Movie Reviews : ‘Drifter’ Drifts Into Lady-in-Distress Formula

In “The Drifter” (selected theaters), an attractive young woman (Kim Delaney) picks up a handsome hitchhiker (Miles O’Keeffe) against her better judgment and winds up sharing a motel room with him. Once home and back to work, she can’t shake the guy.

Writer Larry Brand in his directorial debut tries so hard to avoid the predictable lady-in-distress formula that he ends up overreaching disastrously.

He deftly establishes that Delaney’s well-played Julia is the quintessential yuppie. She’s smugly satisfied in her rewarding career as a fashion designer, in her Southwestern chic apartment--with more cactuses than furniture--and in her boyfriend Arthur (Timothy Bottoms), an attorney as upwardly mobile as she is.

To her, the hitchhiker, for all his passionate lovemaking, is as disposable as a used takeout food container.

Once past the film’s saggy middle with its mechanical suspense, we discover that the director intends to parallel Julia’s relationship with the hitchhiker with Arthur’s equally detached view of the private eye (Al Shannon) who does all his dirty work for him. The trouble is that Shannon’s character comes out of left field and so late that “The Drifter” becomes hopelessly contrived and unconvincing.

Delaney, a lovely and capable actress, fares best, and Shannon shows resourcefulness in trying to play an impossible part.

Production notes tell us that “The Drifter” (rated R for considerable sex and violence) is to be taken as “a parodic homage to B noir pictures.” That smacks of an excuse for a script that needed to be sent back for rewrites.