The crime drama 'Taxi Driver' follows taxi driver Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) who works the night shift in New York City. Travis was discharged from the marines in 1973 having served during the Vietnam War. He becomes obsessed with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker representing presidential candidate, Senator Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). When things start to dissolve, Travis takes it upon himself to visit child prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster) who once rode in the back of his taxi with her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel).
“You talkin' to me” came from Bruce Springsteen. Robert De Niro improvised that whole paranoid monologue, including what would become the movie’s most famous line. (The film's screenwriter, Paul Schrader, later said, “It’s the best thing in the movie, and I didn’t write it.”) De Niro got the line from Bruce Springsteen, whom he’d seen perform in Greenwich Village just days earlier, at one in a series of concerts leading up to the release of 'Born to Run'. When the audience called out his name, The Boss did a bit where he feigned humility and said, “You talkin’ to me?” Apparently it stuck in De Niro’s mind."
- Eric Snider, Mental Floss
'Taxi Cab (City At Night)' - Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band
'Taxi Driver' offers a tormented character study of a man in turmoil. It's a film that explores very dark subject matter but the storytelling has a mordant sense of humour. It's directed by Martin Scorsese who I believe has made some of the greatest crime films of the last 50 years. Robert De Niro is remarkably intense as Travis Bickle, an avid diarist who reveals his inner-thoughts through dialogue, diary entries, narration and letter writing. Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader capture the dislocation felt by a working man with a strong sense of displacement, something both of them had started to feel while working on the fringe of the film industry as they entered their 30s. De Niro's unsettling performance projects a sense of unwavering alienation as Travis becomes more and more detached from reality. With isolation comes paranoia, which then leads to hypochondria and insomnia, fuelling a gradual descent into delusion. There's a reason so many men are at risk of suicide when they approach middle-age as these years often bring irrational fear and self-imposed isolation. What I like about Travis is that he appreciates a good diatribe but isn't comfortable with small talk, and he really hates typical "guy talk", that's not at all where he wants to be.
"'Taxi Driver' (1976) is director Martin Scorsese's and screenwriter Paul Schrader's gritty, disturbing, nightmarish modern film classic, that examines alienation in urban society. Scorsese's fourth film, combining elements of film noir, the western, horror and urban melodrama film genres. Historically, the film appeared after a decade of war in Vietnam, and after the disgraceful Watergate crisis and President Nixon's resignation. It explores the psychological madness within an obsessed, twisted, inarticulate, lonely, anti-hero cab driver and war vet (De Niro), who misdirectedly lashes out with frustrated anger and power like an exploding time bomb at the world that has alienated him."
- Tim Dirks, Filmsite
"This utter aloneness is at the center of "Taxi Driver," one of the best and most powerful of all films, and perhaps it is why so many people connect with it even though Travis Bickle would seem to be the most alienating of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it.
Martin Scorsese's 1976 film (re-released in theaters and on video in 1996 in a restored color print, with a stereophonic version of the Bernard Herrmann score) is a film that does not grow dated, or over-familiar. I have seen it dozens of times. Every time I see it, it works; I am drawn into Travis' underworld of alienation, loneliness, haplessness and anger.
It is a widely known item of cinematic lore that Paul Schrader's screenplay for "Taxi Driver" was inspired by "The Searchers," John Ford's 1956 film. In both films, the heroes grow obsessed with "rescuing" women who may not, in fact, want to be rescued. They are like the proverbial Boy Scout who helps the little old lady across the street whether or not she wants to go."
- Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times
“Taxi Driver” is a movie in heat, a raw, tabloid version of “Notes from Underground,” and we stay with the protagonist’s hatreds all the way. This picture is more ferocious than Scorsese’s volatile, allusive “Mean Streets.” “Taxi Driver” has a relentless movement: Travis has got to find relief. It’s a two-character study—Travis versus New York. As Scorsese has designed the film, the city never lets you off the hook. There’s no grace, no compassion in the artificially lighted atmosphere. The neon reds, the vapors that shoot up from the streets, the dilapidation all get to you the way they get to Travis."
- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
Robert De Niro
'Something's Gone Wrong Again' - Buzzcocks
Martin Scorsese seriously considered becoming a Catholic priest and this has always struck me like a biblical story (Paul Schrader had a strict Christian upbringing which I'd like to return to later). The opening credits that emerge from a fog reveal an avant-garde, mini-masterpiece for anybody who loves cruising at night, introducing the aching melancholy of Bernard Herrmann's timeless jazz score which features steaming brass, disorientating harp runs, crawling drum shuffles and militaristic drum rolls. These credits also display a neon element that's crucial to understanding this complex film's splintered vision of New York. Michael Chapman's searing imagery is occasionally shot down by stand-alone images that stick inside your brain; filings and paperwork strewn messily across an office desk, a crumpled banknote on a car seat, a glass fizzing with a soluble aspirin tablet (as effective in its own way as the shaking glass seen in Steven Spielberg's 1993 monster funride 'Jurassic Park').
"Most people who romanticize the sleazy New York of the 1970s, with the grindhouses and live sex shows on The Deuce, the graffiti-caked subway trains, the mountains of garbage, the rats, the junkies, the blackouts, the citywide strikes, the inescapable stench of piss and the rampant street crime, tend to be people who weren’t living here at the time. Their concept of how awesome and post-apocalyptic and punk rock it all was comes mostly from the movies, and slick Hollywood films at that, which have a strange and glorious knack for romanticizing filth. 'The Warriors' (1979), 'Midnight Cowboy' (1969), 'Taxi Driver' (1976), even 'Panic In Needle Park' (1971) make it all seem so cool.
But back then things really were that bad and worse, and New York fairly and honestly earned its reputation as the dirtiest and most dangerous city on earth, a place where people were murdered on the street while the sun was high, and no one gave a damn. Take another listen to Howard Beale’s rant from 'Network' (1976) and you’ll get a solid sense of how most New Yorkers at the time were feeling. They had to wade through garbage and human flotsam just to get to their damn jobs, and there was no guarantee they’d get home that night without someone cracking them over the head with a blackjack.
People were forced to live like animals. Nothing worked, from the subways to the sewers. They had to put up with all the screwheads and dopers, the whole sick, venal crowd Travis Bickle lists in 'Taxi Driver'. The Mayor and the cops didn’t seem to have a clue what to do about any of it, and people were pissed. Ugh, sh*t, and there goes the power again.
It was that specific environment, that not-so-buried sense of burning frustration and gut rage, that gave rise in 1974 to Michael Winner’s 'Death Wish', the story of a middle aged Upper West Side architect who takes it upon himself to rid the streets and the parks of the punks, the hooligans and the ne’er-do-wells who preyed on innocent citizens. It was the film that would cement Charles Bronson as America’s leading action star and leave an indelible mark on the whole culture. But 'Death Wish', as specific and influential as it was, was hardly the beginning."
- Jim Knipfel, Den Of Geek
"For most of the ’70s, there was something fundamentally conservative about American action movies — or, anyway, about non-blaxploitation American action movies. Films like 'Dirty Harry' (1971) and 'Death Wish' (1974) celebrated rebellious types like maverick cops and outside-the-law vigilantes. But all of them were, on a more basic level, fighting for law and order. Harry Callahan and Paul Kersey were heroes for the part of the population confused and angry over the way things were changing — the way kids were dressing and getting high and disrespecting authority. These heroes might’ve been flawed. In the case of a mass murderer like Paul Kersey, they were more than flawed. But they were doing everything they could to keep us from descending into chaos.
Around the time the U.S. pulled its forces out of Vietnam in 1975, something changed. Everybody figured out that chaos was already here. Americans weren’t necessarily heroes anymore. Moviegoers were getting used to the idea that people were lying to them, that the people coming home from Vietnam weren’t the square-jawed heroes that they might’ve imagined. 'Rolling Thunder', from 1977, is a great movie, and that’s partly why it’s the subject of this month’s column. But it’s also here because it’s important in the history of action movies. It’s the first time an American studio action movie really tried to wrestle with the idea of Vietnam, with the idea that some of the people coming home were, on a deep level, damaged."
