Taxi Driver (1976) — 40 Years Later… A Look Back at Martin Scorsese’s Classic
If “Mean Streets” was Marty’s breakthrough, “Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore” turned him into a Hollywood player, but “Taxi Driver” was the movie that announced his permanent Iconic stature…
Martin Scorsese’s Greatest Film To Date — “Taxi Driver”
Taxi Driver — is easily the most popular Martin Scorsese film among fans and moviegoers, the film that turned Marty into a ‘Cinema Icon’ — but it is also the most darkly disturbing DeNiro-leading-Scorsese-directed film when it comes to depictions of violence on screen. While the action is staged in the chaotic, unorganised way that Scorsese is known for, it is rendered in exaggerated form. Bullet wounds don’t just cause bleeding — they cause profuse bleeding. Hands don’t just absorb a gunshot– they blow apart into millions of pieces. It’s not enough to kill somebody with a single shot — it takes several. Indeed, it’s because of Taxi Driver’s bloodbath finale that Scorsese found himself having to deal with real censorship for the first time. To avoid an X rating that would doom the film before it was ever released, he had to desaturate the colours during the climax so the blood wouldn’t be so bright and red.
It’s hard to imagine anyone else but Scorsese directing the 1976’s classic and in retrospect, anybody else but Robert De Niro playing the iconic lead — “Travis Bickle,” a deranged, socially isolated cab driver with delusions of grandeur. He delivers that famous line while preparing to assassinate a fictional presidential candidate. Although — spoiler alert — he comes up short, Bickle winds up becoming a celebrated, crime-fighting vigilante in a dark, ironic twist.
On Scorsese’s perspectives, the film, its subject matter falls in line so squarely with his aesthetic fascinations that one could be forgiven he wrote the screenplay from his own idea. There’s the New York setting (The original script, which was written by Paul Schrader placed the action in Los Angeles), the unflinching portrayal of seedy urban life and the use of antiheroes and/or criminals as protagonists. Taxi Driver takes this latter point to its ironic conclusion, with the media hailing Travis as a hero after a violent rampage that leaves Sport and his colleagues dead, whereas if he’d only been a little more organised in his earlier assassination attempt of Presidential candidate Palantine, he’d be condemned as a villain. While Travis does not share the Roman Catholic heritage of previous Scorsese protagonists, his inner convictions take on a somewhat religious bent and provide him with an almost biblical desire to purge the city of filth and sin.
I’ve always believed that great art is born from a place of deprivation. The state of needing something — love, companionship, comfort, etc. — can result in greater urgency and intensity on behalf of the person expressing an idea. Conversely, some of the banales, meaningless art come from a place of complacency — simply collecting a paycheck. One of the most influential films of the 1970’s, director Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976), was born of deep, existential deprivation. Writer Paul Schrader wrote the screenplay during a very turbulent time in his life that saw a series of escalating mishaps turn him into something of a recluse. Inspired by his interior monologue and self-perceived outsider status, Schrader fashioned a story about an everyday taxi driver as a study of pathological loneliness. The script was picked up by producers Julie and Michael Phillips and was separately brought to the attention of Scorsese by his filmmaking contemporary Brian DePalma. By this point, Scorsese had a handful of successful features under his belt and was teaching film at his alma mater, New York University. He strongly responded to the script, and actively campaigned for the job. It was only after his Mean Streets 1973) star, Robert De Niro, won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his role as the young Vito Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather: Part II(1974) that Scorsese was able to leverage his collaboration with the actor into landing the job. Taxi Driver would become a transformative project for both men, propelling them to the forefront of the contemporary cinema scene with a bold piece of work that would define not only its decade but an entire generation.
