The Screengrab : interiors

Summer of ’78: “The Driver”

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Each Thursday this summer we’ll hop in the Screengrab time machine and jump back thirty years to see what was new and exciting at the neighborhood moviehouse this week in…The Summer of ’78!

The Driver

Release Date: July 28, 1978*

Cast: Ryan O’Neal, Bruce Dern, Isabelle Adjani, Ronee Blakley

The Buzz: It’s Barry Lyndon going really fast!

Keywords: Car Chase, Parking Garage, Existentialism, Pursuit, Neo Noir

The Plot: Ryan O’Neal is the titular Driver, the consummate wheelman. Bruce Dern is the Detective determined to bring him down. Isabelle Adjani is the Player, a gambler who sees the Driver’s face after a casino robbery and is brought in for questioning by the Detective. She has been paid off, however, and refuses to identify the Driver. Since he’s played by Bruce Dern, the Detective is not a by-the-book kind of guy. He sets up his own bank robbery, using two lowlifes (Glasses and Teeth) facing 10 years in prison as bait. Although he knows the Detective is onto him, the Driver wants to beat him at his own game. Car chases result. Lots of car chases. In the end, it appears the Detective has caught the Driver holding the bag, but it turns out that both men have been duped by a low-level money launderer. This is perhaps what makes the film existential, in addition to the fact that none of the characters have names and nobody besides Dern talks much.

The Test of Time: I’m surprised at myself. As a fan of car movies, '70s cinema and Walter Hill’s pre-Streets of Fire oeuvre, I really should have seen The Driver long before now. Forget about the so-called “existential” stuff; it was all cribbed from Two Lane Blacktop anyway. Walter Hill is a man of action, and he delivers some top-notch car chases here. The first one, in which the steel-nerved Driver manages to plow half a dozen cop cars into walls or over embankments, may be the best. The camera is placed right up front, either on the hood or in the front seat, and the chase unfolds in long takes – you know, so you can actually see what’s going on. (Hello, Michael Bay and company? Hello? Is this on?) My favorite scene, however (which you can watch in the clip below), is O’Neal’s “audition” for the lowlifes, in which he chauffeurs them around a parking garage, reducing their car to scrap metal in the process – then tells them he’s not going to work for them anyway. Hill uses O’Neal’s blankness to his advantage, but I couldn’t help but think as I watched it that this was a movie made for Steve McQueen. (Sure enough, checking Wikipedia this morning I see that was the plan.) Dern is very Dern, and Adjani is eye-catching, although in her first English-speaking role she matches O’Neal in the monotone department. The only real groaner comes near the end, when Dern and about 20 cops somehow materialize behind the ever-cautious and prepared O’Neal in a bus terminal, but The Driver is still a worthy entry in the annals of four-wheeled cinema.

Quotable Quote: “That's a real sad song. Only trouble is, sad songs ain't selling this year.”

2008 Equivalent: The best bet for automotive mayhem is, unfortunately, Death Race.

*Perhaps you are wondering why we’re still in July of 1978. Go check the IMDb for August 1978 releases and you’ll learn, as I have, that there aren’t many. You may think late summer is a cinematic dead zone now, but compared to ’78, it’s an embarrassment of riches. I did have plans to do Interiors (released August 2, 1978), but it was covered in last week’s 15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed by Someone Else list. (That’s fine by me, as I was spared having to sit through Interiors again.) But rest easy, for next week we’ll have a genuine August release to enjoy.

Previously on Summer of '78: Hooper

15 Films That (Almost) Could've Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 20:00:00 GMT

We’ve been taking reader suggestions for our Top Tens of late, and this week’s list, suggested via “electronic mail” by F.O.S. (Friend of Screengrab) Kaegan has the added advantage of being topical, what with the ten million recent reviews of Nanette Burstein’s documentary American Teen that cleverly elucidated how the film’s high school cliques and self-aware characters were just like something from a John Hughes movie...but for real! (And without any Wang Chung on the soundtrack).

Spurred by Kaegan, we henceforth present fifteen worthy homages and/or bad imitations, depending how you look at it (and NOT including Brian De Palma’s numerous Hitchcock rip-offs, which we’re saving for an upcoming list of, well, best and worse Hitchcock rip-offs...so stay tuned)!

