The Driver (1978)
Directed by Walter Hill
The Driver specializes in driving getaway cars for robberies. His exceptional talent has prevented him from being caught yet. After another successful flight from the police a self-assured detective makes it his primary goal to catch the Driver. He promises pardons to a gang if they help to convict him in a set-up robbery. The Driver seeks help from The Player to mislead the detective.
5 connections found
View:
5 films that influenced The Driver
What critics say influenced The Driver
O'Neal's softness provides an analysis of Steve McQueen, his "cowboy desperado" pitted against Dern's haunted sheriff -- macho hostility is ritualized, aestheticized, etherealized, the dialogue pitched at another Bresson, Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.
Hill leeches the notion of underworld loyalty out of the Pickup on South Street homage (Ronee Blakley in her hotel room) and reclaims his own bit of business from The Getaway (a valise of money in a train) to lend it metaphysical heft.
Another remake is The Driver, despite Walter Hill's insistence that he'd never seen it: someone on that movie had to have seen it.
Hill leeches the notion of underworld loyalty out of the Pickup on South Street homage (Ronee Blakley in her hotel room) and reclaims his own bit of business from The Getaway (a valise of money in a train) to lend it metaphysical heft.
Anyone who has seen the Hill-scripted The Thief Who Came to Dinner (directed by Bud Yorkin) and The Getaway (Sam Peckinpah) will be hard-pressed to ignore that the new picture doubles back over much the same ground.
Advertisement
The movie, which opens today at neighborhood theaters, was written and directed by Walter Hill, who once wrote and directed a good movie, "Hard Times," with Charles Bronson.
The Twilight Time label was gracious enough to release Walter Hill's first film as writer-director, 1975's Hard Times (reviewed here ), on Blu-ray earlier this summer, and now it's already brought out his sophomore effort long before the leaves are set to start dropping.
As handsome as, and even artier than, those in his first directorial effort, Hard Times, they relentlessly define cold, dark, life-expunging spaces—some as austere as Bresson frames, others consecrated to a chilly luminescence that makes Pakula places seem like glowing hearths.