Today, its reputation as a classic is basically secure: After scoring four Oscar nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor (De Niro), and Best Supporting Actress (Jodie Foster), Taxi Driver has spent the last 40 years crawling its way toward the top of cinephile best-of lists. Last year, it clocked in at №31 in the decennial Sight & Sound poll of the greatest movies ever made. And in 2009, Film Comment contributors voted it the single greatest Palme D’Or winner ever — a vindication, given how it was first greeted at Cannes. Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 99% based on reviews from 68 critics; the site’s consensus states: “A must-see film for movie lovers, this Martin Scorsese masterpiece is as hard-hitting as it is compelling, with Robert De Niro at his best.” Metacritic gives the film a score of 93 out of 100, based on reviews from 8 critics, indicating “universal acclaim.” While Roger Ebert instantly praised it as one of the greatest films he had ever seen, giving the film a perfect 4/4 rating. Furthermore, Taxi Driver topped the list of the “100 greatest movies set in New York City” a poll conducted by Timeout Magazine earlier this year.
Yet for all the accolades Taxi Driver has accrued over the years, it remains a divisive movie — not in spite of, but because of its enduring popularity. Simply put, this is one of those films that people find difficult to separate from its fan base. After all, one of its most famous devotees was a would-be political assassin: John Hinckley Jr., who attempted to kill Ronald Reagan in 1981, harbored an obsession with Jodie Foster — the actress who plays the teenage prostitute in this cult classic — and claims to have devised his plot as an attempt to impress her, perhaps hoping to become a Bickle-like media celebrity.
(Scorsese was supposedly informed of Hinckley’s fandom at the 1981 Oscars, moments after he lost Best Director to Robert Redford, and was so disturbed by the knowledge that he briefly considered quitting filmmaking.)
A Terrifyingly Realistic Portrayal of the City of New York Through the Eyes of a Troubled Cab Driver…
“Taxi Driver” was released in February of 1976. America was a country with a deeply wounded psyche at the time. The President was Gerald Ford, who had been Richard Nixon’s Vice President throughout the Watergate scandal. The sentencings of Nixon’s White House aides, along with John Mitchell, the former Attorney General of the United States, were not even 12 months removed. The summer prior, America had lost a war for the first time. The country watched as Saigon fell, and people scrambled to abandon the US Embassy.
America needed a hero. Instead, Martin Scorsese gave us an anti-hero: Travis Bickle…
After eventually being offered the role by Martin Scorsese, De Niro was busy filming 1900 in Italy. However, every break from filming he’d get, he’d fly to New York and, having actually obtained his cab driver’s license, worked 12-hour shifts until returning to Italy to resume filming. Having already won an Oscar for his work on The Godfather Part II, he would occasionally be recognised. Stories include De Niro once telling a passenger, “Well, that’s acting. One year the Oscar, the next you’re driving a cab!” When not flying back to New York City to moonlight as a cab driver, he’d spend downtime in Italy listening to taped recordings of Arthur Bremer’s diary, the man who’d shot presidential candidate George Wallace in 1972, who is a noted influence for the character. He would also visit an army base in Northern Italy where he’d befriend a group of U.S. soldiers who were from the Midwest. De Niro studied their accents, their mannerisms, and way of dress, all of which became part of De Niro’s portrait of Bickle.
We’re introduced to Travis Bickle as he applies for a job driving a taxi. And how’s his driving record?
“It’s clean, real clean. Like my conscience.” — Travis Bickle;
Bickle was a Marine who received his honourable discharge in 1973. Given the timing, it’s an easy conclusion to leap to that he served in Vietnam. Yet, I’m cautious with that… I feel if Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader had wanted to make a movie that spoke to the plight of Vietnam vets, they’d have given the viewer more to work with in that regard.
What we DO know about Travis is that he can’t sleep. He can’t sleep, and he’ll work anytime, anywhere. What we don’t realise yet is that Bickle wants to fill his time with work because he has nothing better to do. Since he can’t sleep nights, he’s been riding around the city on the subways and buses… just killing time.
“Loneliness has followed me my whole life. Everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.” — Travis Bickle;
He’s lonely, he’s isolated. He has too much time on his hands.