- Tom Breihan, The A.V. Club
"John Flynn's 'Rolling Thunder' (1977) takes you back to a time when Hollywood still made grown-up medium-budget thrillers like 'Charley Varrick' (1973), 'Mr Majestyk' (1974) or 'Jackson County Jail' (1976). Flynn died in 2007 and never made enough movies; this one reminds us how good he was.
'Rolling Thunder' was written by Paul Schrader and – like Sydney Pollack's 'The Yakuza' (1974), written by Schrader and his brother Leonard – it signposts themes and imagery that would obsess Schrader in his own movies: Vietnam veterans, samurai ethics, and orgasmic explosions of cathartically violent revenge. Oh, and horribly mutilated hands. POWs Rane (William Devane) and Voden (Tommy Lee Jones) return to Texas after years of torture in a Hanoi prison. Rane's wife leaves him and his young son barely knows him. Rewarded by his hometown with a silver dollar for every day of his captivity, Rane is soon robbed of it by four men who kill his family and torture him (severing his hand in the kitchen-sink Dispose-All) to learn the money's whereabouts. Rane – now hook-handed, seething, armed to the teeth and partnered by Jones – spends the rest of the movie exacting his bloody revenge, and it's no less savage today than it seemed 30-odd years ago, climaxing with a pile of corpses in a Juárez whorehouse, as all movies should.
Would it surprise you to learn that Tarantino loves it?
The reason you can discern the outlines of Schrader-to-come is because Flynn clearly listened to the advice of his mentor, producer-director Robert Wise, which was – in the short version at least – that the director serves the script, and subordinates his own creative ego. Equally, in his brisk 1987 thriller 'Best Seller' – about an author-cop who sees a way out of his writer's block via a corporate hitman's psychopathic life story – it's Larry Cohen's cynical, subversive script that registers most strongly, not the stylistics of John Flynn. And in 'Out For Justice' (1991), Flynn leaves the Steven Seagal brand intact; he just supercharges the engine, lets it rip and gives us the only worthwhile Seagal movie apart from Under Siege (1992)."
- John Patterson, The Guardian
Jodie Foster & Harvey Keitel
'Late For The Sky' - Jackson Browne
As a young filmmaker, Martin Scorsese was inspired by a new style of French filmmaking when he came to make his monochrome debut 'Who's That Knocking At My Door' (1967), a picture partially shot in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Scorsese drew from his love of Swedish and Danish cinema when making the crime drama 'Boxcar Bertha' (1972) and a clear Italian influence came through most strongly with the crime picture 'Mean Streets' (1973). I think 'Taxi Driver' returns Scorsese to the French influence that helped launch his career in cinema. The "nouvelle vague" film movement, as it came to be known, utilised a range of tricky techniques that concentrated the camera in urgent street spaces, taking French cinema out on location without permits. The directors involved experimented freely with slow-motion and differing track speeds, jump cuts and montage, at times cross-cutting clues and ideas more than actual events. Observe the assemblage of shots used to construct Travis' taxicab interaction with Scorsese himself in 'Taxi Driver', a sequence I feel stems from the work of this mid-century French film revolution.
"Of the tens of thousands of reviews that comprise the “Guide,” Leonard Maltin reckons he has gotten the most flack over “Taxi Driver” (two stars) and “Blade Runner” (1½-stars). In the case of “Taxi Driver,” he did go back years later and allow that the film was “‘undeniably influential’ to reflect that it was my aberrant opinion,” he said. But for the most part, the reviews stand. “I don’t have a lot of time to revisit old movies,” he said. “I’m too busy watching new ones. But the most dramatic example I can give is ‘Alien.’ I’m a wimp, and when it first came out, it scared the hell out of me. I found it too upsetting so I gave it a review that reflected that. Twenty-five years later, Ridley Scott tweaked it and reissued it theatrically. When I saw it again, I thought it was masterful and I completely changed the review to three-and-a-half stars.”
The “Guide” has also never been swayed by a film’s cult status. Thus, two stars for “Caddyshack” (“People love it, I know, I know”) and two-and-a-half for “The Big Lebowski” (“which I was never crazy about”). But he takes pride in being listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for writing the shortest movie review. A reader submitted Maltin’s take on the 1948 film, “Isn’t it Romantic.” Maltin’s review, in full: “No.”
