The Driver

(Walter Hill, 1978) London Live, 11pm

Still active but unjustly overlooked, Walter Hill was in his prime as distinctive a reinventor of American genre cinema as John Carpenter. This hard-boiled thriller stars Ryan O’Neal as a taciturn outsider who’s the best getaway driver in the business; a magnificently snakelike Bruce Dern as the detective on his trail; and Isabelle Adjani as a gambler caught up in their struggle. This is the closest US crime cinema gets to Hill’s model, Jean-Pierre Melville’s classic Le Samouraï, with its cool reduction of everything to pure existential basics. But it can be explosive as well as chilly: the scene where O’Neal methodically demolishes a car to prove his skills is vehicle abuse elevated to a fine art. Superb.