Taxi Driver

Travis Bickle cannot sleep, so he drives. Night after night he steers a yellow cab through Manhattan in the mid-1970s, and the fare meter ticks while the city slides past his window: pimps, runaways, drunks, men who want to watch their wives through apartment windows. Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver turns that routine into a study of a man coming apart in plain sight. Robert De Niro plays Travis with a stillness that is somehow louder than shouting, and the performance became the template for every lonely radical who followed.

Paul Schrader wrote the script in a few weeks while living out of his car in Los Angeles, drawing on a Calvinist upbringing and a stretch of self-imposed isolation. Columbia Pictures and the producing team of Julia Phillips and Michael Phillips put up $1.9 million, a modest sum that Scorsese spent largely on the streets of New York during a heat wave in the summer of 1975. The film opened on February 9, 1976, and returned $28.6 million in the United States alone. Bernard Herrmann's score, recorded the day before he died, gives the whole thing a mournful saxophone pulse that never quite lets you relax.

The picture earned four Academy Award nominations, including Best Picture, Best Actor for De Niro, Best Supporting Actress for Jodie Foster, and a posthumous Best Original Score nod for Herrmann. It won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1976 and was added to the National Film Registry in 1994. Critics have argued about its final scene for nearly fifty years, and that argument is part of the film's design rather than a flaw in it. [edit]

Travis Bickle is twenty-six, honorably discharged from the Marine Corps, and living alone in a small Manhattan apartment. He cannot sleep. He takes a job driving a yellow cab on the night shift, and during his interview at the depot he describes the city as a place overrun with "sleaze" and "scum," adding that someday a real rain will come and wash it all off the streets. The dispatcher hires him without much comment. Travis drives.

His routine is narrow. He works long hours, eats at diners, sits in pornographic theaters during his off time, and writes in a diary. He is lonely in a way that has curdled past sadness into something harder, and he watches the city with a mixture of disgust and longing. He is not stupid, but he has almost no social vocabulary. When he decides he wants to know a woman, he has no idea how to go about it beyond walking up and asking.

The woman is Betsy, a blonde volunteer working in the Manhattan office of Senator Charles Palantine, a presidential candidate whose "We Are the People" campaign is drawing crowds of the same disaffected New Yorkers Travis sees every night. Travis first notices her through the office window while idling at the curb. He works up the nerve to go inside and introduce himself, and she is charmed enough by his odd earnestness to agree to coffee. They begin a tentative courtship. Then Travis, with no apparent awareness that he is doing anything wrong, takes her to a pornographic movie on their second date. Betsy leaves the theater and later refuses his calls. He sends flowers. She rejects him outright, and the rejection settles into him like a stone.

Around the same time, Travis becomes aware of Iris, a twelve-year-old runaway working as a prostitute near his regular taxi stand. He first sees her during a fare: a passenger, played in an uncredited cameo by Scorsese himself, insists on sitting in the cab and watching his wife through the window of their apartment. Later, Travis meets Iris more directly when her pimp, a man who calls himself Sport, pulls her away from a customer. Travis is disturbed by her age and her situation. He pays for time with her but refuses sex, and instead tries to talk her into leaving the life and going home to her parents. Iris is guarded, faintly amused, and not remotely persuaded.

Travis's mental state declines. He buys a small arsenal, including a .44 Magnum and a snub-nosed revolver, and begins a regimen of physical training and firearms practice in his apartment. He talks to himself in the mirror. He attends a Palantine campaign rally, then drives past the senator's security detail on a practice run. His plans narrow toward two possible targets: the politician he believes might clean up the city, and the men he believes are destroying Iris. The film moves toward a reckoning, with the character's isolation, his arsenal, and his convictions all pointing in the same direction. The story stops short of that climax here.[edit]