Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (1976): I Can't Pretend and I Know I'm Alone

Some thoughtful movie fans see American personhood summed up in characters like Rocky Balboa, Atticus Finch, George Bailey, Forrest Gump, Cool Hand Luke, and even Vito Corleone or Tony Montana. But I see much of it in Travis Bickle, the wounded Vietnam vet and desperate loner of Taxi Driver (1976), slowly going psychotically mad in the (then-) ruined urban landscape of New York City. It is my contention that this film, with its noxious stew of stalker/vigilante fantasy, misguided heroism, a war-wounded mind, racism, sexism, urban decay, gun fetishism, and misplaced media attention, is the greatest American film since its release in 1976. Really. I cannot put it any other way. It's an all-too-prescient depiction of a personality disorder that would come to haunt our public life in the following decades: men broken who refuse to mend. Their name is legion and I need not mention them here. Gaze into the abyss, a man adrift and alone:

It's well-known film lore now that Paul Schrader wrote this screenplay in a matter of weeks after a bout of homelessness, drinking while walking the streets and sleeping in his car. "It leapt out of me like an animal," he would say later. His choice of a taxi cab to symbolize loneliness while in the midst of humanity was truly inspired. The primal power of the script is undeniable, even though it was restructured in the final edit.

Director Martin Scorsese and cinematographer Michael Chapman use an astonishing expressionistic style to bring Schrader's words alive. For all its American-ness, this is a movie filled with foreign influences: informed fans will sense a melange of Godard, Bresson, and Dreyer in its execution; those not so inclined will still see something of power and conviction, pain and obsession. Virtually every shot includes Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro), usually alone in the frame, as everything around him contributes to his despair. He is as responsible for his condition as he is trapped by it.

Travis scribbles in his journal with a grade-school pencil (cf. Bresson's Diary of a Country Priest) but it's not only Travis's voice-over narration that clue us in; it's snatches of dialogue, of song lyrics, the inventive camerawork, and Bernard Herrmann's glorious and final jazz-horror score which reveal the man's sickest, most feverish thoughts. "I got some bad ideas in my head," he tells fellow cabbie Wizard (Peter Boyle), and Scorsese relentlessly illustrates them on-screen. I find this strange formality one of Taxi Driver's most fascinating aspects, which I'll focus on here rather than rehashing the plot or performances.

Travis's famous "morbid self-attention" does not result in a sense of self-awareness; it shows a serious lack of one. Those journal entries serve as an ironic counterpoint to his daily life alone in his filthy room (in the screenplay, when Travis leaves his place for the final time, we see it is in a condemned building). Two moments are standouts:

"Here is a man who stood up. Here is..."

"You're only... as healthy... as... you... feel."

In other instances, dialogue by other characters function as Travis's interior monologue. While the camera focuses on Travis, characters continue talking but we are not really hearing them; it's as if we're inside Travis's head, hearing his very thoughts. First is Wizard relating another of his tall tales about taxi life, two gay men in a fight in his cab; the words are painfully accurate after his date with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) fails spectacularly:

"They start arguing, they start yelling... you bitch, you whore..."

Fellow cabbie Charlie T's innocent comment about Travis's wad of cash (and all that money never buys Travis a ticket out of this cesspool) proves an ominous warning. He also jokingly calls Travis "Killer." Soon all will be literalized:

"My man is loaded, loaded."

The seething black man screaming as he storms down the street while Travis stalks underage hooker Iris (Jodie Foster) delves further into Travis's crumbling mind in the most simplistic terms:

"When I get my hands on that bitch I'm gonna kill her..."

And of course the porn soundtrack Travis can't seem to live without, as a voracious actress expresses her admiration for a large "weapon":

"Look at the size of that... oh yeah... it looks so good..."

Even non-essential flirty banter has its place; witness Tom (Albert Brooks) and Betsy at work in Senator Palantine's headquarters. These scenes are not in Schrader's original screenplay, but they are still integral to the film. Are we to take their words at face value, or are they a horrifying prophetic foreshadowing?

"If you had these three fingers missing on this hand, and that hand missing on that hand..."

Horrifying prophetic foreshadowing.