One of the reasons he gets the job is because he doesn’t mind working nights, and he’s not afraid of taking the fares that take him into the dangerous parts of the city. He’s in a cab in short order, and we’re introduced to the second major character in the movie, the film’s setting, the city of New York.
The cab flows through the veins of the city like a corpuscle. Through Bickle’s rain-soaked windshield, the lights of the city night blur into a painting in motion. The saxophone pours the main theme’s plaintive, lonely, jazzy moan and there are times -when he first starts hacking — that it’s tempting to romanticise the city.
But this is not a romanticised view of anything. Instead, Scorsese gives us the dark heart of the city. Bickle’s world is inhabited by prostitutes and pimps, gun dealers and drug dealers. Gangs. Murderers. Scum. Filth. They’re his fares, they get in his cab. Each night he has to wipe the cab free of bodily fluids. He sees it all. Like being on a constant tour of famous crime scenes, without the fame, Bickle is taken around the city and through the perverse passion play that unfolds on its sidewalks night after night after night.
It’s no wonder that Betsy appears to be an angel to him.
Taxi Driver immortalizes New York City in the 1970s, a city vastly different from the New York we know today. The city’s filth is exaggerated in the film partly because it is seen through Travis Bickle’s skewed perspective, but during 1975, when the movie was filmed, New York was literally a filthy city. New York nearly filed for bankruptcy in 1974, so when the New York City trash collectors went on strike in the summer of 1975, causing the streets to fill with warm garbage, the city didn’t have the funds to fix the problem. One of the promises Jimmy Carter made when campaigning for the presidency, which he won in 1976, was that he would make sure New York City wouldn’t have to file for bankruptcy. Taxi Driver presents a true-to-life portrait of what Manhattan once was. Times Square was filled with peep shows and prostitutes, and during the summer of 1975, when the film takes place, the country was in the middle of a presidential campaign where one of the main issues was moving beyond the Vietnam War, which had officially ended only in 1973. One can easily imagine an ex-marine in New York being disgusted by the filth, finding the politicians who are supposed to help him to be artificial, and feeling that he needs to approach the city as he would a special combat mission.
“You talkin’ to me?”
“You talkin’ to me?” — The phrase has entered the pop-culture lexicon, so familiar it is. As Bickle stands in front of the mirror, clad in an Army jacket, threatening his unseen foes with the gun up his sleeve, Taxi Driver hits a disturbing peak because we know exactly where Bickle is coming from. You talkin’ to me?! Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader created one of the sorriest, scariest, messed-up muthers in the history of cinema. And while he starts off relatively normal (i.e. he seems able to coexist with the rest of society), during the course of the film he becomes a blood-crazed psychopath. His murderous rampage is a troubling, violent climax to his story (before he seemingly, amazingly comes full circle), but it’s the middle ground between “normal” and “insane” that is the most memorable moment from Taxi Driver. The phrase actually comes from Bruce Springsteen, as De Niro saw him say the line onstage at a concert as fans were screaming his name, and decided to make the line his own in this film. 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.
Earlier this year, Robert De Niro wasted no time in giving his fans what they wanted at Thursday night’s 40th-anniversary screening of Taxi Driver at the Tribeca film festival in New York. “Every day for 40 f*cking years,” he said in introducing the film, “at least one of you has come up to me and said — what do you think — ‘You talkin’ to me?’”
Despite his character’s severely isolated nature, De Niro stressed that he “never had any existential discussions” with Scorsese before agreeing to take on the role. And as for the infamous mohawk hairstyle, Bickle adopts before the carnage begins, De Niro revealed that he never, in fact, shaved his head for the film.
“I was about to do The Last Tycoon after, and my hair was all bushy,” said De Niro. “We decided to have [makeup artist] Dick Smith do a test, and it worked.”
“I remember I was in the other room, and I had fallen asleep while we were working on your mohawk, and I just dozed off for a moment, and I felt a tap on my shoulder. I opened my eyes and you were there with this thing,” Scorsese recalled, seated next to De Niro. “It was terrifying.”
