Brilliant movie

Rating: 9/10 (27 February 2010)

Martin Scorsese's brilliant 1976 film about Travis Bickle has the best music score I've ever heard. Bernard Herrmann died the day he finished his recording sessions for the movie. Herrmann did the music for the radio broadcast of "War of the Worlds" and the films "Citizen Kane" and "Psycho," among many others.
The score for "Taxi Driver" has no memorable songs, no hit singles. It's tied inseparably to the visuals, searing and complete. The opening of the movie is riveting, with steam coming from the manholes and a cab appearing through the mists like some monster from a deep lagoon as Herrmann's menacing, sinister score fades in and out. When you've never seen the movie, you don't know what it's about, but you know immediately it's going to be bad. And it is.
If you haven't seen the movie since it came out, it's time to see it again. It's been over thirty years, and Scorsese still has it nailed. It's riveted down and bolted. He welded it. It's still a scorching movie. DeNiro plays Travis Bickle, a Vietnam vet with the scars to prove it. Inside and out. Bickle is seriously mentally ill. He's Holden Caulfield back from the Nam.* He keeps telling people he's got to do something, but he doesn't know what. We know he's going to explode, and we wait with a sick feeling in our stomachs for the carnage.
Jodie Foster was 12 when she played Iris, the child prostitute. It's amazing to see her and realize how good she was. Her scene with Harvey Keitel when he talks her out of running away is mesmerizing. (Some scenes were shot with her 19 year old sister as a body double, by the way.) And her lunch with Bickle is totally natural. She was a star right from the beginning, holding her own with Robert DeNiro and Harvey Keitel. Incredible.
Keitel is Iris's pimp, the epitome of all that makes Bickle sick, the scummy garbage of New York. Named Matthew, Iris calls him Sport, and she loves him. He manipulates her relentlessly and shamelessly because he makes a lot of money having a 12-year-old whore in his stable. "You can do anything with her," Sport tells Travis, then he spouts a laundry list of filth, sickening Bickle. Keitel is one of my favorite actors; I've never seen him fail in a movie, and he doesn't disappoint here. Sport puts a name and address on Bickle's urge to do something.
I've seen Cybill Shepherd in two movies where she played similar characters: Betsy here in "Taxi Driver" (with Albert Brooks as her opposite number) and "The Heartbreak Kid" as Kelly Corcoran (with Charles Grodin playing her suitor). In both movies her character is pretty much empty - a blonde who's gotten by on her looks and who has no personality. Betsy provides a whitebread, sane counterpoint to Bickle. The problem is whether we're better off being the sane counterpoint, involved in an election campaign where nothing the candidate says means anything, surrounded by whitebread, incompetent, safe, well-meaning people who truly care whether the candidate's bumper stickers are printed correctly.
Betsy sharpens our focus is on Bickle as he slowly spirals down, letting slip his facade of control, losing his grip on himself, in his solitary hell. Herrmann's score gives music to Bickle's seething anger and danger, underplaying the tempest we feel must be raging unseen in the black night of Bickle's soul. We never see Bickle's torment on his face, but we know his flat affect is the mask of his will to do something, anything to let loose his locked-down demons.
"Taxi Driver" has lost nothing over the years. The characters, the directing, the music all work. See it with a good sound system.
The movie was produced by a threesome that included Julia Phillips, author of "You'll Never Have Lunch in This Town Again." If you haven't read that book, I recommend it. It's free at your local library and well worth the price of checking it out. She also produced "The Sting," "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and a few others. She had a lot to say in her memoir, and she said it well. Julia Phillips died of cancer a few years ago, I'm sorry to say.
*To carry that analogy further, Iris is both Holden's prostitute and Holden's sister, Phoebe. Bickle protects her.