Taxi Driver (1976, R18+)

Dir: Martin Scorsese, USA, 113mins, 35mm

Rootless Vietnam vet Travis Bickle gets a night shift job driving a New York Checker cab. Insomniac, void of ambition and connection, but filled with rage against a city then close to social implosion and bankruptcy, there’s nothing else for Bickle to do in his days off but watch daytime soap operas, scrawl it all out into a diary and stalk the unobtainable, smart, blond and sophisticated advisor of a high-profile politician. Bickle seems to be preparing himself for a sacred mission –- although he seems uncertain about what it is. Then the TV blows up, the secret service get too close and there’s a last minute mission change. Taxi Driver began as a febrile script no one thought would get made, from an insomniac and out of control screen writer/ cinephile named Paul Schrader. It seemed conceived somewhere between the fall of Nixon and the fall of Saigon, the assassinations of the Kennedys and of John Lennon (itself to become an infamous outcome of Taxi Driver’s cultural impact). It seemed positioned somewhere between Easy Rider, New York film noir, Dostoyevsky, Kurosawa/Mifune samurai epics and Jaws. It ended with a film whose mix of street grit and filmed nightmare won it the Cannes Film Festival and a status as an instant American classic, gave us the final film score masterpiece of composer Bernard Hermann and granted director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert deNiro permanent status as cultural icons.