idea ·Taxi Driver (1976)

In every city there's one man

Columbia sold Taxi Driver on loneliness, not violence. Scorsese expected audiences to reject the film outright.

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reception

I never realized what that image on the poster did for the film — a shot of De Niro walking down the street with the line, "In every city there's one man." And we had thought that audiences would reject the film, feeling that it was too unpleasant and no one would want to see it!

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 63

A Commerce datum with two edges. The campaign sold the film's affect — isolation — and buried its content, which is the standard move for a difficult picture. And it worked on people who recognised themselves in it, which is not entirely a happy outcome for a film about a man whose loneliness turns into a shooting.

Scorsese has the anecdote that goes with it: a film student in Peking who followed him around for three weeks asking what to do about loneliness, and kept coming back when the answers did not help (sos 63). "People related to the film very strongly in terms of loneliness."

Keep it beside Taxi Driver — the shoot-out and the audience that cheered. The film's two best-documented reception facts point in opposite directions: it was received as an anthem of loneliness and as a revenge crowd-pleaser, and neither is what it was built to be.

Go on, then

idea Bickle sees through glass The windscreen and the rear-view mirror are the film's two apertures. Travis is a viewer before he is an actor, and the film is careful about which passengers he is allowed to see.
idea Bresson's hands, Travis's guns The gun-handling sequences copy the pickpocketing in Bresson's Pickpocket. The debt is Schrader's; Scorsese admits he finds Bresson hard to watch.
idea Chapman pushed the night stock Taxi Driver's wet neon look came from over-developing night-rated Technicolor stock — a 1970s laboratory habit, not a lighting package.
idea De Niro wrote in the margins De Niro's annotated shooting script rewrote Travis's dialogue, and the changes reached Schrader's final draft. The film's most quoted line has no screenwriter.
idea Herrmann finished the score and died that night Bernard Herrmann took some persuading to score a film with a title he disliked. He completed it on Christmas Eve 1975 and died the same night.
idea Overhead shots are the priest's-eye view Scorsese's flat overhead inserts come from watching a priest lay out the implements of the Mass on an altar — not from any film.