Cover: Taxi Driver (Collectors Edition) Rating: 0
20 Feb 2013

Details

Director:Martin Scorsese
Writer:Paul Schrader
Theatrical:1976
Studio:Columbia/Tristar Studios
Genre:Drama
Duration:113
Awards:Nominated for 4 Oscars, Another 25 wins & 9 nominations
Languages:English, Spanish
Sound:Dolby
Aspect Ratio:1.85:1
Discs:1
Region:1

Summary

“Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the street.” So mutters tormented taxi driver malcontent Travis Bickle, played with maximum intensity by Robert De Niro in the first of his lauded lead turns for Martin Scorsese. Bickle’s job shuttling back and forth across New York City-”anytime, anywhere,” he boasts-provides him an insomniac’s view of the city’s underbelly, all those things on dark backstreets that most people never witness. But he’s become so inured to the world around him that he feels numb, invisible, and ultimately impotent.
Yet Bickle is not so much outraged at the signs of social and physical decay around him as he is frustrated that he no longer knows anything else. He’s also conflicted, attracted to the very things he purports to despise. Sick of himself and what he sees, he embarks on a final, desperate quest to reintegrate himself into society. “I don’t believe that one should devote his life to morbid self-attention,” he says, “I believe that one should become a person like other people.” But in Paul Schrader’s bleak, hell-on-earth script, there’s no way out. Bickle is already too far gone.
Bickle’s descent is at first painful to watch, then nerve-racking and ultimately pitiful. He begins by wooing beautiful campaign aid Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), and when his awkward romantic advances are inevitably rebuffed, his alienation grows more intense. After trying to rejoin society, Bickle’s next goal is to destroy it, beginning with the planned assassination of a popular presidential candidate. When this plan also fails he then tries to redeem society, with the suicide-mission rescue of an underage prostitute (Jodie Foster) from her abusive pimp.
Portraits of urban malaise and anomie don’t come any darker, bleaker, or more claustrophobic than Taxi Driver. The film has some noirish elements–Bickle’s voiceover, Bernard Herrmann’s haunting, jazzy score—but veers sharply when it comes to the actual storytelling. Taxi Driver proceeds like a film noir told from the perspective of an anonymous stranger standing at the corner of a murder scene, peering over the police tape at the shrouded body splayed out on the street. What’s going through that person’s head? How will he react when confronted with such a vivid display of violence?
Scorsese, Schrader, and De Niro seem to be asking that of us as well. For the film’s duration we’re stuck viewing the city from Bickle’s relentlessly isolated perspective, with few peripheral glimmers of hope taking us out of his deranged head. He’s Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man surfacing with a gun and a death Wish, a vigilante antihero with a hands-on approach to cleaning up the city. “Here is a man who would not take it anymore,” he announces triumphantly. “A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up.”
But is this what we want? In an ironic ends-justifying-the-means twist, Bickle is ultimately praised as a crusading hero, and it’s hard to say if Bickle’s inadvertent triumph is actually a tragedy. Because the film has done such a successful job wobbling the moral compass, we’re left desperately grappling for impossible answers. —Joshua Klein (1001)

"Taxi Driver" is the definitive cinematic portrait of loneliness and alienation manifested as violence. It is as if director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader had tapped into precisely the same source of psychological inspiration ("I just knew I had to make this film," Scorsese would later say), combined with a perfectly timed post-Watergate expression of personal, political, and societal anxiety. Robert De Niro, as the tortured, ex-Marine cab driver Travis Bickle, made movie history with his chilling performance as one of the most memorably intense and vividly realized characters ever committed to film. Bickle is a self-appointed vigilante who views his urban beat as an intolerable cesspool of blighted humanity. He plays guardian angel for a young prostitute (Jodie Foster), but not without violently devastating consequences. This masterpiece, which is not for all tastes, is sure to horrify some viewers, but few could deny the film's lasting power and importance. "—Jeff Shannon"

Director: Martin Scorsese
Year: 1976
Running time: 123 mins
Censor Rating: R18 - graphic violence
Genres & Subjects: Adrenaline, Archival, Classic films, Drama

Producers: Julia Phillips, Michael Phillips
Screenplay: Paul Schrader
Photography: Michael Chapman
Editors: Tom Rolf, Melvin Shapiro
Art director: Charles Rosen
Set decorator: Herbert Mulligan
Costume designer: Ruth Morley
Music: Bernard Herrmann

With: Robert De Niro (Travis Bickle), Cybill Shepherd (Betsy), Jodie Foster (Iris), Harvey Keitel (Sport), Peter Boyle (Wizard), Leonard Harris (Charles Palantine), Albert Brooks (Tom), Martin Scorsese (passenger), Steven Prince (Andy)

Festivals: Berlin 2011

Martin Scorsese’s great seething vision of 70s New York mesmerises anew in a blazing 35th-anniversary 35mm restoration. The synthesis of talents was extraordinary: Paul Schrader’s script surveys Manhattanthrough the eyes of an insomniac, sleaze-obsessed Vietnamvet and delineates his crackup with wily expertise. Bernard Herrmann’s score wails to wake the city’s dead. Scorsese pours a century of cinema into his vision of urban inferno – and Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle forever cruises the avenues of our imaginations, a psychopath as tender, lonely and deranged as Psycho’s Norman Bates, but so much more real. — BG

“What can be newly said about this savage, many-headed dragon of the American new wave? You either love it or you love it… Bickle remains an authentic everyman, a walking dumb-as-shit smashup of conservative responses, but also a disenfranchised victim of the corporate-imperial combine, an ex-soldier used to meaningless death, lost in the streets of his own empty freedom. There may not be a more essentially American figure haunting the national cinema.” — Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

“Taxi Driver still stuns! …Hysterical yet sublime, the movie crystallizes one of the worst moments in New York’s history – the city as America’s pariah, a crime-ridden, fiscally profligate, graffiti-festooned moral cesspool... In other aspects, the world of Taxi Driver is recognizably ours. Libidinal politics, celebrity worship, sexual exploitation, the fetishization of guns and violence, racial stereotyping, the fear of foreigners – not to mention the promise of apocalyptic religion – all remain. Taxi Driver lives. See it again. And try to have a nice day.” — J. Hoberman, Village Voice

Credits

Robert De Niro ... Travis Bickle
Cybill Shepherd ...
Jodie Foster ... Iris
Paul Schrader ... Scriptwriter
Diahnne Abbott ... Concession Girl
Frank Adu ... Angry Black Man
Victor Argo ... Melio
Gino Ardito ... Policeman at Rally
Garth Avery ... Iris' Friend
Peter Boyle ... Wizard
Albert Brooks ... Tom
Harry Cohn ... Cabbie in Bellmore
Copper Cunningham ... Hooker in Cab
Brenda Dickson ... Soap Opera Woman
Harry Fischler ... Dispatcher
Nat Grant ... Stick-Up Man
Leonard Harris ... Charles Palantine