The Driver's Seat (1974)
The one I'm looking for will recognise me as the woman that I am right away.
For many people, Muriel Spark is the author of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a darkly subversive take on the rites-of-passage novel and a significant success when published in 1961, though the power of the novel has since been diluted by adaptations to film, television, and stage.1 This is a shame, because behind the genteel façade and literary plaudits, Spark was one of the most inventive and downright terrifying novelists the UK ever produced, whose work had more in common with Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith than it did your average Booker winner. Witness the psychological terrorism of Memento Mori (1959) in which a simple phone call – “Remember you must die.” – causes a group of elderly toffs to unravel in spectacular fashion; the horrors visited upon the thirty-something clubmen in The Bachelors (1960); or the showbiz psychodrama of The Public Image (1968). Nowhere is Spark’s gimlet eye more piercing, however, than in her 1970 novella, The Driver’s Seat.
Apparently inspired by a police report, the novella is the story of Lise, a thirty-four-year-old woman of indeterminate origin (simply the “North”) and unstable mind, who prepares to leave her mundane life in an accountancy office for a journey to the “South”, where she aims to meet her unnamed (and hitherto unmet) Mr Right. Along the way, she makes a nuisance of herself, berating salesgirls, getting assaulted by strangers, and generally disquieting those unfortunate enough to come into contact with her. Her fate is set in stone from the third chapter – “dead from multiple stab-wounds, her wrists bound with a silk scarf and her ankles bound with a man’s necktie” – but her intention is deliberately opaque, and it is only towards the end of the story that we realise Lise was not quite the kind of tragic case she appeared to be; she has been actively seeking out her “type”, not as a potential lover, but a potential murderer. Her trip is an insane attempt to seize control of her life by manufacturing her death and the mystery surrounding it.
Naturally, something as dark and experimental as The Driver’s Seat met with baffled reviews from those looking for another Brodie. Some major critics were effusive, but others looking for a straightforward narrative or a sympathetic protagonist were left wanting. The book was too prickly, Lise too unpleasant. The subject matter – as lurid as it might have been – didn’t strike a chord with the reading public either, and the novella disappeared almost as quickly as it had arrived, though it did enjoy something of a reappraisal in later years, ending up shortlisted for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010.2
Enter Elizabeth Taylor, then in the middle of both divorce proceedings (she and Richard Burton would call it quits in 1974) and a career decline following a string commercial failures like Boom! (1968), The Only Game in Town (1970) and the odd Faustian satire Hammersmith Is Out (1972). In her early forties, Taylor was already considered (unfairly, might I add) as something of a has-been, dancing around the psycho-biddy subgenre with Night Watch (1973) and struggling to balance her glamorous star persona with more challenging roles.3 As an ill-advised last-ditch attempt to reconcile with Burton, she agreed to join him in Italy, where he was filming Massacre in Rome (1973), and - never one to sit idly by - signed on to star in the Italian production of The Driver’s Seat.
Directed by Giuseppe Patroni Griffi and adapted by the director and Raffaele La Capria, the film adaptation (retitled Identikit in Italy) largely sticks to the novella, intercutting Lise’s journey from Hamburg to Rome, her search for a man with a “lack of absence” and her eventual demise with flash-forwards of the police interrogating those she meets along the way. Neither man was a hack: Patroni Griffi had directed adaptations of his own play Metti, una sera a cena (1969) and a take on John Ford’s revenger’s tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and La Capria was a noted poet and screenwriter responsible for a number of Francesco Rosi films. And yet, despite their best efforts, The Driver’s Seat suffers in translation.
To be fair, adapting the novella to screen was an almost impossible task. Spark’s narration benefits from a dazzling array of styles, at once cold-eyed and ironically interpretive; its present tense keeps us both connected to the action as it happens and at a slight distance, with a sentence structure that expands and contracts to reflect Lise’s state of mind without ever truly describing it. Dialogue has the tin-eared cadence of a second language, misshapen, yet apparently desperate to communicate and open to misinterpretation. In its transcription from page to screen, this dialogue becomes unintentionally comic, exacerbated by the dubbing traditional to Italian cinema and some overwrought delivery. It also appears that Patroni Griffi wanted to inject an element of surrealism into proceedings. Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography is soft and dream-like, and Rome is curiously devoid of people - most notably in the opening scene in a dress shop with naked, foil-smothered mannequins and a shopping mall that seems bereft of life – but these touches feel like unnecessary stylistic flourishes. They may contribute to a sense of heightened, unstable emotion, but they also sacrifice the intellectually experimental aspect of the book, which means that the novella’s disturbing, extremely Catholic core goes almost completely ignored. This is, after all, a story about alienation, absence of faith, and autonomous suffering. In Patroni Griffi’s hands, The Driver’s Seat becomes little more than an art-house giallo.
