Next American Film Festival Screening
Monday, April 21, Taxi Driver (1976)
directed by Martin Scorsese
with Robert deNiro, Jody Foster, Harvey Keitel, Cybill Shepherd and Albert Brooks
Robert de Niro plays an alienated Viet Nam vet who drives his taxi through the mean streets of New York City
French "new wave" meets classic Hollywood entertainment:
"Taxi Driver is a study in contrasts: new wave grit versus Bernard Herrmann-scored melodramatic ambience, submergent ur-Method acting entwined within Corman-style plot elements, blood-freezing outsider portraiture mated with an ironically heroic denouement. The resulting fugue had an unmistakably apocalyptic ring to it, even in 1976."
Michael Atkinson, "Bringing Out the Dead: Scorsese's Sordid Everyman Returns," The Village Voice
Post Viet Nam, Post Watergate, Post-sixties....and chillingly prophetic of today's self-appointed agents of "righteous" violence?
"Most of the glamorous depictions of hell on earth and odes to stoical despair about a postapocalyptic civilization found in monuments to capitalist-urban squalor, including Blade Runner and Seven, can be traced back to Taxi Driver, and if it continues to exert an enormous claim on our imagination, this is surely because we continue to live in its vengeful, puritanical fantasies-as well as with the dire consequences of those fantasies." For more from Jonathan Rosenbaum's provocative essay on *Taxi Driver*, click below:
"Hell on Wheels," Jonathan Rosenbaum on Taxi Driver in the Chicago Reader
Did you know that........
--Screenwriter Paul Schrader modelled his story on John Ford's classic Western, "The Searchers"? (note that the character of Sport wears an Indian headband)
--The name of DeNiro's character, Travis Bickle, was a tribute to "Mick Travis," the hero of Lindsay Anderson's films "O Lucky Man" and "If" (chillingly played by "Clockwork Orange" star Malcolm MaDowell)?
--DeNiro drove a real cab around NYC to practice for his role?
--"Taxi Driver" won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, but lost the "Best Picture" Academy Award to "Rocky"?
