The Driver (1978)

Film Club is BACK for November with one of the greatest cult films of the Seventies, one with a firm place in the pantheon of cool - Walter Hill’s THE DRIVER!

Underground action icon Walter Hill is best-known for THE WARRIORS and 48HRS, but many assert THE DRIVER to be his true masterpiece, a lean, mean 90-minutes of vehicular mayhem that collides exquisitely with Euro-arthouse existentialism. Ryan O’Neal (BARRY LYNDON), in a role that preceded Ryan Gosling’s turn in DRIVE, plays a monosyllabic getaway driver, a consummate professional who has never been caught. When a hotshot young detective (Bruce Dern, NEBRASKA) gets on the case, The Driver is drawn into a world of double crossing and set-ups.

Also starring POSSESSION’s Isabelle Adjani, THE DRIVER is a neon-drenched, bare-bones neo-noir that outclasses almost every other ‘driving film’ you could care to name. From DRIVE to BABY DRIVER to THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS, the DNA of this film exists in the modern action landscape like few other films. It’s a great introduction to Hill, the genre inverter and B-Picture elevator, mentored by Sam Peckinpah and a key fixture of Seventies and Eighties cinema of all stripes.

Said critic Craig Williams: “The B-movie form begins and ends with Walter Hill’s THE DRIVER (1978). It’s the blueprint genre picture; a year zero for the modern cult canon. When the French Nouvelle Vague repurposed the American genres of the thirties and forties for the intellectual classes of the Parisian sixties, they gave the forms a new lease of life by burdening them with existential malaise and a heavy sense of ennui. While these elements carried over to New Hollywood, Hill brought the grit back to the B-movie. The Driver is a film of types and trends; a cinematic expression of our basest narrative impulses. Directed with remarkable economy, the seasoned Hill keeps everything as tight as possible.”

Don’t miss the chance to catch this cult masterpiece on the big screen, the way it was meant to be seen. At the special time of Thursday 21st of November, 7pm. Tickets $10, as always. See you there!