic, you have The Italian Job (1969), with Mini Coopers driving through the tunnels and sewers of Milan.

Less a chase film than a hard-driving epic, Vanishing Point (1971) is cherished by many gear-heads. Barry Newman’s Benzedrine-infused driver bets he can drive from Denver to Los Angeles in 18 hours. By the end, the California Highway patrol is after him while he desperately, and unsuccessfully, evades them for hundreds of miles.

Another revered chase, a rival to Bullitt but qualitatively different, occurs in The French Connection (1971). Popeye Doyle (Gene Hackman) commandeers a civilian’s car and pursues an elevated train harboring a A French assassin. It helps that Doyle is borderline crazed and frenzied well before the chase, which makes his disregard for public safety plausible (he just misses a woman pushing a baby carriage), not to mention a disregard for the car’s condition at the end of the chase. Contributing to the realism, according to director William Friedkin, wass how dangerous the driving was, fostered by filming it without city permits!

Although the Buttitt and French Connection chases are so different, they are linked by the man who drove the car chased by McQueen and who choreographed Hackman’s delirious ride: Bill Hickman (he played the FBI man, Muldrig, who is shot and killed by Popeye in the last scene). Hickman also arranged and drove in an equally thrilling chase in The Seven Ups (1973), being chased by French Connection star, Roy Scheider. In this chase, Hickman gets away when Scheider’s car slides on gravel and skids under a truck, slicing off the top of the car (Scheider survives by ducking quickly).

Since 1978, there have been more great chase scenes, perhaps the most complex and exciting, is in another Friedkin film, To Live and Die in L.A. (1985). There’s a pursuit against traffic on the L.A. Expressway and along the concrete gully of the Los Angeles River. William Petersen is simultaneously being pursued by two different groups, the police and the D.E.A. Thus the hero, a cop, is the one being pursued, and who causes the death of a police informant, and eventually eludes his pursuers in a feat that proves exhilarating for him as much as for film audience.

Then there are two films spawned by The Driver: Drive (2011) and Baby Driver (2017). Drive stars Ryan Gosling as a stunt driver who moonlights as a getaway driver. As in The Driver, Drive’s protagonist enters a complicated relationship with a woman whose husband is in trouble with a robbery crew. Ryan O’Neal has a relationship with Adjani that is exploited by Bruce Dern’s cop as he coerces O’Neal to join a robbery crew that he had originally refused to work for. The second remake is Baby Driver (2017), in which the film’s namesake works for Kevin Spacey, who plots high end robberies. While the soundtrack score is important in The Driver and Drive, Baby Driver is powered by the music to which Baby Driver listens when he’s speeding around the city. A thread runs from The Driver to Baby Driver in the person of Walter Hill. When Baby Driver is put on trial, an elderly blind man testifies to the good character of Baby Driver. We learn in the credits, however, that the man’s voice has been dubbed by Walter Hill, probably for no reason save to acknowledge the superior status of Hill’s film.