Noirvember 2025 roars to life with Walter Hill's sleek, existential chase film The Driver (1978). Ryan O’Neal plays the nameless getaway specialist who moves through Los Angeles like a ghost, pursued by Bruce Dern’s manic lawman hell-bent on taking him down. It’s a lean, hypnotic duel between predator and prey where style is substance and silence is power.
Mike rides shotgun with Beth Accomando and Walter Chaw to unpack Hill’s minimalist approach, his homage to Melville’s Le Samouraï, and the cold precision that makes The Driver a high-octane hymn to professionalism and control.
Addendum: Big apologies to Ms. Adjani. Re-reading her Wikipedia, it looks like she's not anti-immmigrant but actually speaks out against anti-immigration!
#Shocktober2017 continues with a the 1976 film from Roman Polanski, The Tenant . Adapted from a book by Roland Topor (Fantastic Planet), the film also stars Polanski as Trelkovsky, a man in need of a new apartment. He finds one where the previous occupant has defenestrated herself. After her death, he's able to move in and finds that his neighbors don't like him being noisy... in fact, they don't like him being him at all. Some put this alongside Polanski's Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby as his “apartment trilogy” in which explores the terrors of urban paranoia.
Guest Co-Hosts: Beth Accomando, Walter Chaw
Guest Co-Hosts: