“It’s a film that the French like very much. » This is how Walter Hill defined his second production, a commercial and critical failure when it was released in 1978, which can now be seen in theaters. See again The Driver (which was titled Driver in France) today will recall the memory of the incredible creativity of a time when Hollywood was open to all kinds of experimentation, but will also allow us to understand how the project ran the risk of being misunderstood in the United States. .
Because if “the French” love this feature film, it’s because they rightly saw in it a variation and a reinterpretation of the action detective film through the prism of Jean-Pierre Melville’s cinema (and especially his Samurai, in 1967), that is to say of a cinema that had put an end to dying forms in order to deliver a kind of stylized, morbid and mannerist rereading of them.
The universe staged in The Driver is populated by mute predators, nameless creatures freed from all morality and all visible affect, engaged in a life-and-death struggle in the name of issues whose abstract dimension derealizes an entire narrative strained by the question of efficiency, pure gesture. The words are laconic and precise: “I respect a man who is good at what he does” (“I respect someone if they are good at what they do”).
Quasi-metaphysical adventure
The Driver was produced by British company EMI for Twentieth Century Fox. The filmmaker had to fight with his producer to keep all the mysterious and opaque dimension, devoid of any psychological cliché, of an almost metaphysical adventure. It is possible that Walter Hill’s film will finally appear for what it is: one of the best action films of its time, and the symbol of a bygone era.
Caltrops, betrayals and brutal pursuits follow one another
A skilled driver (Ryan O’Neal in a role originally planned for Steve McQueen), who has put his talent to the service of robbers who hire him for a heist, is tracked down by a tenacious and cantankerous policeman (the excellent Bruce Dern), who develops, manipulating thugs he blackmails, a trap to make him fall. Traps, betrayals and brutal pursuits follow one another. The driver is helped by a mysterious young woman who provides him with an alibi, played by Isabelle Adjani. This is after seeing and enjoying Walter Hill’s previous film, The Brawler (1975), that the actress had decided to accept this first Hollywood role. The failure of The Driveralas, contributed not a little to the brevity of his American career.
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