Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver is a 1976 film directed by Martin Scorsese. Robert De Niro stars as the title character. Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Albert Brooks and Peter Boyle are also featured.

Plot summary

Spoiler warning: Plot or ending details follow.

Travis Bickle (De Niro), an alienated, sexually repressed young man from the Midwest, has recently been discharged from the Marines. He suffers from insomnia and consequently takes a job as taxi driver in New York and volunteers to work the overnight shift. Bickle spends his spare time watching pornography in seedy theaters and driving around purposelessly.

Bickle 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, he becomes obsessed with saving her despite her complete lack of interest in the idea.

Bickle is also obsessed with Shepherd's character, an aide for a New York State Senator. She agrees to a date with Bickle, but he takes her to a pornographic film, and she leaves, disgusted.

Bickle then plans to assassinate the Senator. When this fails, he kills Iris's pimp (Keitel). He is wounded in the fight, and seems to be dying. A brief epilogue of sorts shows Shepherd hiring Bickle's cab, and commenting on his "saving" Iris. Some have seen this epilogue as Bickle's dying fantasy, while others see it as a real resolution of Bickle's acts.

Critical response

Taxi Driver won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976 and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It was #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.

Bernard Herrmann, who is noted for his work with Alfred Hitchcock (especially Psycho), scored Taxi Driver. The soundtrack was the last he completed before his death.

Roger Ebert selected Taxi Driver as a Great Film, alongside Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia and others. 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.

Influence

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.

Songs

• The Clash song "Red Angel Dragnet" refers to Bickle, and quotes dialogue from the film.
• The Scientists' song "If It's The Last Thing I Do" (a.k.a. "Travis") starts "Sometimes I feel like Travis Bickle/ Just wanna shoot up all the bad lurking in this town".
• Rancid's 2003 album Indestructible includes the song "Travis Bickle."
• Millencolin's song "Botanic Mistress", from their album Home from Home, begins with the line "I felt like Travis Bickle, tyrannical, lonely and blue", and later in the song has "And I'll feel like Bickle once more, And maybe I will lose it, Go insane and start a gun war?!".

Quotes

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.