FREEWAY (1996), Not Directed by John Waters

I’ve written about Freeway so recently that I’ll merely direct you to that write-up for my thoughts on Matthew Bright’s deranged cult classic...but, considering the film’s white trash milieu, indomitable characters, gleeful celebration of violence and depravity and startling against-type casting, it seemed fitting to kick off the list with the greatest Baltimore-of-the-West film the Prince of Puke never directed.

MIAMI BLUES (1990), Not Directed by Jonathan Demme

In the eighties, Jonathan Demme amassed a sizable following with his films Melvin & Howard, Something Wild, and Married to the Mob. Each of these films showed a flair for offbeat comedy, as well as an affinity for marginalized characters. So when Miami Blues hit screens in 1990, the handful of people who actually paid to see it could have been forgiven for believing it was Demme’s latest directorial effort. Hell, it was produced by Demme and his usual producing team, shot by Demme’s usual cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, edited by Demme regular Craig McKay, and co-starred newly-hot leading man Alec Baldwin, who had a supporting role in Married to the Mob. But manning the director’s chair wasn’t Demme, but rather his old Roger Corman colleague George Armitage, whose most notable title up to that point had been 1971’s Private Duty Nurses. The style of Miami Blues bears definite resemblance to that of Demme’s work, but Armitage’s sense of humor is more twisted, as in the scene where Baldwin’s Fred Frenger (a Demme name if there ever was one) steals police detective Fred Ward’s gun and badge, plus his false teeth just to rub it in. But if Armitage’s brand of sick humor doesn’t exactly jive with his old pal’s more generous comedy, the two share an affection for characters who are essentially good, embodied here in the form of Jennifer Jason Leigh’s Suzie, a kind-hearted prostitute who gets stuck on Fred and comes off like the slower cousin of Something Wild’s Audrey. Once it begins to dawn on Suzie that Fred is far more dangerous than she’d anticipated, her answer is both quirky and heartbreaking: "I had to give him the benefit of the doubt. He always ate everything I ever gave him and he never hit me."

THE THIRD MAN (1949), Not Directed by Orson Welles

It's easy to understand why people got the wrong idea about The Third Man. Orson Welles not only gives an electrifying performance as Harry Lime, but improvised various bits of the character's memorable dialogue, including his famous line about Swiss cuckoo clocks. (Indeed, he became so closely associated with the character that he went on to voice him in a radio show called The Lives of Harry Lime a few years later.) The film itself is infused with the kind of morally unhinged noir sensibility that Welles would later master in Touch of Evil, making it seem entirely plausible that his was the mind behind the film. Many of The Third Man's most daring shots, from the shadowy confrontations in the sewers of Vienna to the final, heartbreaking walk taken by Alida Valli, resemble Welles' visual pyrotechnics in his own films, and the overall dark tone of the movie, as well as little touches like the overlapping dialogue, the low-angled two-shots, and the interesting lighting, are all reminiscent of movies that Orson Welles really did direct. To top it all off, Welles was already a famous (or infamous) director when The Third Man opened in the U.S., while Carol Reed, though well-known in his native England, wasn't particular renowned here. But the all-too-common assumption that Orson Welles "really" directed the film does a disservice to the talented and innovative Reed, who, while not on his star's level of genius, was nonetheless a very dedicated, professional and skilled director. Indeed, in at least one way, it was Carol Reed who did Orson Welles' job and not the other way around: Harry Lime's hands reaching through the sewer grate near the movie's end belong to Reed and not Welles, who was gallivanting around Europe when the scene was filmed and hadn't even shown up on set yet.

INTERIORS (1978), Not Directed by Ingmar Bergman

Like a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is obsessed with the work of Ingmar Bergman. Unlike a lot of movie fanatics who live in Manhattan, Woody Allen is actually capable of getting movies made and widely released across the country. For years, Allen – whose obsession with Bergman is arguably both wider and deeper than his understanding of Bergman – had been trying to get people to take him seriously, and with Interiors, he pulled the trigger in a big way, inspired by Bergman's stark, chilly tales of family unhappiness in everything from the photography to the poster design. Never had Diane Keaton stared so wistfully out of a poorly lit window; never had Woody Allen failed to appear in one of his own movies; and, most importantly, never had a film by America's leading comedic director been such a relentless bummer. Interiors proved to be a massive critical success, with only a few grouches wondering if someone so adept at comedy needed to be spending his time making second-rate imitations of art films by a Swedish director who was still alive and perfectly capable of making such films himself. (Indeed, Bergman managed to one-up Allen even in the casting department: Woody had wanted to use Ingrid Bergman for the role of Eve, but she was already committed to filming a movie in Europe with, you guessed it, Ingmar.) Regardless of whether or not you think of Interiors as a failed Bergman knock-off or a successful Bergman homage, one thing's for sure: it ain't funny. The "I liked your earlier, funnier work" has become a comic cliché of its own when applied to Woody Allen's movies; Interiors is the movie that set it all off.

