The Wrong Man taught the camera to be paranoid
Scorsese names one Hitchcock film as the source of Taxi Driver's camera moves — and it is the documentary-flat one, not the famous ones.
- camerawork
- point-of-view
- atomic
- influence
We looked at Hitchcock's The Wrong Man for the moves when Henry Fonda goes into the insurance office and the shifting points of view of the people behind the counter. That was the kind of paranoia that I wanted to employ.
— Scorsese on Scorsese (1989), sos 60
Elsewhere he puts it more strongly: The Wrong Man "has more to do with the camera movements in Taxi Driver than any other picture I can think of. It's such a heavy influence because of the sense of guilt and paranoia" (Roger Ebert — Scorsese by Ebert, unpaged).
The specific borrowing is not a shot but a procedure: cutting between a man under scrutiny and the shifting attention of people deciding about him, so the audience feels watched on his behalf. It is why the cab-depot interview and the campaign-office scenes in Taxi Driver play as ordeals rather than as exposition.
Worth noting which Hitchcock this is. Not Vertigo, not Psycho (1960), not Rear Window — The Wrong Man (1956), the flat, semi-documentary, overtly Catholic one about an innocent man wrongly accused. Scorsese took the guilt, not the suspense. Filed under Camerawork and Point of view; compare Camera as voyeur.