Jump to content

Taxi Driver

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 65.93.214.232 (talk) at 05:25, 26 August 2006 (→Analysis). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.
For other uses, see Taxi Driver (disambiguation).
Taxi Driver
File:Taxi Driver poster.JPG
IMDB 8.5/10 (62,435 votes)
top 250: #36
Directed byMartin Scorsese
Written byPaul Schrader
Produced byJulia Phillips & Michael Phillips
StarringRobert De Niro
Jodie Foster
Harvey Keitel
Cybill Shepherd
Peter Boyle
Albert Brooks
CinematographyMichael Chapman
Edited byTom Rolf
Melvin Shapiro
Music byBernard Herrmann
Distributed byColumbia Pictures
Release dates
February 8, 1976
Running time
113 min.
LanguageEnglish

Taxi Driver is a 1976 American motion picture drama directed by Martin Scorsese. It is widely considered one of the greatest and most controversial films in the history of American cinema and frequently praised for its strong performances and gritty realism. The film also made stars out of both its lead actors, Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, the latter of whom was only thirteen years old when the movie was released.

The famed Bernard Herrmann, who is noted for his work with Alfred Hitchcock (especially Psycho), scored Taxi Driver. The soundtrack was the last one he completed prior to his death, before the film was released. Taxi Driver was dedicated to his memory.

Taglines:

  • On every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody.
  • He's a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove that he's alive.

Primary cast

Plot summary

Template:Spoiler Travis Bickle (De Niro) is an alienated, isolated, depressed and sexually frustrated young man of 26 from the Midwest, who says he was a Marine in the Vietnam War. He suffers from chronic insomnia and consequently takes a job as a nighttime taxi driver in New York City. Travis spends his spare time watching pornography in seedy porn theaters and driving around aimlessly through the shadiest neighborhoods of Manhattan.

Travis is horrified by what he considers the moral decay around him, and when Iris (Foster), a 12½ year-old prostitute, gets in his cab one night to escape her pimp, Travis becomes obsessed with saving her despite her complete lack of interest in the idea, explaining that she was "stoned" when she tried to escape, and that her pimp, Matthew a.k.a "Sport" (Keitel), appears to be a kind and caring person. He tries to convince her to return home to her parents and go back to school, but his efforts to "save her" are futile.

Travis is also obsessed with Betsy (Shepherd), an aide for New York State Senator Charles Palantine, who is running for the presidential nomination and is promising dramatic social change. She is initially intrigued by Travis and agrees to a date with him after he flirts with her and sympathizes with her own apparent loneliness. On the date, however, Travis takes her to a pornographic film (Kärlekens Språk), and she leaves him, disturbed.

File:Taxi Driver still 1.jpg
Robert De Niro and Cybill Shepherd

Taxi Driver has a number of other disturbing scenes reflecting both Travis' worsening mental condition and the seedier side of New York City. Travis purchases four handguns from an energetic black market "travelling salesman" named Easy Andy. Another scene features an insanely heart-broken businessman in the back of Travis' cab (played by Scorsese in a last-minute substitution) explaining to Travis how he wishes to kill his wife, who is playing around with a paramour. Travis happens across a robbery at a convenience store where he is a regular customer, then shoots the would-be robber. The store clerk then proceeds to beat the robber's dead (or dying) body in full view of any passersby. Travis writes a letter to his parents, claiming to be involved in "sensitive" government work; he also reports to them that he is dating Betsy. Obviously desperate, Travis tries to express his frustration to Wizard (Boyle), an older more experienced cabbie, telling Wizard "I got some bad ideas in my head" and that he feels like "doing something big"; not comprehending, Wizard tries to relate from his experience, but can ultimately only suggest that Travis should "get laid, get drunk" and not "worry so much."

The film's most famous scene may be when Travis is practicing his quick-draw technique and rehearsing a speech he'll deliver if confronted: "You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin' to? You talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here." This scene had not been scripted, it only read "Travis looks in a mirror", but De Niro decided to ad-lib the lines to fit Travis' cockiness and swagger. Scorsese liked it so much that he kept it in.

File:Taxi Driver still 5.jpg
"You talkin' to me?" Alone in his apartment, Travis postures and practices his moves in front of the mirror

Travis then plans to assassinate Senator Palantine at a public rally. When he is spotted by Secret Servicemen and flees, Travis desperately drives uptown and shoots Iris's pimp Sport (Keitel), before storming into the brothel and brutally killing the bouncer, the wounded Sport (who has followed Bickle), and Iris's customer. Iris escapes the bloodshed, as Travis is shot by a man he soon kills.

