The Driver’s Seat/ Identikit (Giuseppe Patroni Griffi, 1974)

Based on the 1970 novella by Muriel Spark, with Elizabeth Taylor playing a woman in the middle of a nervous breakdown, constantly deflecting the attention of brutish men who mistake her for a prostitute whilst cruising for a man to kill her; a fragmentary film, a big-budget experiment in narration, with a now middle-aged but still astonishingly beautiful Elizabeth Taylor giving one of her greatest and most under-rated performances. In this podcast we discuss Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat, Vittorio Storaro’s cinematography, the appearance of Andy Warhol as a badly-dubbed British aristocrat; Elizabeth Taylor’s career in the late sixties/ early 70s and to what extent its reception has been coloured by sexism (in contrast to say Dirk Bogarde’s) and American cultural imperialism (popular european cinema doesn’t matter). We also mention Bruce La Bruce’s appreciation of the film in an essay that accompanies the BFI blu-ray release and speculate on whether the film has a ‘gay gaze’. An exploratory discussion of a film that deserves much more attention.