With Ryan Gosling in the driver's seat, new film sure to go No 1 against a Bullitt

WARNING: don't even let the kids read this column, let alone see the movie.

John Connolly

WARNING: don't even let the kids read this column, let alone see the movie.

There have been lots of great movies about cars: Bullitt, Grand Prix, The Italian Job, Duel and Vanishing Point, to name a few. And there have been lots of movies about the relationships between drivers and their cars. But no movie has gone back to the real origin of the driver-and-his-car movie until Drive, to be released in Australia on October 27.

Of course, the driver-and-his-car movie is based on the man-and-his-horse movie (sorry, ladies), especially the unknown man and his horse as in Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood's Dollars trilogy. You know it. A cool, underspoken, cigarillo-out-of-mouth outsider rides into town to leave his unknown but obviously pretty nasty past behind. Meets virginal hooker with child and falls in what passes for love until baddies threaten the whole set-up. Finally bad past comes to be useful and wrongs righted but unknown man has to move on again.

Former Mousketeer Ryan Gosling plays the driver. Gosling did a crash course in driving (no pun intended) so he could do a few stunts in the movie. I'm not sure what they were but there are some very nice shots of Gosling, with toothpick instead of cigarillo, behind the wheel courtesy of stunt driver technology, but not as many chase scenes as you would like.

The limited car chases, however, are seriously good, the cars are seriously pedestrian and the product placement is pretty ordinary when you think a can of WD40 is the most memorable.

The cars are equally ordinary when you think the choice of stars is between a silver Chevy Impala with a bigger engine dropped in to help with better robberies and an old Chevy Malibu (Gosling's own drive), while for the really important robbery it's a new black Ford Mustang. To show you how pedestrian things are, the best chase is between a Mustang and a Chrysler 300. I hope Ford, GM and Chrysler paid heaps for being in the movie because decent cars would have seen their sales shoot through the roof.

Gosling's character is a man of few words, but his best is: "If I drive for you, you give me a time and a place. I give you a five-minute window. Anything happens in that five minutes and I'm yours no matter what. I don't sit in while you're running it down; I don't carry a gun . . . I drive." How good is that?

It's even better than Eastwood's best car movie Gran Torino where he says: "Ever notice how sometimes you come across somebody you shouldn't have f . . ked with? Well, I'm that guy."

Now when you think "what a great recommendation . . . I think I'll take the kids along" - don't. Eastwood was a wuss in his movie compared with Gosling in this. Think Quentin Tarantino as a softie and you have some idea how really violent this movie gets. Gosling is under the direction of Nicolas Winding Refn, who in his native Denmark is known as l'enfant sauvage, the wild child.

Anyway, this film is a real chance for the Academy Awards' best picture. If it gets up, it will be the first real car movie to make it. I know, I know, Driving Miss Daisy took it out in 1990 and Crash in 2006. But these weren't real car movies. Even with the gratuitous violence and no sex, this one is.

What we do know about the very best drivers is that they have no emotion. Driving is technical. Michael Schumacher was called the ice man. Lewis Hamilton has too much emotion and maybe so does our own Mark Webber.

The opening of Drive was in New York, so I had better report on Bonhams's last weekend at the Goodwood Revival. Bonhams said it was happy, but I found the results disappointing after Pebble Creek. Top sellers included a 1971 Ferrari 365GTS/4 "Daytona" Spider for close to a million big ones; the former Maharaja of Mysore, Richard Solove and John M. O'Quinn 1911 Rolls-Royce 40/50hp Silver Ghost Ceremonial Victoria for $650,000; and Westlife singer Shane Filan's 1964 Aston Martin DB5 4.2-litre Sports Saloon for $550,000. Filan is a horsehead rather than a petrolhead. He owns more than 70 horses. All very well, but the two serious Jaguars were passed in. Gosling would have bought them.

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