Description by Allmovie "All the animals come out at night" -- and one of them is a cabby about to snap. In
Martin Scorsese's classic 1970s drama, insomniac ex-Marine Travis Bickle (
Robert De Niro) works the nightshift, driving his cab throughout decaying mid-'70s New York City, wishing for a "real rain" to wash the "scum" off the neon-lit streets. Chronically alone, Travis cannot connect with anyone, not even with such other cabbies as blowhard Wizard (
Peter Boyle). He becomes infatuated with vapid blonde presidential campaign worker Betsy (
Cybill Shepherd), who agrees to a date and then spurns Travis when he cluelessly takes her to a porno movie. After an encounter with a malevolent fare (played by
Scorsese), the increasingly paranoid Travis begins to condition (and arm) himself for his imagined destiny, a mission that mutates from assassinating Betsy's candidate, Charles Palatine (
Leonard Harris), to violently "saving" teen hooker Iris (
Jodie Foster) from her pimp, Sport (
Harvey Keitel). Travis' bloodbath turns him into a media hero; but has it truly calmed his mind?
Written by
Paul Schrader,
Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era.
Scorsese and
Schrader structure Travis' mission to save Iris as a film noir version of
John Ford's late Western
The Searchers (1956), aligning Travis with a mythology of American heroism while exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet Travis' military record and assassination attempt, as well as Palatine's political platitudes, also ground
Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s. Employing such techniques as
Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by
Bernard Herrmann's eerie final score (finished the day he died),
Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed through Travis' point-of-view, where
De Niro's now-famous "You talkin' to me" improv becomes one more sign of Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike,
Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its violence.
Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R, and
Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on
President Ford's life,
Taxi Driver's intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted
Reagan assassin and
Foster fan
John W. Hinckley.
Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the
Cannes Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting
Rocky. Anchored by
De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man,"
Taxi Driver remains a striking milestone of both
Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood.
Features
- BD exclusive: interactive script to screen
- Original 1986 commentary with director Martin Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader recorded by the criterion collection
- Commentaries by writer Paul Schrader and by professor Robert Kolker
- Martin Scorsese on Taxi Driver
- Producing Taxi Driver
- God's Lonely Man
- Influence and appreciation
- Taxi Driver stories
- Making of documentary
- Travis' New York - the changes of New York from 1975 to today
- Travis' New York locations - we visit the famous locations in New York city 2006 and compare them to the same locations in 1975
- Storyboard to film comparisons with Martin Scorsese introduction
- Animated photo galleries
11th April 2011
Taxi Driver [Blu-ray]