(The Quotes were taken from the Interview from last year’s Tribeca film festival season time when the cast and crew behind the 1976 classic reunited at the to discuss violence, the mohawk and the film’s most famous line with The Guardian)
Scorsese meanwhile admitted that he never thought Taxi Driver was a film people wanted to see, explaining it was the passion that drove him to make it. When he first read Schrader’s script, the film-maker was in post-production on his first collaboration with De Niro, Mean Streets, and looking ahead to Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore.
De Niro/Scorsese Collaboration
“Legacy”
“Taxi Driver” lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting “Rocky” but its legacy is far beyond than any other film’s reach, especially other films of that sub-genre and is still unmatched. Anchored by De Niro’s disturbing embodiment of “God’s lonely man,” it remains a striking milestone of both Scorsese’s career and 1970s Hollywood. It won worldwide critical acclaim upon its release and is still highly regarded to this day. It came in at #47 on AFI’s 100 Years… 100 Films, and remained in the same general vicinity ten years later (#52) when the tenth-anniversary edition was released. Bickle’s quote, “Are you talkin’ to me?” made at #10 on their list of the top 100 movie quotes of all time, and Bickle himself came in at #30 on their list of 100 Years… 100 Heroes and Villains.
On the “Villains” side. Of course, artists should rarely (if ever) be held responsible for how madmen interpret their work. But there’s no denying that Travis Bickle, so ferociously embodied by Robert De Niro, has become something of a pop-culture icon — an outlaw anti-hero, immortalised on dorm-room posters and through the transformation of his psychotic bedroom soliloquies (“You talkin’ to me?”) into oft-quoted catchphrases. If the legacy of Taxi Driver is the ionisation of a murderous bigot, then maybe Williams was right to be reluctant about handing it an award. The million-dollar question, to which there may not be a satisfactory answer, is whether the movie is accidentally fascist or just widely misunderstood. Is Bickle’s nihilism so persuasively conveyed that it ends up sounding like a kind of gospel, not the ravings of a lunatic?
On the other hand, much has been made about Taxi Driver as a political film, and there’s little doubt that Bickle is intended as an embodiment of American disillusionment — the angry voice of an angry nation, post-Vietnam and Watergate. But Bickle’s fury is not constructive, it’s misdirected: “I don’t know much about politics,” he tells Senator Palantine (Leonard Harris), the presidential candidate he’ll later plot to assassinate. And indeed, the politician becomes his target, not because of any specific agenda he promotes, but because Betsy — the girl who snubbed Bickle earlier in the film — is working on the man’s campaign. Mostly, Bickle just lumps all of his imaginary rivals into one category, blaming “whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies” for ruining his city. There’s also a racial angle to his animosity, with Bickle sharing several long, cold stares with the black men he encounters during his nightly odysseys. To see this misfit as a hero — any kind of hero — one basically has to share his prejudices. He’s the antithesis of the counterculture, acting on behalf of only himself and his own hang-ups. Did it deserve to win? Sadly, I’ve only seen a small handful of titles from the 1976 competition slate. But it has to be Taxi Driver, doesn’t it? Problematic or not, Scorsese’s film has a power — a combined force of performance, atmosphere, and directorial verve — that can’t be ignored. It’s an unforgettable movie. Less worthy, perhaps, but still very worthwhile: Roman Polanski’s creepy-funny apartment thriller, The Tenant, a great companion piece to his Repulsion and Rosemary’s Baby; and Wim Wenders’ Kings Of The Road, another of the German director’s loose, poetic travelogues and a fine tribute to ancient movie houses. I’d have to see the majority of the other contenders to know for sure, but Taxi Driver seems in retrospect like a no-brainer.
Apparently De Niro was on board for a sequel. Thank God for the rain that helped wash that garbage from our screens before it ever got made.
Forty years on… Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver still thrives collectively in public consciousness.
Originally written by Asif Ahsan Khan and published at hubpages.com. Read the full version at here.