In perhaps the film's most revealing and discomforting sequence (prior to the climax of course), director Scorsese himself, looking like an upstanding Manson, glowers maniacally in the backseat of Travis's cab. The living, breathing embodiment of the ugliest thoughts in Bickle's head, he rattles off his intent: to kill his wife--with a .44 Magnum, of course--who's sleeping with a black man. Except he relays this in some of the most repulsively sexist and racist comments that have ever been uttered in a mainstream picture. Travis says nothing, but the glare in his eyes says everything. The passenger exists both as a manifestation of Travis's darkest fears and as an element in the outside world that Travis focuses on solely.

"And I'm gonna kill her with that gun."

The previous scene showed us Travis condemning Betsy to hell for rejecting him; in the very next sequence, as Travis walks out of the Belmore Cafeteria, an all-night cabbie haunt, he stops and glares at a young black man, who glowers back. When Travis meets up with gun salesman Easy Andy, the first thing he asks is, "You got a .44 Magnum?" All the pieces are falling into place.

"Goddamn, man... Goddamn..."

Everyone focuses on the "You talkin' to me?" scene, beloved of dude-movie fans everywhere, but the really effective scenes are simply Travis alone in his room, alone with his fears, his fantasies, and his guns. Scorsese, always ready with an appropriate rock song to illustrate his characters' internal conflicts and desires, nails Travis's with Jackson Browne's "Late for the Sky." Ostensibly a plaintive, earnest tune about a broken relationship, here it becomes an elegy for a forgotten man.

"How long have I been drifting alone through the night?"

Lastly: throughout the film Scorsese intersperses dramatic overhead and high-angle shots, almost haphazardly. It's first seen in the opening when Travis is being interviewed for the cab driver job. We see it next when he futilely hits on the ticket-taker girl at the porno theater. Then, when Travis boldly confronts Betsy and asks for a date ("I see all this and it means nothing"). And lastly, ultimately, most startling of all, the long tracking shot from the ceiling in Iris's bedroom, now the scene of slaughter. These shots have predicted the film's climax and reach their apotheosis in a gory tabloid of pulp genius.

Whew. This was a tough post to write. Surely I am not the only one for whom revisiting this classic is an emotionally exhausting experience, painful but rewarding. Travis Bickle is a sort of Hamlet character, in which a myriad of interpretations of his behavior and actions seem to say much but in the end do no justice. "He seems to have wandered in from a land where it is always cold," Schrader describes him in the screenplay's opening passages, "a country where the inhabitants seldom speak." Better to watch safely, then, at a distance, comfortable in the theater or at home. But then that is something men like this would never allow us to do.

"On every street corner there's a nobody who dreams of being somebody..."

Schrader, Scorsese, & DeNiro share big laughs on location

Robert Mitchum in The Yakuza (1974): The Strange Stranger

"When an American cracks up, he opens a window and shoots up a bunch of strangers. When a Japanese cracks up, he closes the window and kills himself."
Richard Jordan in The Yakuza


The Yakuza (1974) has a pretty high pedigree for the 1970s: it was the first screenplay from Paul Schrader, co-written with his brother Leonard, a rewrite by Robert Towne, and directed by Sydney Pollack. Robert Mitchum, who was having a nice career resurgence at the time, had the lead role. Between them, this is a pretty impressive bunch of credits, encompassing Chinatown, The Way We Were, The Friends of Eddie Coyle, The Last Detail, and They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, among others.

At the time, the Schraders were paid an inordinately high fee ($325,000) for the screenplay, which heralded their arrival in Hollywood. Paul would go on to write two of the most acclaimed movies of the era, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, and make his startling directorial debut with Blue Collar (1978). Pollack, apparently uncomfortable with making solely a "gangster picture," hired Towne to add backstory and romantic elements to the script, and the Schraders distanced themselves. I hope Paul feels differently today (his brother Leonard died several years ago; watch this amazing video of his book-stuffed home here) because The Yakuza is a satisfying thriller that showcases many of Schrader's thematic concerns, and Mitchum at his middle-aged best.

Harry Kilmer, played by a wonderfully disheveled, schlumpy Robert Mitchum, is tapped by his old WWII buddy George Tanner (Brian Keith), a business magnate, for a big favor: rescue his college-age daughter from Japanese gangsters, known as the yakuza. For Kilmer, this is a bittersweet request, as he had remained in Japan after the war to be with his mistress Eiko (Kishi Keiko) and her infant daughter, victims of the bombing raid on Tokyo. After Eiko's brother Tanaka Ken returned from a POW in the Philippines, Kilmer returned to America, but without Eiko - who said she could never marry him.

