The Driver's Seat (1974)

 

a.k.a. Identikit

Director: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi

Screenplay: Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and Raffaele La Capria

Based on the novella by Muriel Spark

Cast: Elizabeth Taylor as Lise; Ian Bannen as Bill; Guido Mannari as Carlo; Mona Washbourne as Mrs. Helen Fiedke; Luigi Squarzina as Lead Detective; Maxence Mailfort as Pierre; Andy Warhol as the English Lord

An Abstract Candidate

 

But orgasms are yang!

The Driver’s Seat, when I first heard of this film adaptation, was presented as a bizarre folly¹, something camp which is arguably deliberate when you get to Bill (Ian Bannen) and his macrobiotic diet. However there is so much more here, now you are in an era where the film can be seen in pristine form as intended than a bootleg¹, that is disarming on purpose, comedy there but morbid and, against the eerie nature inherent to many Italian productions in how they were made, a dread clinging to this. There is a perverse humour to our lead Lise (Elizabeth Taylor), on her way to Italy, meeting an older woman who asks which pulp novel is the more “sadomasochistic” for preference, one of the few moments, including her recounting in delight reading her lawyer son’s records on crimes, which is not from the source text but not out of place from the novella’s tone. The corpse humour however leads into the tale of Lise herself, a woman on a knife edge who is after the perfect man on her trip, but not for a clear reason until it is too late, especially as it has flash forwards when it is seen that Lise will be dead and the police will be trying to figure out what happened.

It is a befitting film from an author, Muriel Spark, who literature could be uncomfortable. She wrote stories which could be also whimsical in their tone whilst nonetheless posing moments which undercut it – The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961) flashes past the lives (and abrupt deaths) of a troupe of teenage girls forming a cult around a female teacher whose liberal attitude is however cut by her ego and passion for Mussolini – and for the bleakness of the story’s final reveal, The Driver’s Seat has its own idiosyncrasies which blur the lines between funny and dark too.. All set in the (real life) tense situation of kidnappings, crime and terrorism in Italy, a vague location in the novella given flesh by the production at an incredibly turbulent period in modern Italy, where random outbreaks of crime even happen here in the airport, Lise is on a mysterious goal to find the right man. There is a wit, but with an aura where everyone is apparently afraid of Taylor’s Lise, you have a lead who is not likable on the surface, with a hair trigger temper over anything from a glass left in a hotel room which a dissolvable aspirin to stainless dresses, but is also someone who is visibly on a trajectory in a fragile state. It is great performance you could dismiss as camp except it has the layers of the film helping enrich Taylor’s acting. Take the first scene, more disarming in a location where feminine mannequins in the shop have a foil-like material wrapped around their heads like a crime scene; her temper at a stainless dress which causes upset is absurd until you see how Lise continues, and how her fear of “stainless” fabric is meaningful as the secrets are unlocked. Considering, as in the novella, her behavior is as much to get attention, from her over-the-top and multicolored clothes to her responses to people, like kicking a fuss at the airport security, then Taylor’s performance is appropriately heightened.

Some of this is gleefully absurd, taken from the novel for the most part. The touches the film add work, such as the novel Lise carries being something specific here - Richard Neely's The Walter Syndrome (1970), one of many pulp crime books from this period that causes one to think director/co-writer Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, or the co-screenwriter/novelist Raffaele La Capria, wanted to parody the giallo boom in Italian culture and cinema, as well as feel absolutely right for the twist that centers Lise's plans, as a murder mystery about a killer. The decision to emphasis the political turmoil the novella is set, by placing it in Italy, where we see an attempted kidnapping at the airport, and an ambassador for an Arabian King having their car blown up in the street, fits contextually for the time period and fits how the novel, while vaguer, nods to this period in general for the political strife too. Other passages are entirely from the book if enriched in the film, especially in the case of Bill.

The “macrobiotic diet” was a concept developed by Sagen Ishizuka, and codified by George Ohsawa, the later a Japanese educator who also drew from Zen Buddhism with its ideas of ying and yang being balanced by what you ate, which means it does have a streak of non-scientific New Age to it in concept. Even the most ultra cynical disapprover of alternative medical diets, like Penn Jillette, would be in Ohsawa’s corner, mortified, if they saw a real life representative of the macrobiotic diet like Bill, one of the many sexually predatory men from the novella who try to force themselves onto Lise aggressively, which requires a trigger warning but is in mind, in the end, she is the one in control making them look fools. The difference between the version of Bill in the book and this version is that Scottish actor Ian Bannen really adds so much to make him stand out, the first shot perfect as Bannen’s entrance fully gets the character over, looking lustfully at Lise on an airplane with a literal comparison to Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother wanting to eat her thrown back at him. Believing in a mandatory orgasm a day, ignoring the existence of masturbation, and that two in one day would cause him indigestion, alongside his habit of carrying tiny plastic bags of unpolished rice on his persons in a way suspiciously like he was smuggling cocaine into Italian soil, he is a cruel parody of New Age figures from this era. He is however also a perfect centre to the reoccurring aspect of Taylor’s Lise, as an older woman, among libidinous men trying to get a woman (even by force) despite Lise with no desire for sex, barring one scene by herself, but for a different goal.

The film leans on the police investigating the case more than the book, a crime thriller touch that does not neuter Spark’s novel but feels the same way legitimately, like Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (1970) by Elio Petri, as a way to emphasis the complex psychology at hand when other characters can present fragments of images of Lise. Yes there is plenty here which does scream “cult” – Andy Warhol cameos as a vague character from the book, a lord who Lise briefly fixates on, Warhol there at the right time, aptly around the time when his name presented the Italian shot Flesh for Frankenstein/Blood for Dracula (1973) films by Paul Morrissey, and also a perfect choice in hindsight for the tone, even in terms of an English lord clearly played by an artist from Pittsburgh in his pure white hair and suit. There is however so much here which a level above, even for a film streaked in camp, that is incredibly well made, a huge factor to the proceedings being Vittorio Storaro as the cinematographer. Set in modern environments, with a large portion of the film in septic white and alien-looking shopping malls, Storaro adds so much by himself in showing this fascinating but sterile world where Lise literally is the most colorful detail within them. It is a film which, like so many idiosyncratic productions particularly with the sixties and seventies, came but seemingly became lost to time, with no actual British release for the film until a 2023 British Film Institute Blu-Ray for a debut. It will confound a few viewers but feels too precise to dismiss. Certainly it makes a legitimate argument, from a figure of the golden age of Hollywood starlets both in terms of her own screen roles but the gossip around her life, that Elizabeth Taylor was both a great actress but one with this entire deeply unconventional period in her filmography – next to Boom (1968) and Secret Ceremony (1968 too) in terms of deeply unconventional films she controls – that is ripe for dissection.

Abstract Spectrum: Eccentric / Psychodrama

Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): Low

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1) Elizabeth Taylor's Craziest Role: 'The Driver's Seat' aka. 'Identikit', by Richard Metzger for Dangerous Minds, published 24th March 2011.