THE SCREEN
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
DRIVE, HE SAID THE SCREEN In The Driver, as the title character (Ryan O'Neal) is about to junk the getaway car he has just driven in a casino stick-up, he first throws something--a...
...All through 'July and August each year I feel as if I'm being force-fed-sherbert in order to clear my palate for the heavy cuisine of the Film Festival in October...
...Similarly, they live in an unnamed and unrecognizable American city-the kind of city that has small bars, supermarkets, walkup flats, a :train station, and one legit casino, which is to say a city at once both completely familiar and purely hypothetical...
...This arch remark is interesting in a couple of ways...
...In the first place, there is their anonymity...
...robbery they're doing, but express doubt whether he's worth the price he charges...
...The epithet hints that there is about this driver something of the rugged individualism, the singularity of character, of the Western hero...
...The subject of the films that John Ford and Howard Hawks made was people, not events, and the purpose of each action sequence was to develop the chara, e, ters in some way...
...His driving is his character...
...The action allowed .the hero to express his love for the heroine, or gave his sidekick a chance to demonstrate his loyalty, etc...
...How could they, when we care nothing for the characters in the first place...
...The result is that he has no character either, at least none that could be developed...
...And on top of that, everyone leads an extraordinarily insular life...
...Typical is that incident where the driver leaves in the car something--we can't see what--from which the cop deduces somehow--we can't fathom how--that the driver is a "cowboy...
...COLIN 'L...
...It goes as far as it can to abstract the characters and render them featureless...
...All the characters in the film both live and work utterly alone...
...He exists in an absolute and absolutely static condition, which makes him a pretty dull fellow...
...A Midsummer Night's Dream says at one point that the nature of art is "to give to airy nothingness a local habitation and a name...
...But in The Driver we are purposely made to remain in airy nothingness...
...What makes the hint interesting is the fact that it is only a l~int...
...The truth is that the scenes where the driver is actually being pursued by cops or other criminals aren't any more exciting than this gratuitous demonstration...
...The atmospheric vacuum in the film does in some way intensify the action...
...The setting is vague, amorphous...
...Oh," he says, examining it and smiling to himself, "A cowboy...
...What .the cop means by "cowboy," I take it, is somebody like The Lone Ranger or John Wayne...
...WESTERBECK, JR...
...It's quite a show, but it also demonstrates the extreme thinness of this sort of movie...
...Some "shooters from downtown" want him to drive for a bank...
...This human condition---or rather, a lack of one---is to be found in most action, films these days...
...W,hen the cop in charge of the case (Bruce Dern) finds the car, his men bring him whatever it is...
...The peculiarities of the appeal this sort of film has are perhaps apparent from the fact that the best scene in the movie is one where the driver isn't even playing for keeps...
...In The Driver, on the other hand, the hero doesn't love the heroine and has no sidekick...
...In the current action film, a vestige like this is all that's left of the sort of traditional hero Wayne played in Stagecoach or Red River...
...He invites them to get in the back seat of their Mercedes while he takes the wheel, and then he proceeds to execute spin outs, drive at high speed in reverse, thread the concrete pillars in an underground garage, knock the valve heads off of standpipes, carom off walls and drive under parked trucks until the car has literally been destroyed around its passengers...
...Outside of these chase scenes, the action itself is also cryptic to the point of being unreadable...
...Commonweal: 595...
...He has nothing except his driving, which he performs with the single-mindedness of a samurai...
...Aside from tl'ds one minor (and not quite appropriate) detail, The Driver is a film which admits very self-consciously that the only thing to survive from the old action film is the action itself...
...It distills and purifies the action until The Driver has become a kind of overperfection of the summer "entertainment" movie...
...He's just giving a demonstration...
...The item left to be found in the car is a little flourish, a bit of bravado, which gives the driver's work personality, and .this is what makes him a "cowboy...
...They aren't even as exciting, for elements of suspense and danger for the characters add nothing to the stunt work behind the wheel here...
...The effect of all this gray and fuzzy context is to focus our attention exclusively on the driving, which is spectacular and, admittedly, all the more spectacular for the mindlessness of the rest of the movie...
...DRIVE, HE SAID THE SCREEN In The Driver, as the title character (Ryan O'Neal) is about to junk the getaway car he has just driven in a casino stick-up, he first throws something--a nail file?---onto the front seat...
...This is even true of the cop, who operates out of an unidentified van rather than a squad room or police headquarters...
...They have no names, but are simply "the driver," "the cop," or "the gift...
...The only thing that distinguishes The Driver is that it emphasizes the fact...
Vol. 105 • September 1978 • No. 18
