`Taxi Driver' -- 20 Years Later, Its Urban Fears Still Haunt US

One of the last great movies of Hollywood's most recent golden age - the 1970s - was Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." Originally released in early 1976, Scorsese's portrait of a lonely New York cab driver, played by Robert De Niro, divided critics and created controversy but clicked with audiences, emerging as something of a surprise box-office hit.

It marked the end of one career (Bernard Herrmann died the day after finishing his score) and the true beginning of others - notably those of screenwriter Paul Schrader and actress Jodie Foster, in her first adult-like role as a 12-year-old prostitute. And, indirectly, of the infamous John Hinckley Jr., whose obsession with Foster's performance led to the attempted assassination of President Reagan.

On its first appearance in February 1976, the New Yorker's Pauline Kael found the movie "horrifyingly funny" while acknowledging Scorsese's ability to achieve "the quality of trance in some scenes . . . the whole movie has a sense of vertigo."

While not questioning the truth of the material, the New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann worried about "Scorsese's ability to lift it out of the movie gutters into which less truthful directors have trampled it." The division of opinion followed the film everywhere, even as it emerged as a critics' favorite.

Despite the misgivings of some members of the Cannes Film Festival (including Tennessee Williams, who wondered about the impact of its nearly X-rated finale), it trounced the European competition and took home the Grand Prize that year.

Foster won a British Academy Award. The Los Angeles Film Critics' Association and the New York Film Critics' Circle picked De Niro as the year's best actor. The National Society of Film Critics honored De Niro and Foster and named Scorsese the year's best director.

Yet by the time the Academy Awards rolled around in the spring of 1977, the tone of the film industry had changed. The Oscar voters embraced John G. Avildsen's feel-good boxing movie, "Rocky," ignoring Scorsese's imaginative direction, Michael Chapman's spooky cinematography and Schrader's haunted screenplay.

Nominated in four categories - best picture, actor (De Niro), supporting actress (Foster) and original score (one of two posthumous nominations that year for Herrmann) - "Taxi Driver" won nothing. It was exactly the kind of introspective, disquieting film that Hollywood would turn its back on in the blockbuster era of "Star Wars," "Jaws" and their sequels and spinoffs.

Inspired by the diaries of Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin of George Wallace (as well as by Dostoevsky's "Notes From Underground," Harry Chapin's song "Taxi" and Schrader's own experiences with isolation and alcoholism), the script's examination of an isolated Vietnam veteran did lead to an attention-getting footnote that guaranteed it a kind of immortality.

In the spring of 1981, Hinckley made an attempt on the life of then-President Reagan. (So severe was the film industry's sense of shock that the Academy Awards were postponed for two days.)

A cinema of loneliness

"Taxi Driver" has since been cited as Example No. 1 of a movie that can be shown to have inspired violence. Yet was there ever a stronger argument for a violent film reflecting the society that spawned it? Which came first, Bremer or Hinckley?

Scorsese and Schrader had clearly captured something truthful about the disorienting nature of urban life in the post-Vietnam years. When Robert Phillip Kolker published a 1980 collection of essays on films of the 1970s, he called it "A Cinema of Loneliness." The only cover illustration was a photo of De Niro's hunched-over Travis Bickle, walking the streets of New York with his hands jammed into the sides of his jacket.

Kolker calls Bickle "an obsessive, a passive obsessive, so oppressed by his isolation that when he does act, it is only upon the dark and disconnected impulses triggered by his perceptions."

"It set out to be a film about loneliness," said Schrader recently by phone from Los Angeles, where he is preparing a film of Elmore Leonard's 1985 novel about a faith healer, "Touch." "But the subject was really self-imposed loneliness, the neurotic structures we build to perpetuate our miseries. It was clearly an extension of the existential hero, which is the primary literary hero in this century."

De Niro gets inside the friendless cabbie of the title in a way the actor rarely approaches these days - though his current performance as a lonely criminal in "Heat" carries echoes of Bickle. You could imagine both men identifying with Simon and Garfunkel's 1960s ode to isolation, "I Am a Rock," while failing utterly to live up to its code of feeling no pain.

