idea ·Taxi Driver (1976)

The red tint over the bloodbath

The muted colour of Taxi Driver's massacre is regularly praised as a stylistic choice. It was the price of an R rating.

colour
atomic
censorship
production-story

But to avoid an 'X' rating for its American release, which would have reduced its box-office earning potential, Scorsese had to agree to putting a red tint over the final bloodbath.

— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 68

An X in 1976 meant most newspapers would not carry the advertising and many chains would not book the film. The tint was commercial survival, not palette.

Why keep this note: the desaturated look of the killing in Taxi Driver — the shoot-out is now routinely described as expressive — deliberately drained, hellish, dreamlike. It became expressive. It began as a settlement with a ratings board. This is the cleanest case in the wiki of Control producing something later read as authorship, and it belongs beside The Production Code and Psycho, where the constraint pushed Hitchcock toward the cut rather than the filter.

Filed under Colour. The general principle: when a film's colour is unusual, find out whether anyone was allowed to choose it.

Go on, then

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 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.
scene Taxi Driver — the shoot-out Three men dead in a stairwell, a camera that floats out through the ceiling, and an audience that cheered. Scorsese wanted a catharsis; he got applause, and it frightened him.
film Taxi Driver (1976) A returned soldier drives nights through a city he wants to wash away. Scorsese's first acknowledged masterpiece — and the wiki's best case of point of view doing the work of an argument.
idea The $85,000 backdrop The Alice prologue set cost $85,000 of a $1.8M budget and shot for one day — five per cent of the film spent on announcing what the film is about.
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.