Taxi Driver

Robert De Niro in his legendary role as Vietnam veteran and taxi driver Travis Bickle.

Photographed in dreamlike images, the familiar yellow New York taxi glides through rain-soaked streets in a cloud of steam, accompanied by Bernard Herrmann’s film noir-inspired score. Flashing neon lights are reflected in the cab’s gleaming paintwork and in the eyes of its driver, Travis Bickle, played by a brilliant Robert De Niro. He is a Vietnam veteran with no sense of belonging, a sleepless driver who observes the criminals, prostitutes and drug addicts of the night—a society full of filth and degradation.

Several people branded Taxi Driver as glorifying violence when it was released. Travis’s personal crusade is undoubtedly portrayed with a certain fascination. The film has also been defended as an expression of a brutal vigilante philosophy, while Travis has, conversely, been described as a Jesus figure bent on cleansing the temples of the 1970s. More soberly, we can describe Taxi Driver as 1970s film noir, with equal measures of realism and existentialism.

Screenwriter Paul Schrader deserves much of the credit for making the film spark a wealth of associations without allowing it to be pinned down to a single idea. Taxi Driver is also, above all, a showcase for its actors. It was the film that made Robert De Niro a major star, and it marked Jodie Foster’s debut role. Taxi Driver also gave Martin Scorsese his major international breakthrough, winning, among other awards, the Palme d’Or for Best Film at Cannes.

“A brilliant nightmare and like all nightmares it doesn’t tell us half of what we want to know.”

Roger Ebert, The Chicago Sun-Times

“Taxi Driver was not just a hit but, like Psycho or Bonnie and Clyde, an event in American popular culture (…) Brilliant and yet repellent, at times even hateful, Taxi Driver inspired understandable ambivalence.”

J. Hoberman, The Village Voice