TAXI DRIVER

This was and remains to this day a controversial film that catapulted the careers of a brooding 26 year-old Robert De Niro and a very young Jodie Foster. De Niro plays a New York City cab driver named Travis Bickle, an unstable Vietnam Veteran. Bickle is a character who suffers from isolation, insomnia and alienation with an obsession about the ugly corruption of life's "scum bags" he encounters driving a Yellow Cab on the night shift in New York. "Someday a real rain will come and wash all the scum off the streets." This may sound early Bruce Springsteen-esque. It isn't. Bickle painfully attempts to escape his alienation from life by wooing Betsy, a Senator's campaign worker (Shepherd) and failing just as badly in his attempt to persuade a child prostitute Iris (Foster) to desert her pimp and go back home to her parents and enroll in school. Driven to the edge by his overwhelming sense of powerlessness, Bickles life becomes very intense.

Cast: Directed by Martin Scorsese; Written by: Paul Schrader; Robert De Niro....Travis Bickle; Cybill Shepherd;....Betsy; Peter Boyle....Wizard; Jodie Foster....Iris Steensma; Harvey Keitel....'Sport' Matthew; Leonard Harris....Sen. Charles Palantine;Albert Brooks....Tom.

There is a ton of Trivia that goes along with this film. Jodie Foster was too young to do explicit scenes, for which her sister Connie served as a body double. Also, the woman who worked with Foster to prep her for her role was also named "Iris". De Niro does improvise quite a bit. The most famous such scene is of course Travis Bickle's "You talkin' to me?" Martin Scorsese was encouraging De Niro just below the camera while shooting the scene, which lead to the rest of the "dialogue" Bickle has with his mirror. While it was truly improvised, the exchange is actually a quotation from Shane (1953) where Alan Ladd and Ben Johnson square up to one another just before their barroom brawl. The story was a bit autobiographical for Paul Schrader, who suffered a nervous breakdown, and literally didn't talk to anyone for months, went to porno theaters and developed an obsession with guns when he first moved out to Los Angeles. Schrader decided to switch the action to New York City only because taxi drivers are far more common there. Schrader's script clicked with both Scorsese and De Niro when they read it. The record that Travis buys for Betsy is "The Silver Tongued Devil and I" by Kris Kristofferson. In the restaurant they quote from a song on the album, "Pilgrim Chapter 33" ("he's a prophet...") inspired by the late Johnny Cash. Foster remembers De Niro in "endless" rehearsals sitting down with her in a restaurant and not sticking to the script. Finally, Farrah Fawcett was considered for the role of Betsy. But when Sue Mengers, Cybil Shepherd's Agent heard that Scorsese was looking for "a Cybil Shepherd-type", she called him and the rest as they say is history. A gritty story, it is considered an important American Film. Buckle up. And tip your driver well. PLEASE!