..think where I would insert a car chase into ‘Pride and Prejudice’, ‘Sleepless in Seattle’ or ‘War and Peace’ I am sure that roar of a seven litre V8 bouncing off the rev limiter would add wider audience appeal.
Which brings me only slightly indirectly, much like a TomTom GPS car navigation system in the south of France, to three movies all of which have car chases of various standards of excellence in them. ‘Drive’, ‘The Driver’ and ‘Bullitt’, starring Ryan Gosling, Ryan O’Neal and Steve (don’t call me Ryan) McQueen irrespectively. And also a few Chevrolets, a Mercedes and an iconic green Ford Mustang.
Unsurprisingly ‘Drive’ and ‘The Driver’ have much in common thematically, with lead roles of such taciturnity and brevity of speech that must have made learning the lines a doddle. I know that Ryan O’Neill has about 330 words of dialogue in the whole of a fairly brief movie and I’m sure that Ryan Gosling probably wouldn’t have exceeded that. I actually think that some of the lines from “the Driver’ appear in ‘Drive’. Neither leading character has origins, a past or a name, although Ryan O’Neal has the better hair on both head and chest.
Let me say that the only genuine merit that the film ‘Drive’ possesses is Ryan Gosling’s performance, which turns a rather unpleasant, gratuitously violent, film of a European director attempting to recapture the concept of late 1960’s American cool into something almost interesting. Mr Gosling’s character has a behaviour management problem that turns him into a psychopathic anger machine able to crush people’s heads whilst wearing sneakers when leaping to the defence of the helpless and disadvantaged. The fact that this is remotely believable is actually is something of a tribute to the actor and to the power of tomato sauce. Even though the film is well edited, has some capable supporting performances and good cinematography, it is a movie where you can see all the cliché buttons being pushed – the music as an ironical counterpoint to the action goes somewhere above the stratospherically obvious.
But the car chases and stunt driving are curiously unimaginative and uninvolving, which for a film called ‘Drive’ is unforgivable. So I won’t forgive it and can imagine the disappointment of all those at the film festivals it opened.
‘The Driver’ (1978) directed by Walter Hill, who, up until this film was primarily known as a scriptwriter, should actually be the worse film as it is an American doing a European cool movie of the French New Wave variety. None of the characters has a name, so we know we should be heading into the world of Jungian archetypes as imagined by a Hollywood action director. You may have worked out the Ryan O’Neal plays ‘The Driver’, but we also have Bruce Dern playing ‘The Detective’, Isabelle Adjani as ‘The Player’ and Ronee Blakley coming to a sticky end as ‘The Connection’.
Ryan O’Neal has never struck me as the most emotive of actors, but in this case he assumes a state of animation little removed from rigor mortis. No matter what he does, which apart from driving and staring into the middle distance is not all that much, is done with unchanging blankness and the panache of a cigar store Indian. I assume this may be deliberate and the result of directorial Intention. Isabelle Adjani performs in the same minimalist manner, obviously learnt from studying Buster Keaton, so only Bruce Dern gets to chew the scenery with the slightly off-centre, hippy in law enforcement mania, which he does so naturally.
There is an enigmatic plot, which you can follow up until the end where the enigma goes entirely into an existential MacGuffin. But the car chases that top and tail the movie are great fun, with police cars and other assorted machinery embedding themselves into the urban architecture with frequency and aplomb which was only exceeded by the Blues Brothers a few years later. However, the scene that defines the movie is not so much a car chase but a demonstration of skilled driving that involves the steady erosion of a Mercedes saloon in a car park by ‘The Driver’ who is showing some criminals that he is (a) very, very good (b) not going to work for them and (c) their car is no longer roadworthy.
‘Bullitt’ was made ten years before ‘The Driver’ and is a police procedural with several twists, a double somersault and the inimitable Steve McQueen. The only weak point of the movie is probably Jacqueline Bisset who just seems to be able to take a line and turn it into an advertisement for toilet soap. Arguably it is the car chase sequence for which the movie is mostly remembered and I suspect because it seems the most plausible and the least staged. Certainly connoisseurs of the car chase genre will say that ‘Ronin’ or any of the Bourne series are more exciting but they, like the opening scenes for the majority of James Bond movies, are set piece entertainments.
For the large part driven by McQueen, who was an excellent racing car driver, the editing of what is quite a simple sequence is an object lesson in film cutting for all directors. It is still one of the most exciting driving sequences and for lovers of trivia was the introduction of low profile tyres into popular car culture.
But you know it’s the real deal when they fasten their seat belts. Vroom, vroom.