- Donald Liebenson, 'Interview : Leonard Maltin's Final Guide Marks The End Of An Era'
"Like Robert Altman’s 'Nashville', 'Taxi Driver' had a dark political significance in that bicentennial year of 1976. Palatine’s slogan is “We are the people.” It was only on this viewing that I noticed the posters for his opponent: Goodwin, whose slogan is the familiar-sounding “A Return To Greatness”. The visual mastery of 'Taxi Driver' is still gripping, particularly the fixed camera shots on the side of the cab, and the vérité scenes in the real mean streets themselves. Robert De Niro’s two dialogue scenes with Jodie Foster and Cybill Shepherd are superb."
- Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“For years I was thinking where Travis Bickle would be today and we spoke to Marty Scorsese about it and Paul Schrader came up with something. But it never worked out. I think there may be something interesting in what happened to him, but we couldn’t find the right thing.”
- Robert De Niro, Collider
Martin Scorsese, Albert Brooks & Cybill Shepherd
'What A Difference A Day Makes' - Dinah Washington
I think 'Taxi Driver' is a desert island film, an important film. Its influence can be seen in crime films like Luc Besson's 'Leon' (1994), Quentin Tarantino's 'Pulp Fiction' (1994), Gaspar Noe's 'I Stand Alone' (1998) and Neil Jordan's 'The Brave One' (2007). It makes me chuckle that Travis Bickle asks a personnel officer (played by Joe Spinell) what "moonlighting" means as Cybill Shepherd would go on to star in the tv smash 'Moonlighting' in the 1980s.
'Taxi Driver' was awarded the Palme D'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival. It's been ranked among the top 5 films of all time in a global directors poll conducted by 'Sight & Sound'. The film was considered "culturally, historically or aesthetically" significant by the US Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 1994.
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1957 - 1962 : 6 Years That Changed Cinema
'Handsome Serge' (1958, Le Beau Serge) - Claude Chabrol writes, produces and directs this naturalistic drama about relationships that's shot in Sardent. He then directed a sister movie, 'The Cousins' (1959, Les cousins).
'The Sign Of Leo' (filmed in 1959 but only released in 1962, Le Signe du Lion) - Eric Rohmer writes and directs this feature film about chance and fate that's produced by Claude Chabrol. In 1957, Rohmer had co-authored a book with Chabrol on Alfred Hitchcock's films. Rohmer had also directed the short film 'Berenice' (1954). This picture is often seen as atypical of Rohmer's output (though some motifs appear). For example, he uses an intermittent music score to soundtrack this tale of a composer.
'The 400 Blows' (1959, Les Quatre Cents Coups) - Francois Truffaut begins making a series of films centred around the character Antoine Doinel (played by Jean-Pierre Leaud) with this semi-autobiographical work written with Marcel Moussy. It's edited by Marie-Josephe Yoyotte who also cut 'The Sign Of Leo' for Eric Rohmer. Truffaut met with Alfred Hitchcock for recorded interviews in 1962. Truffaut had made several short films before this, beginning with 'A Visit' (1955). In addition to honouring the early pioneers of French silent cinema in 'The 400 Blows', Truffaut includes a visual nod to the work of Polish pioneers Kazimierz Proszynski and Boleslaw Matuszewski who spent time in Paris.
'Breathless' (1960, À bout de souffle) - Jean-Luc Godard directs an experimental crime drama doused in the imagery of classic film noir. Godard's script is based on an original treatment by Francois Truffaut and Claude Chabrol. Godard had made several short films before this, beginning with 'A Flirtatious Woman' (1955).
'Paris Belongs To Us' (1961, Paris nous appartient) - Jacques Rivette directs this mystery set in Paris in 1957. It's co-produced by Claude Chabrol. Rivette had been directing short films since the late 1940s.