Filled with hatred for the 42nd Street corruption he witnesses nightly, this 26-year-old ex-Marine tries to date a campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd), gets rejected and stalks her boss, a presidential candidate (Leonard Harris) who distances himself from Bickle's tirades.

A failure at political assassination, Bickle finally turns his energies into freeing a child prostitute named Iris (Foster) from her creepily manipulative pimp (Harvey Keitel). The result is a bloodbath.

"I wrote it when I had fallen into a rather low point in my life," said Schrader. "I was drifting, living in my car in L.A. I started getting this pain in my stomach, and I went to a hospital and found I had an ulcer. At that point I realized I hadn't spoken to anyone in two or three weeks. I'd been floating in this sort of steel coffin through the city.

"Before I wrote the script, I re-read `The Stranger' by Camus and `Nausea' by Sartre. I wrote both drafts in 10 days in 1972, February or so, and left L.A.," he added. "It was a script that was written for the best of reasons, as self-therapy.

"I felt that these kinds of thoughts and this kind of anger was going to start infecting my life. It sort of proved that art works, by projecting these things out and helping you to analyze. I got into writing for the best possible reason: I needed to."

Probing the soul of violence

Scorsese once described "Taxi Driver" as "a film dealing with religious anxiety, guilt and one man's attitudes toward women - which were arrested at age 13."

The movie probes considerably deeper into the soul of a would-be assassin than, say, Robert Altman's "Nashville" from the year before (Altman always claimed that no one could really probe a psychotic's mind). Yet it still leaves us with a mystery.

Although we are made to see how the character is goaded into violence by his hellish surroundings, there are many others who share his circumstances. Why did this man turn killer, while others resisted?

De Niro shows us a frustrated Vietnam vet who gets a night-shift job as a Manhattan cab driver, partly to cope with insomnia, partly because he would be driving the streets anyway at those hours. The job inevitably heightens his sense of alienation: the riders in the back seat act as if he didn't exist, and he in turn begins to think of them as human garbage.

His attempts to communicate with those he does care about end in failure. He idolizes Shepherd, then makes the incredible faux pas of taking her, on a first date, to a hard-core porn movie. He tries to discuss his problems with an older cabbie (Peter Boyle) who might as well be speaking Mandarin, and when he follows Iris, he discovers she's in love with her pimp.

"I don't know who's weirder, you or me," Iris tells him.

The importance of De Niro

Without De Niro, "Taxi Driver" might not have worked at all. He does for the film what Jon Voight did for "Midnight Cowboy," taking an essentially unsavory, obtuse, displaced person and forcing us to recognize his humanity. Without this kind of exposed and empathic performance, the film would have great difficulty justifying its extreme violence or finding an emotional center.

"Before we could get it off the ground, Marty (Scorsese) had to have his first (box-office) success with `Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore' and De Niro had to win the Oscar for `Godfather II,' " said Schrader. "At the time it became (financially) possible, it caught all three of us at the same point in our lives. We understood it."

Scorsese once claimed the film was based on one shot, in which De Niro is being turned down on the telephone by Shepherd: "And the camera actually pans away from him - it's too painful to see that reaction. People die because he doesn't know how to get in touch with his feelings."

Shortly after this episode, Bickle says that he's "gotta do something." Soon he's sporting a Mohawk, shopping for guns and isolating himself in a porn theater where the phallic references on the soundtrack reflect his rebellion against impotence.

"He tries to win the woman he can't have and tries to kill the father of the woman he can," said Schrader.

Scorsese and Schrader went no further in filling in Bickle's background because, in Schrader's words, "then his problems aren't your problems. He should remain something of a cipher so you can project something onto him."

Indeed, what makes "Taxi Driver" more than a case history, what turns it into such a devastating and ultimately haunting experience, is the sense of identification that Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro build around Bickle. Anyone who has ever felt alone or defeated by big-city indifference will find it easy to sympathize with Bickle - up to a point.

That point of departure will undoubtedly be different for each member of the audience, which is why Bickle's true motives must be mysterious - and why the violence in the final scenes carries such a charge. When he accidentally becomes a hero, in an ironic and utterly unnerving epilogue, we feel both guilty and relieved.