Kilmer arrives in Japan with young Dusty (Richard Jordan), a confidant of Tanner's, to make sure Mitchum "doesn't get run over by a Honda." They meet up with Ollie Wheat (Herb Edelman), another old war pal who still lives in Tokyo, whose doctor has told him he can't play his beloved chess because of the stress it causes him. "Don't let it fool you," Wheat warns when Kilmer notices an American-style high rise, "Japan is Japan, and the Japanese are still Japanese." As veterans of World War II, even ones who stayed in the country, these men are wary of this place. Immediately following this exchange comes a cry from the other room; Dusty has sliced himself on a specimen from Wheat's sword collection. "I barely touched it," he says. Foreshadowing, anyone? Then Kilmer, "the strange stranger," as he was referred to as an American in Japan after the war, wanders the city streets alone, seeking Eiko after many years.

Soon, Eiko's brother Tanaka Ken (Takakura Ken), once a mighty yakuza but now a master teacher in traditional Japanese swordsmanship, shows up. "Ken is a relic, a leftover of another age, of another country," Kilmer is told, and Ken therefore feels a begrudging obligation to help Kilmer since Kilmer had cared for Eiko after the war. Tanner's daughter is rescued in a terrific shootout in the middle of a yakuza hideout. Although he says he hasn't picked up a sword in 10 years, he saves Dusty and Kilmer with his skill by killing several yakuza. But now the yakuza boss wants Tanaka dead, while Tanner, who reveals his true motivations, makes a deal with them to take out Kilmer...

One can feel the writerly passages that probably entwine both Schrader's and Towne's version of the screenplay in the voice-over narrations that work terrifically, in the discussion of "giri" and its various meanings, in the elaborations on the value of family, duty, and honor. As for the direction, in some scenes I felt as though I could see the screenwriters (particularly Schrader) over Pollack's shoulder, coaching him through scenes, particularly the sword-and-gun fight sequences, which are well-staged, awesomely violent and very nearly poetic. When Kilmer bundles up in a large coat to hide his weaponry and the camera follows him down a long hallway as he looks for Tanner, we can see a dry-run for the climax of Taxi Driver. The pre-credit sequence in Japan reminded me of the cabbie boss's interview of Travis Bickle as well, right down to the edits. Schrader's screenplays are just that visual.

Dave Grusin's score is highly effective, mysterious, and evocative throughout, during the opening credits, and especially during Kilmer and Eiko's reunion, which are some of my favorite moments in the film. With old friend Wheat narrating, Grusin's music, and subtle editing, we get a real sense of the Kilmer and Eiko's happy past. But there is also loss here, loss that is predicated upon Kilmer's return.

The themes that will preoccupy much of Schrader's best work are all here: the loner on a mission, the man who carefully chooses - like a script - his path of action, men obsessed with guns and violence and redemption, the "spirituality" found in physical confrontation and duty. Violence is theater, something carefully prepared for and performed. "I just thought you might want to hear your reviews," says Wheat to Mitchum after he sees the newspaper account of their rescue of Tanner's daughter. This philosophy of Schrader's would see its apotheosis in his elegant, ambitious Mishima (1985).

Ultimately this is not a film about vengeance or violence, but one that uses those elements to explore the past and other people and our duty to them; the characters are honor-bound to one another, across decades, across continents. The movie ends with a true understanding of respect and friendship; after we have seen the turnabouts and double-crossings previously, it is a satisfying, hard-won, and even touching moment. I recommend The Yakuza easily to people who are fans of any of the aforementioned artists. Like many '70s movies it is at once a genre flick and a character study. This is no anonymous karate or gangster flick; this is a serious, patient meditation on adult concerns punctuated by bursts of bitter, necessary, regretful violence... and the amends men make for it.