Travis appears to be dying from a bullet wound to the neck in Iris' room, suffered in the fight, but then attempts suicide with his handgun. When this fails (the weapon is empty) and, once the police enter, Travis raises a bloody index finger to his head and pretends to shoot himself. A slow-motion overhead tracking shot moves out of the room and examines his path of violence, moving over blood stains, dead bodies, down the steps and outside to the crowd of police and curiosity seekers swarming outside.

A brief epilogue of sorts ends the film and shows Travis recuperating in the hospital and receives a letter from Iris' parents who thank him for saving their daughter, and the media hails him a hero for saving her and ending the drug dealing in Manhattan. Betsy climbs into Travis' cab, and comments on his "saving" Iris and Travis' own media fame, yet Travis denies being any sort of hero. This curious ending has inspired some debate as to its meaning and interpretation; see below.

Analysis

File:Taxi Driver still 2.jpg
Jodie Foster as "Iris"

The climactic shoot-out was, for its era, intensely graphic, and retains much of its visceral impact today. To attain an "R" rating, Scorsese desaturated the colors, making the brightly-colored blood less prominent. In later interviews, Scorsese commented that he was actually pleased by the color change and he considered it an improvement over the originally filmed scene, which has been lost. However, in the special edition DVD, Michael Chapman, the film's cinematographer, regrets the decision and the fact that no print with the unmuted colours exists anymore.

Some critics expressed concern over young Jodie Foster's presence during the climactic shoot-out scene. However, in the documentary Making "Taxi Driver" (included in the DVD release of the movie), Foster stated that she was present during the setup and staging of the special effects used during the scene; the entire process was explained and demonstrated for her, step by step. Rather than being upset or traumatized, Foster said, she was fascinated and entertained by the behind-the-scenes preparation that went into the scene.

Regarding the film's epilogue, some have seen this epilogue as Travis' dying fantasy, while others see it as a real resolution of Travis' acts. As Betsy departs his cab, Travis drives away, and a curious ring sounds as Travis quickly adjusts his mirror, before the credit roll on the background of the bright and distorted city lights seen from the cab's perspective. Director Scorsese comments on Travis' final moments in the DVD, mentioning that this "mirror glance" could be a symbol that Travis might fall into depression and violent rage once again in the future, although it is still open to interpretation like the ending of The Wizard of Oz. This has been compared to Stanley Kubrick's film Clockwork Orange, in which Malcolm McDowell's Alex DeLarge seems to revert to his old, sociopathic self at the end: "I was cured, all right."

Roger Ebert has written of the film's ending, "There has been much discussion about the ending, in which we see newspaper clippings about Travis's 'heroism' of saving Iris, and then Betsy gets into his cab and seems to give him admiration instead of her earlier disgust. Is this a fantasy scene? Did Travis survive the shoot-out? Are we experiencing his dying thoughts? Can the sequence be accepted as literally true? ... I am not sure there can be an answer to these questions. The end sequence plays like music, not drama: It completes the story on an emotional, not a literal, level. We end not on carnage but on redemption, which is the goal of so many of Scorsese's characters."

It was noted by some critics: Travis's first acts of violence were premeditated murder and, whether or not he saved Iris or the men he killed "deserved it," he would have been prosecuted. Therefore, all scenes after the arrival of the police must be fantasy. Additionally, one of the men he shot wasn't even armed.

However, James Berardinelli is his review of the film, argues for a literal ending stating - "Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader append the perfect conclusion to Taxi Driver. Steeped in irony, the five-minute epilogue underscores the vagaries of fate. The media builds Travis into a hero, when, had he been a little quicker drawing his gun against Senator Palantine, he would have been reviled as an assassin. As the film closes, the misanthrope has been embraced as the model citizen -- someone who takes on pimps, drug dealers, and mobsters to save one little girl"[1]

Greil Marcus, in an interview in The Believer (June/July 2006, p. 78), said that Martin Scorsese told him that the first half of his movie Taxi Driver was based on Van Morrison's album Astral Weeks.

Critical response

Taxi Driver was a financial success and was nominated for several Academy Awards and received honors at the Cannes Film Festival. In later years, the film was ranked #47 on the American Film Institute's list of "100 Years, 100 Movies", and #22 on its "100 Years, 100 Thrills". It is consistently in the top 50 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films, and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry. Roger Ebert has added Taxi Driver to his list of "Great Movies."

Some critics have argued Taxi Driver is perhaps the first film to address--however indirectly--the impact of the Vietnam War on soldiers who fought in the conflict. If we accept his word that he was a U.S. Marine then it is possible that Travis is suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder [2], a condition that was brought to major attention by the condition of some veterans of that conflict and later included in the DSM-III. More subtly, Travis' spartan lifestyle and choice of poorly-paid, dead-end employment is evocative of the experiences of many war veterans suffering from this condition and the perception that veterans who have a mental or physical disability are disowned and inadequately compensated by society or the government. A broader interpretation would point to the repercussions of severe solitude and alienation coupled with the propensity to blame one's inner demons on the more visible representation of what one may think is wrong with society, and the paths that may lead to the eventually homicidal actions of a person.

