By Lee Pfeiffer 

Twilight Time has released director/writer Walter Hill's 1978 thriller The Driver as a limited edition (3,000 units) Blu-ray. The film is intentionally antiseptic when it comes to development of characters. They are deliberately opaque. In fact, not one character in the movie has a name. The credits refer to them by their professions or physical characteristics. Ryan O'Neal stars in an almost wordless role (he speaks literally 350 words according to the informative liner notes by Julie Kirgo) as a legendary Los Angeles wheelman who gets paid big sums of money to drive getaway cars in the commission of crimes. The Driver doesn't know the people he is in league with and sentiment plays no part in his decision as to whether to accept an assignment. It's strictly based on the money to be earned and his confidence in the people pulling off the caper. The film opens on the robbery of a gambling den in Los Angeles. The crooks bungle their time table, leading The Driver to have to enact death-defying stunts in order to outrun a fleet of police cars in rapid pursuit. He succeeds in doing so but curtly informs his confederates that he will never work with them again because of their lack of professionalism. Meanwhile an arrogant detective (Bruce Dern) is excited by the challenge of finally capturing and convicting The Driver, a man he has been pursuing with a Javert-like zeal for years. He recovers a piece of evidence that leads him to The Driver. The Detective is blatantly breaking the law by setting up a crime and forcing some petty criminals to approach The Driver to be the wheelman. If they succeed in enlisting him for the job, they will walk away from jail sentences. The Detective doesn't want them: he only wants them to lure in the big fish so he can have the ultimate victory. To say that things go wrong across the board would be an understatement but the scenario allows Walter Hill to stage some of the most spectacular car chases in the history of the medium. He was clearly inspired by the success of Bulllitt, which he worked on, and he replicates that film's effective method of mounting a camera inside each speeding car. The result is thrilling. The caper aspect of the story is less impressive largely because of the vaguely-defined characters. Each one is unlikable and somewhat obnoxious. We root for The Driver only because The Detective is so egotistical and morally ambiguous. Isabelle Adjani is thrown into the mix as sexy window dressing but she saunters around wearing a glum, depressed expression and the script does not provide any opportunity for her to develop on screen chemistry with O'Neal. O'Neal, always a competent but bland and unexciting actor, is actually in his element in this role, as it seems to suit his real life personality. Dern steals the show because his character at least has some interesting eccentricities to play off of. There are some fine sequences aside from the chase scenes, with Dern's pursuit of a suspect aboard an Amtrak train especially exciting, even though it seems based on a similar sequence in Peckinpah's The Getaway. Ronnee Blaklee gives a fine performance as a southern woman caught up in the L.A. crime scene who pays a terrible price for that affiliation in the film's most disturbing sequence. The Driver is an imperfect film but it is an exciting one.

The Twilight Time release boasts a first rate transfer, an original trailer that shows a snippet of a kiss between Adjani and O'Neal that I don't believe ended up in the final cut and a deleted original opening sequence that  gives a bit more depth to the characters but which drags along at a snail's pace. Hill was right to eject it from the film. 

In all, another fine Twilight Time release and one that is highly recommended.  

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