As for the performances, they run from the sublime to the ridiculous. Many of the Italian actors are stuck with stock roles of oversexed potential rapists and hard-nosed Italian cops who like nothing better than to slap suspects around their strangely modernist interview rooms, the wonderful Mona Washbourne turns up as a standard Mona Washbourne character (and is a delight), and Maxence Mailfort is a suitably fresh-faced and anxiety-ridden Pierre. Things get stranger with the appearance of Andy Warhol4 as “English Lord” (though it isn’t his speaking voice) in a couple of scenes, and an utterly bonkers performance by Ian Bannen as Bill, introduced with one of the scariest smiles I’ve ever seen. Bill is the first man to try and seduce/rape Lise, a macrobiotic nut who totes pockets of “unpolished rice” and insists on an orgasm a day.5 Lise describes him as looking like “Red Riding Hood’s grandmother”, and Bannen brings a lupine touch to the performance, although Bill ends up being more of a whining puppy than anything else, and fans of his performance in The Offence (1973) will enjoy the scene where he’s woken up by the police: “I’m a foreign citizen.” It’s a broad turn, to be sure, but Bannen is at least game enough to go all the way.
If The Driver’s Seat relied on the above to make it work, we wouldn’t be talking about it here. Thankfully, it stars and is largely driven by Elizabeth Taylor. Apparently the shoot began the day after Taylor secured her divorce and, while she was never much of a method actor, Taylor brings fractious charisma to the role. Her Lise is seven years older than the character in the novella, which adds an extra seasoning of sadness to the performance. And while that sadness is often buried under brittle, off-putting behaviour, it is ultimately highlighted when we realise that, yes, Lise is not of sound mind, but she’s still actively leaving breadcrumbs for her investigators: her loud clothes which she perversely describes as a “pure blend of natural colours” and importantly must retain stains; her clutching of a pulp novel with a lurid cover6 which she uses to hide her face; her hissy fit at the airport; her insistence on uncomfortable eye contact; her overpayment for a simple drink and her braying enquiry to a full bar – “what time is it?” – which demands that people notice and remember her. Even without the ulterior motive, Lise’s behaviour is tragic. This is a woman who has been ignored most of her life; she just wants to be seen and understood.
While some critics have described her performance as hammy, Taylor is actually much more measured. Lise’s occasional haughtiness is delivered with an underlying lack of confidence, like a child telling tall tales, and her anxiety and impatience flicker to the surface as she scans the crowds for her “type”. Taylor was always great at delivering fragility – she was frequently in poor health – and anyone with an eye for detail (and no small amount of patience) will be able to see beyond the shrill tantrums and recognise the terrified woman within. Alas, those people don’t exist in The Driver’s Seat, and part of Lise’s tragedy is that she doesn’t get the death she wants. In this world, men are invariably selfish and disappointing: even when they’re getting to murder you, they’ll try to rape you first.
Critical acclaim for The Driver’s Seat was in short supply. After a premiere at a benefit for the Monaco Red Cross where the audience was reportedly “shocked and stunned” (and rightly so), only a few critics gave the film much space, and even those largely focused on Taylor’s physique. When one of your main advocates is Rex Reed, you know you’re in trouble.7 As a result, the film was barely released – it was only released into UK cinemas last year – and quickly sank without trace, weighed down with dismissals of pretentious camp. It’s a pity because, for all its flaws (and boy howdy, are there a lot of them), The Driver’s Seat is still a fascinating translation of a great novella with a compelling, unselfconscious performance at its heart.
Next Up: “Harry Benson is a brilliant computer scientist. For three minutes a day, he is violently homicidal.”
All of which tend to strip out the theological themes and focus on Brodie rather than her “gells”, which I’ve always found a bit annoying.
The “Lost Man Booker” was awarded by public vote in 2010. A change in Man Booker Prize rules meant that books published in 1970 were overlooked - until 1970, the prize was awarded to books published the previous year; in 1971, it was awarded to books published that year. The prize ended up going to J.G. Farrell’s Troubles, which is a fine novel, but it’s no Driver’s Seat.
A connection to our previous movie, The Offence (1973) - Taylor’s last film with Burton was the made-for-television Divorce His, Divorce Hers (1973), which was written by none other than John Hopkins, who was apparently getting quite a bit of work that year.
Warhol was apparently in Italy overseeing production of Flesh for Frankenstein (1973) and Blood For Dracula (1974) and was excited to be in a movie with one of his muses.
If he doesn’t have an orgasm (which is yang!) once a day, he has to have two the next day, which he doesn’t want to do because “it gives me indigestion.”
The book is The Walter Syndrome by Richard Neely, a 1970 novel about a serial killer and rapist featuring an obvious twist and a thick streak of misogyny. It’s notable that Lise gives away the book, claiming not to need it, once she’s identified her murderer.
But seriously, to any film writers out there suffering from a lack of confidence - treat yourself to some Rex Reed. I guarantee you’ll feel a lot better about yourself.
This sounds great! Love Spark.
I watched this on Tubi a couple of years ago and it was a wild ride!