“Who’s the broad?” one of the gangsters asks, as the car pulls away—to all their deaths, except for the getaway driver.

“Just some broad,” we hear a gangster say. This is a voice-over, during a long shot of the car driving into a hail of gunfire.

For the last not-a-getaway scene, the same broad shows up again. This time, there’s a seat for her—the passenger seat, right next to the smiling little driver. The moll recognizes him, of course; she somewhat aggressively takes his flatcap off, just to be sure. It’s the first time we can see how handsome he is—his dark-brown hair, his dark-brown eyes, the shy innocence of his boyish smile, which is beginning to betray his deadly sarcasm. I definitely had his eyes.

“It’s you again!” the moll tells the driver. She gets out of the car, keeping his cap, which she puts on her head. “I ain’t ridin’ with him,” she tells the three gangsters squeezed into the backseat of the death car. “You’re dead meat, you know,” the broad tells them, but this is über-noir in overkill—we know.

On the drive back from Durham, my uncles went on and on about the symbolism of the getaway driver; they were struggling to express what it means that he always gets away. The little driver is working for a rival mob, or he’s a cop, or he’s not real—these were among my uncles’ bold interpretations.

“He’s too pretty to be a guy!” Uncle Johan exclaimed.

“His eyes are your eyes,” the snowshoer told me.

“What about his smile?” I asked Elliot.

“His smile is very noir,” the little English teacher said.

“I like how the getaway driver hooks up with the broad at the end!” Uncle Martin called out from the backseat.

“It’s like those two planned the whole thing!” Uncle Johan shouted.

I glanced at the snowshoer—only for a second, because I was driving—just long enough to see he was smiling. There was nothing noir about Mr. Barlow’s smile.

At the end of The Wrong Car, the getaway driver is drinking a beer at a bar when the moll comes in. She’s still wearing his flatcap.

“How’d it go, cutie pie?” she asks the little driver, cozying up to him on the nearest barstool.

“You know how it went,” the driver tells her in his deadpan way. “Please take off that cap.” The broad puts the duckbill cap on the empty barstool beside her.

“Better?” she asks him, snuggling closer.

“Such an improvement,” the little driver tells her—giving her his shyly innocent, almost childlike smile. When you’re over thirty and you smile like a kid, there is something noir about it.