Taxi Driver: Original Soundtrack Recording
American composer Bernard Herrmann's last film score was for director  Martin Scorsese's (and writer Paul Schrader's) deeply unsettling, Dostoyevskian  film noir,Taxi Driver--a portrait of urban alienation that's never been  matched.  In the slow-motion images of New York City as Dante'sInferno(steam rising into the air to suggest the hellfire below), the orchestral music  is ominous and dissonant, a rumble and crash that rises up from the underworld.   But Herrmann's other major motif is a slinky, smoldering sax theme that suggests  the forbidden pleasures of big-city nightlife--bars and clubs, prostitutes and  porno palaces--things Travis Bickle (Robert DeNiro) may himself indulge in, but  that give him no pleasure.  (In fact, they disgust him.)  The soundtrack  features a track in which Herrmann's music is played behind bits and pieces of  narration from Travis's "diary":  "Some day a real rain will come  along and sweep all the scum off the streets."  Unforgettable music,  unforgettable movie.--Jim Emerson