The film includes a subtle reference to US military operations in Vietnam. When Travis determines to assassinate Senator Palantine, he cuts his hair into a mohawk. This detail was suggested by actor Victor Magnotta, a friend of Scorsese's who had a small role as a Secret Service agent, and who had served in Vietnam. Scorsese later noted that Magnotta had "talked about certain types of soldiers going into the jungle. They cut their hair in a certain way; looked like a mohawk ... and you knew that was a special situation, a commando kind of situation, and people gave them wide berths ... we thought it was a good idea."

Award wins

File:Taxi Driver still 3.jpg
Director Martin Scorsese in his cameo role, with De Niro

Award nominations

Influence

File:Cap038 travis.jpg
Travis stalks the Senator

John Hinckley, Jr.

Taxi Driver was reportedly part of a delusional fantasy on the part of John Hinckley, Jr. which triggered his attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, an act for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. His stated reason was that the act was an attempt to impress Jodie Foster by mimicking Travis' mohawked appearance at the Palantine rally.

Quotes

Wikiquote has quotations related to Taxi Driver.
  • 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.
  • Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.
  • I first saw her at Palantine Campaign headquarters at 63rd and Broadway. She was wearing a white dress. She appeared like an angel. Out of this filthy mess, she is alone.
    They...cannot...touch...her.
  • June twenty-ninth. I gotta get in shape now. Too much sitting has ruined my body. Too much abuse has gone on for too long. From now on it'll be fifty pushups each morning. Fifty pull-ups. There will be no more pills, no more bad food... no more destroyers of my body. From now on it'll be total organization. Every muscle must be tight.
  • You talkin' to me? You talkin' to me? Then who the hell else are you talkin'-- You talkin' to me? Well I'm the only one here. Who the fuck do you think you're talking to?
  • Listen, you fuckers, you screw-heads. Here is a man who would not take it anymore. A man who stood up against the scum, the cunts, the dogs, the filth, the shit. Here is a man who stood up. Here is.
  • I had black coffee and apple pie with a slice of melted yellow cheese. I think that was a good selection.