'You Never Knew Me' - Magazine
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When Paul Schrader Met Wes Craven : Tales Of A New York Taxi Driver From Ohio
Wes Craven was born and raised in a part of the American midwest that's not too far from the east coast, Cleveland, Ohio. His father was a Baptist Minister and his family prohibited him from watching films. At the end of the 1960s, Craven worked the night shift as a taxi driver in New York to support his young family. He then worked his way up through the editing rooms of a post-production film building where he was stationed on a floor full of documentary filmmakers including D.A. Pennebaker who recorded the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival in 'Monterey Pop' (1968). Pennebaker would later shoot for Wim Wenders who would one day put Craven up in his flat. An accomplished guitarist, Craven was first taught to cut and edit by musician Harry Chapin who encouraged young musical artists like Bruce Springsteen and Pat Benatar. Martin Scorsese was one of the editors of 'Woodstock' (1970) which documented the Woodstock Festival of 1969 and he would go on to make the concert film 'The Last Waltz' (1978).
Paul Schrader was raised by strict Calvinist parents and movies were forbidden in his family's home. He grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he was a member of the Christian Reformed Church. Schrader has said the first movie he ever saw was 'The Absent-Minded Professor' (1961) which left him feeling disappointed.
On March 10, 1995 came the culminating evening of a UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television symposium entitled 'The Aesthetics Of Violence'. Melnitz Theater was packed for a discussion panel comprising writer-director Wes Craven, writer-director Paul Schrader and feminist film scholars Carol J. Clover ('Men, Women And Chainsaws') and Linda Williams ('Hard Core'). The audience witnessed both men being grilled over their ferocious, ultraviolent film creations by two of the most powerful feminists operating within the arena of film theory. These two men came from the strictest of religious backgrounds yet composed coruscating studies of violence with strong literary content.
"That certainly wasn't how people reacted back in 1972, when Wes Craven and his producing partner, Sean Cunningham (who later spawned the money-spinning Friday the 13th franchise), released their violent and pessimistic rape-and-revenge debut horror outing, 'Last House on the Left'. The audiences were almost as scary as the movie: "Yeah, it was crazy. Heart attacks, people crying, kids throwing up, people even attacking projection booths and tearing up prints. We had to set up a whole editing office just to restore our prints, because every one would come back chopped up by theatre owners." Danny Peary, in his 1982 survey Cult Movies, recalls with rather sniffy distaste seeing 'Last House on the Left' on its first release, with an apparently rabid audience that loudly cheered the film's many scenes of violent mayhem, including indoor chainsaw battles.
You'd never think that the film's writer-director started life as the working-class product of a deeply fundamentalist, Baptist household, or that he only saw his first movie in his final year of college, at the age of 24, risking expulsion for it. He attended Wheaton College in Illinois, "which had the same strictures - no moviegoing, no dancing, no card-playing, no drinking - that I grew up with. I risked being expelled, but hitchhiked to a town that was, like, two towns away to see 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. I said to myself, I could be expelled for seeing, oh, wait a minute, this film? That kind of did it for me and organised religion."
Craven is an admirer of 'The Exorcist', but he has never made an overtly religious horror movie. Does his childhood, which he has described as "not happy", insinuate itself into his movies in other ways? "I don't think you can be inculcated that way and not have it banging around some place. Even when the beliefs go out the window, the issues remain. If anything, religion of any sort is a way of looking for meaning beyond just the trivial or the self-serving, for whatever's out there that's bigger than us. It teaches you to ask the larger questions. So in that sense, it's still important. But in pretty much every other way, religion just ruined my life."
Craven is still glad he discovered cinema just when it was reaching its postwar peak, a dozen new masterpieces appearing every month during the 1960s, when he was teaching English literature in college. "Bergman! Fellini! Dick Lester! Something new and amazing every week! God, it was fantastic then." He was impressed enough to filch the plot of Bergman's 'The Virgin Spring' for 'Last House on the Left', a wonderfully cheeky instance of cultural appropriation. "Ah, but remember," says Craven, ever the prof, "Bergman stole it first - from the medieval minstrels." Craven's movies have always been political."
- John Patterson, The Guardian
Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader & Michael Phillips
Wesley Earl Craven
'Taxi' - Harry Chapin
"I was there in Cannes with Marty [Scorsese] and [Francis] Coppola. Then [Rainer Werner] Fassbinder came by with somebody. Then Sergio Leone came by. I remember thinking, wow! This is the f*cking greatest thing I've ever been at in my life. Here I am with all these movie gods, sitting on the terrace discussing movies in the middle of the night in the Mediterranean."
- Paul Schrader