Brian DePalma's Obsession (1976): Overwrought and Obvious

I am usually underwhelmed by Brian DePalma's movies. He's a stylist who wears his influences - his influence, as in Hitchcock and Hitchcock only - on his sleeve. I've enjoyed Sisters, Carrie, The Untouchables, and Carlito's Way, but schlock like Scarface, Raising Cain, and The Black Dahlia are some of the worst movies I've ever seen by a major director. Too often they rely simply on their relationship to another picture; in this case, Obsession's is Vertigo (1958). But in 1976, long before Hitchcock's film had achieved its status as perhaps his greatest film (or just about the greatest film), not everyone pored over films at home like they can do today. You could get away with this kind of thing back then. I watched Vertigo last year and quite often watch moments of it when it's on cable; people seeing Obsession in '76 probably hadn't seen it in over 15 years. I felt like I was watching a watered-down version of Hitch's movie, not a film that existed independently.

This probably contributes to why it is one of DePalma's least-seen works. The DVD is out of print and it's not available from Netflix. Turner Classic Movies showed Obsession recently, as part of their celebration of composer Bernard Herrmann. Good timing, too, because I'd been rereading Schrader on Schrader and learned Paul Schrader and DePalma had watched Vertigo together and decided to an homage/remake of it. This was before Schrader gained Hollywood ascendancy with Taxi Driver. However the script was rewritten and changed so much that Paul Schrader dropped out of the project.

After his wife and daughter are killed in a kidnapping and ransom attempt that goes horribly wrong, Michael Courtland (Cliff Robertson) remains a grieving widower, although a successful New Orleans businessman. Fifteen years after the event that gutted his life, he finds himself in Italy near the church in which he and his wife had met. He is drawn to it and wanders inside, only to find the his long-dead wife's doppelganger, Italian art student Sandra Portinari (Genevieve Bujold). They begin a tentative romance and Courtland brings Sandra back to the States. Now he sets out to remake her in the image of his dead wife. John Lithgow, a smarmy Southerner, is Robertson's business partner and views this newfound fascination as alarming...

The Oscar-nominated score by Herrmann (someone Hitch used, of course, numerous times), is busy and intrusive; it plays for virtually the entire movie and rather than accentuating scenes, it overpowers them. Herrmann is one of cinema's greatest composers and it's always a delight to hear his work but in Obsession it only makes you think of Vertigo. DePalma's skills are used to good effect in an inventive sequence near the end in which Bujold relives a childhood trauma that brings the movie full circle. The less said about the climactic fight scene between Lithgow and Robertson the better.

"Should we preserve the original or destroy it?" Genevieve Bujold says when Cliff Robertson meets her restoring a painting in the old Italian cathedral. Behind this painting lies another; the artist deemed it unworthy and painted over it. That's the heart of the movie, of course, both for Robertson's character and for DePalma's work in general. A fine question it is, but I never connected with Obsession, never felt Robertson was in the grip of mania like Jimmy Stewart's Scottie conveyed in Vertigo. All of Herrmann's lush, manic, swirling strings, DePalma's feverish camera work, and editor Paul Hirsch's rippling dream effects (to lessen the ultimate implications of the plot twist) can't make this movie rise above a mildly interesting, decidedly minor '70s thriller. This one is for completists of any of the filmmakers or actors mentioned, for fans of Herrmann, or that wonderful '70s era. I'll take Sisters or Carrie any day over Obsession.

"Go ahead, bite the Big Apple, don't mind the maggots..."

"...to live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough." Jagger could have been singing about Taxi Driver itself in that little Travis Bickle-esque rant. Feast your eyes upon this loverly two-disc special edition DVD that has been placed atop my must-have list posthaste. I love surprises like this--the set came out last week and I heard of it only this morning through the also-loverly Kim Morgan via her wondrous and magical Sunset Gun site. A full exploration of said DVD will be forthcoming, although of course like any sane person, I am a tad hesitant to revisit the sordid world of Travis, Iris, Sport, et. al., having purged myself of the obsessive Taxi Driver virus some time ago. I'm probably going to spin on down to Borders this after-work and snag it--rueing the fact that I always trash those Borders email coupons for 30%-off deals that clutter up my in-box (that's what she said...). That's how they get you.

P.S.: I utterly despise the cover artwork on this DVD set (actually, on all the DVDs of this film) because it gives away what is supposed to be the jolt of seeing Travis with a Mohawk. Scorsese has repeatedly said that is the moment in the film when the audience is to finally sever its sympathetic ties with Travis, and for it to be featured on the cover of the DVD is an act of artistic larceny. What is so wrong with these original one-sheets? They are two of the greatest movie posters ever.