Film Noir of the Week - The Driver (1978)

This week we take a look at the intense neo-noir, The Driver. Directed by Walter Hill, this cold neo is a perfect example of how film noir evolved into experimental crime films in the 1970s. The Driver is a cold, lean piece of pure cinema. A night time world of criminals and angry cops.(snip)

Starring a very disco cast, the film has barely any dialog. Bruce Dern gets the most lines as the man chasing the "driver." Mostly he frustratingly barks at middle-aged-hard-life-cops played by day-player actors that peppered every crime films of the time. Beautiful Isabelle Adjani is the female lead. And Ryan O'Neal is the handsome driver. Sporting long-ish, wavy hair and an open collar, he looks more like a playboy trying to pick up Diane Keaton at a bar than a hardened criminal.

Originally Steve McQueen and Robert Mitchum were at least close to playing the Ryan and Dern roles. The film would most definitely be more beloved -- even possibly a classified as a classic -- than forgotten if they had those guys in it. But would it be a better movie? I'm not so sure. Ryan has no actual backstory but his look just makes him more interesting. What is his story anyway? Hell, the guy doesn't even have a name.(snip)

It's not on Netflix. It's not in the Netflix DVD library. It's not on Amazon streaming, but you can buy the DVD. It's not in our Idaho library. But it IS in our California library and has three reviews. Two aren't promising...

Review #1
The only reason I didn't give this one star is that the car chase scenes are so good. They are all filmed well and the lighting is good. You can't say the same for the rest of the film. It's like the director really knew what he wanted to do for the driving scenes then handed the rest of the movie off to the second unit director who just phoned it in. It was a struggle to watch the "movie" parts of this film. I would love an edited version with just the chase scenes.
Review #2
Vroom! Vroom!.... With the exception of 2 very good car-chase scenes (one at the beginning and one at the end), The Driver, pretty much, sucked. For me, this was clearly one of those movies where I swear that they were making its story up as they went along. Its badly-conceived situations and its unintentionally laughable dialogue left me believing that story coherency wasn't a real concern for its producers since they believed that with the apparent combined star-power of Ryan O'Neal, Isabelle Adjani, and Bruce Dern in their precious, little picture the ever-gullible audience would accept just about any sort of half-ass nonsense (insensitively tossed their way).
What also lost The Driver some significant points was the downright awful and completely unconvincing performance of the rat-faced, frizzy-haired Bruce Dern as "The Detective". Dern's presence, literally, made my skin crawl. He was clearly miscast for his part as the "concerned" and conscientious cop. In conclusion - To say that The Driver was very much a product of its time (the 1970s) would truly be an understatement.

Pass. There seems to be a reason that none of the on-line libraries have it.

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