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Thirty years old and endlessly imitated, Taxi Driver still packs a fearsome punch. Of all the psychos, sociopaths, and screw-ups that Robert De Niro has played for director Martin Scorsese, none is more iconic than Travis Bickle, the cuckoo cabbie on a self-appointed mission to wash the scum off the streets of New York. From the lush menace of Bernard Herrmann's score to Jodie Foster's performance as a twelve-year-old prostitute, it's a film that screams to be seen on the big screen. And yes, we are talkin' to you...
From the instant a yellow cab prowls through a cloud of sewer smoke, Scorsese has you in his grasp. His portrait of a neon-daubed hell on earth is more frighteningly real than most horror movies, yet steeped in cinematic allusion: from Travis' noirish narration - more cracked than hard-boiled - to the plot itself, a self-confessed steal from 1956's The Searchers (in which another of God's lonely men grows obsessed with 'saving' a young woman).
"STILL SHOCKS THREE DECADES ON"
But where John Ford kept the savagery offscreen, Scorsese lets it all hang out in what was the bloodiest climax to an American movie since The Wild Bunch. It's strangely satisfying to find that the sequence still shocks three decades on. Likewise, the improvised "Are you talkin' to me?" scene has retained its weird chill in the face of countless impersonators (including De Niro himself in The Adventures Of Rocky & Bullwinkle). You've got the bleak beauty of the visuals and the taut intelligence of Paul Schrader's screenplay, but in the end it's De Niro's quietly terrifying tunnel vision that urges you to hunt this masterpiece down again and again.
I don't know what all the fuss is about