Trivia

  • The only scene that doesn't feature Travis is the one between Sport and Iris talking in her room. This was added late into production.
  • Paul Schrader has said that his main influence for Taxi Driver was the diary of would-be George Wallace assassin Arthur Bremer. Bremer's writings, published under the title An Assassin's Diary fascinated Schrader during a period of time when he found himself recently divorced and living in his car. Another influence Schrader acknowledges is the film The Searchers starring John Wayne. In it, a war veteran comes home to find that his young niece has been kidnapped by a band of Comanche Indians. Ethan (John Wayne) embarks on an obsessive quest to bring her back, completely ignoring her own feelings on the matter. This influence is directly evident in the latter part of the film when Travis attempts to rescue Iris from Sport. Coincidentally, Sport at one point calls Travis a "cowboy" and during their final confrontation Sport's attire resembles that of a stereotyped Native American.
  • The last film to use the classic Columbia Pictures logo.
  • The original source of inspiration for Bickle as a Midwestern loner in a large city, was an earlier chapter of Schrader's own life. After Schrader's divorce and breakup of a following relationship, he spent some time being a drifter as a failed film critic with few friends and not doing much except for frequenting Los Angeles' pornographic cinemas. It has also been suggested that part of the motivation for the screenplay was garnered from the motivation Schrader internalized of the urban decay in the late 60's and early 70's that took place in Schrader's hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan.
  • In the original screenplay, Sport was black, as were other minor characters; Scorsese thought that this would make the film appear to be racist, and they were changed to white roles. There is still a strong undercurrent of racial tension, however; black characters are referred to as "spooks," "jungle bunnies," "niggers," and other racial pejoratives throughout the film; a mostly black neighborhood is called "Mau Mau land"; and Travis often exchanges hostile stares with black men.
  • Brian De Palma was originally lined up to direct, but the producers were dragged to a private screening of Mean Streets (1973) (Robert De Niro and Martin Scorsese's previous collaboration) before they told Scorsese he could direct, but only if he got De Niro to play the lead.
  • Jeff Bridges was considered for the role of Travis.
  • The actress who played Iris's friend in the film was a real prostitute who Jodie Foster studied to pick up on the character.
  • Various studios considered producing this film; one suggested Neil Diamond for the lead role.
  • Harvey Keitel was originally offered the part of the campaign worker, eventually played by Albert Brooks. He decided to take the role as the pimp, even though in the script he was black and only had about five lines.
  • Rock Hudson was once considered for the role of Charles Palantine, but was unavailable due to his commitment to the TV series, "McMillan and Wife" (1971).
  • Robert De Niro worked twelve hour days for a month driving cabs as preparation for this role. He also studied mental illness.
  • The scene where Travis Bickle is talking to himself in the mirror was completely ad-libbed by Robert De Niro. The screenplay details just said, "Travis looks in the mirror." The reason De Niro repeats himself so many times is because Scorsese was listening to the takes on a pair of headphones, and with all of the background noise, he didn't know if De Niro could be heard. He simply signalled for De Niro to keep going to be sure they would get it right.
  • The famous movie line "You talkin' to me? was based on the movie line from the classic 1953 western Shane when Shane confronts Chris Calloway played by Ben Johnson with, "You speaking to me?" with Chris replied back, "I don't see nobody else standing there."
  • Harvey Keitel rehearsed with actual pimps to prepare for his role. The scene where his character and Iris dance is improvised.
  • Director Martin Scorsese claims that the most important shot in the movie is when Travis is on the phone trying to get another date with Betsy. The camera moves to the side slowly and pans down the long, empty hallway next to Travis, as if to suggest that the phone conversation is too painful and pathetic to bear. It was the first scene he thought up, and the last one he filmed for the movie.
  • Due to her age Jodie Foster could not do some of the more explicit scenes. Instead her older sister Connie Foster was used as a double.
  • Before being given the part, Foster was subjected to a long session of psychological testing to ensure that she would not be emotionally scarred by her role.
  • Legendary composer Bernard Herrmann died on Christmas Eve of 1975, just hours after completing the recording sessions for this film. Herrmann wasn't going to write the score for the film, but agreed to do it when he saw the scene where Travis pours peach brandy over his corn flakes cereal.
  • The sex film Travis takes Betsy to see is Kärlekens Språk (Language of Love) (1969), a Swedish sexploitation film posing as scientific or educational documentary.
  • Punk group Poison Idea's song "The Badge", from their Feel the Darkness album, features audio excerpts of the final scene where the shooting occurs. Pantera's cover of the PI song (recorded for The Crow soundtrack) also features the same excerpts.
  • The Clash's song "Red Angel Dragnet" contains the lines "Tonight it's raining on the angels of the city / Did anyone prophesize these people? / Only Travis / Come in Travis / All the animals come out at night / Queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick venal / Some day a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets / Thank god for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk / Listen you screwheads / Here is a man who would not take it anymore / A man who stood up against the scum, the filth / Now I see clearly"
  • Rancid has a song on their 2003 album Indestructible (obviously) inspired by Taxi Driver entitled "Travis Bickle." They also show scenes of the film while performing during their 2006 tour.
  • Toronto Straight Edge Hardcore band The Swarm's song xOn Your Kneesx samples dialogue from the scene where Travis is buying guns and offered a plethora of drugs for sale.
  • In the song "Alexander in Charge" Chicago based avante-gaurde band Tub Ring sampled the monologue from the scene where Iris' father has written a note after Travis 'saves' her.
  • Actress Diahnne Abbott played the concession stand attendant who rebuffs Travis' advances. In real life, she would marry (and later divorce) De Niro, as well as have a son (Raphael) with him.
  • Veteran New York actor Joe Spinell, in one of his earliest roles, played the personnel manager at the taxi company Travis speaks to about a job.
  • Noted to be Quentin Tarantino's third favorite movie.
  • The second season of the japanese anime Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex features an episode that closely mirrors Taxi Driver, detailing the delusions of a professional helicopter pilot who obsesses about a cyborg prostitute and entertains ideas about killing the Prime Minister of Japan along with other "scum."
  • During his interview on Inside the Actor's Studio in 1999, Robert De Niro stated that he and Martin Scorsese had discussed the possibility of making a sequel to this film. According to De Niro, the two agreed that it would be interesting to see where Travis Bickle ended up 30 years later. But during Scorsese's interview on the show in 2002, the director stated that he would never make a sequel to any of his films.
  • The infamous "Listen you fuckers, you screwheads..." speech was used in the intro to West-Coast rapper, Xzibit's track, "[At the Speed of Light]", on the 1996 album of the same name.

Video game

In May 2005 Majesco announced that it was going to publish a video game sequel to Taxi Driver, developed by Papaya Studios. [3] In January 2006 the game was canceled due to financial problems. [4]

Sources

  • Making "Taxi Driver" (documentary) [5]

Videos

Wikiquote has quotations related to Taxi Driver.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Taxi_Driver&oldid=71952497"