Click here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Paul Clark, Leonard Pierce

Allen and Martin in Print

Peter Smith — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 17:00:00 GMT

Two of the major film comedians of recent decades have started launching multiple assaults onto bookstore shelves. Woody Allen, of course, stop being a "mere" comedian a long time ago; he also started hemorrhaging audience shares a long time ago, and Conversations with Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Movie-making, a redundantly subtitled collection of interviews conducted with his biographer Eric Lax, is designed to serve as a reminder that he is a major filmmaker, in case any of the people who've stopped seeing his movies have forgotten it. Much of what he has to say about the path he's taken as a director and his on-again, off-again relationship with his fans will be very familiar to anyone who's had moments of being interested lo these many years. Allen likes to affect a mandarin pose; the official story is that he stopped reading his reviews after Annie Hall, a film whose "classic" status apparently strikes him as inexplicable. But the 1980 Stardust Memories, a self-victimization orgy (and a work that Allen regards as among his very favorites) that includes a fantasy scene of extraterrestrials telling Allen that they prefer his "earlier, funnier" films, sure does look like it was made by someone who'd made a close study of the reviews of Interiors. Lax may be too deferential for the job; the book would be a livelier read if some of it had been done with an interlocutor who might have reacted to Allen's wondering aloud why Hollywood Ending "was not thought of as a first-rate, extraordinary comedy" by explaining, "Because it sucked donkeys, my liege." Blessedly, as a sop to those who like him funny, Allen has also authorized the release of Mere Anarchy, a new book of his recent "casuals" from The New Yorker, as well as The Insanity Defense: The Complete Prose, which vacuums up the contents of the three earlier collections that Allen published from around 1970 to 1980. The new collection, which brings together the pieces Allen started publishing again in the 1990s after a long time away from the typewriter, are sometimes a little creaky, but they have their moments. The thicker book, however, is a dandy flashback to that period when Allen's pores seemed to spontaneously produce off-kilter sophomoric wisecracks. You can see him losing interest in the form towards the end of the book, but that's when he rallies and produces his best effort at staying gut-bustingly funny while telling a real, honest-to-God story: "The Gleams Episode", about an ill-fated love affair between Emma Bovary and a frustrated CCNY professor who has the ability to literally escape into the pages of literary classics.

Playing the mandarin may actually come a lot more naturally to Steve Martin, who seems to have put an inhuman amount of cool, thoughtful contemplation into a career that began with him marketing himself as a spastic ass. Martin describes Born Standing Up: A Comic's Life, a memoir that takes him from the start of his performing career to the point in 1981 when he retired from stand-up to concentrate on movies, as "not an autobiography but a biography, because I am writing about someone I used to know." (Martin has also written a new alphabet book, with illustrations by Roz Chast.) Like Allen, Martin has gradually moved away from his earlier, spirited film work, but with a difference. He was once eager to star in the chance-taking Pennies from Heaven and to explore his bittersweet side in his scripts for Roxanne and L.A. Story, but at some point he got fed up with putting his heart and blood into projects that were perceived as commercial disappointments, and for more than ten years now, he's plainly seen movies as something you do for the money and pitch straight down the center of the road. His more ambitious work has been done elsewhere (as in his play Picasso at the Lapin Agile and his novella Shopgirl, which inspired a 2005 film in which he co-starred with Clare Danes) or at least in movies that were somebody else's baby (such as David Manet's The Spanish Prisoner, where he had a chilling role as a con man). The excerpts from his memoir that have appeared already are graceful, affecting, and leave the reader wanting more. In the meantime, he's about to start a new movie, based on his idea of what movie audiences want: it's an unnecessary sequel to his unnecessary remake of The Pink Panther. — Phil Nugent