"This guy's problems are not resolved," Schrader points out. "They're going to start all over again."

A nightmare that won't stop

"Taxi Driver" touches on many of the same urban fears and frustrations as the Charles Bronson movie, "Death Wish." Some audiences accepted it on that level, cheering at the bloodbath and missing the point of the epilogue.

But it was easy to dismiss the contrived, emotional arguments of the Bronson film (and its current offspring, "Eye for an Eye"). "Taxi Driver" is a nightmare that just won't stop - it ends where it begins, like a recurring dream that doubles back on itself and finds no true resolution. It's insidious.

In addition to the influences of Bremer, Dostoevsky, Camus, Sartre and Chapin, Bickle has an acknowledged big-screen predecessor: John Wayne's embittered Confederate soldier and loner, Ethan Edwards, in John Ford's 1956 Western, "The Searchers."

The plot for "The Searchers" was reworked in several 1970s films, including Schrader's "Hardcore" and Steven Spielberg's "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and references to it turn up in Scorsese's earlier films, "Mean Streets" and "Who's That Knocking at My Door?"

But it's never been a clearer influence than it is here. Bickle is a 20th-century Edwards, funneling his fury with a lost war, a lost love and the corruption of the contemporary world into his obsession with rescuing a young girl from a man who's cruelly exploiting her.

Throwing Hitchcock's "Psycho" into the mix, Kolker goes on to call Bickle "the legitimate child of John Wayne and Norman Bates." It's an image that sticks, and it's one reason so many critics find "Taxi Driver" funny. How else is one to respond to the famous, improvised sequence in which De Niro, stripped to the waist and facing the mirror, delivers the movie's most quoted line: "You talkin' to me?"

Then there are the scenes of Iris teasing Bickle (which underline Scorsese's suggestion that they're really the same mental age), and the episode in a porn theater just after Bickle has gone gun-hunting (an echo of the scene in "The Night of the Hunter" in which Robert Mitchum's murderous nature surfaces in a theater), and that outrageously gruesome finale, which begs not to be taken seriously.

First of all, it's unlikely; it resembles a dream of violence that Bickle had while sitting on the steps just before he does it. Second, it's doubtful that Bickle would have survived it, especially after taking a gun to his own head.

Lastly, it's the sort of explosion of violence that seems designed primarily for an audience that needs a catharsis - and then Scorsese tweaks that expectation by adding a coda that distances Bickle from what he's supposedly done.

"I wonder if beneath its horror there is not something of the comic," writes Kolker, citing the finale's grotesque exaggerations as an indication that Scorsese intended a parody of screen violence, especially of the kind exhibited in Tobe Hooper's "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" - which turns up on the marquee of a theater as Bickle drives by.

No longer so shocking

"Taxi Driver" will be seen with different eyes this time. Hooper and Scorsese's films preceded the slasher era, introduced by "Halloween" (1978) and "Friday the 13th" (1980). What was shockingly over-the-top then may no longer seem so.

Schrader sees it differently, too. He hasn't seen the film for years, but "it's so ubiquitous I keep catching bits and pieces," usually on television.

"People refer to it as the quintessential New York movie," he said. "But that kind of anger I had in many ways comes from L.A. - people who are locked in these steel boxes, like pressure cookers, driving around all day and getting angry. New York in a way is much more accessible to your frustrations, but I had to use it because it has a genuine taxi culture."

In many ways, it can't be the same film it was in 1976. Yet "Taxi Driver" remains as powerful a statement about urban alienation as it ever was.

--------------------- `TAXI DRIVER' REISSUE ---------------------

Martin Scorsese's 1976 film "Taxi Driver" is getting a deluxe 20th-anniversary reissue, beginning Friday at the Broadway Market Cinemas.

The Museum of Modern Art staged a "premiere" last Tuesday for this restoration, which was created from the original camera negative by Sony Pictures Entertainment, in association with MOMA. The soundtrack has been remixed in Spectral Recording Dolby Stereo, marking the first time Bernard Herrmann's score has been heard in stereo in a theatrical presentation.