Picture This

Rating: 10/10 (7 January 2005)

... a lonely hero enters a brothel to rescue a 12-year-old girl and must fight his way out. He uses every weapon at his disposal to defeat his enemies and succeeds in the rescue attempt.
I just described a highpoint of Akira Kurosawa's "Red Beard." Before he became a screenwriter and director, Paul Schrader was a scholar of Japanese film at UCLA.
He must have had Kurosawa in mind when he wrote the climax to "Taxi Driver." Of course, Schrader and Scorsese undermined the heroism of Kurosawa in favor of ironic horror, but the parallel is not accidental. Schrader, Scorsese, Lucas, all the movie brats of that generation owe a great deal to the Japanese cinema, Kurosawa in particular.
Much of "Red Beard" is derived from Dostoyevsky (listen to the DVD commentary from Criterion) and "Taxi Driver" was a riff on "Notes from the Underground." I believe "Taxi Driver" stands as Scorsese and Schrader's best work, even better than "Raging Bull." It only gets deeper when you see the influence of a master like Kurosawa.