Taxi Driver (1976)
Directed by Martin Scorsese
Suffering from insomnia, disturbed loner Travis Bickle takes a job as a New York City cabbie, haunting the streets nightly, growing increasingly detached from reality as he dreams of cleaning up the filthy city.
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15 films that influenced Taxi Driver
What critics say influenced Taxi Driver
It is a widely known item of cinematic lore that Paul Schrader's screenplay for "Taxi Driver" was inspired by " The Searchers ," John Ford's 1956 film.
It was the most cinephilic movie ever made in Hollywood, openly acknowledging Bresson, Hitchcock, Godard, avant-gardists Michael Snow and Kenneth Anger, and the John Ford of The Searchers.
It's at the center of Martin Scorsese's “ Taxi Driver ,” written by Paul Schrader , who used it again in his own “Hard Core.”
Haunted by John Ford’s The Searchers (1956) and the tormented racist Ethan Edwards’s redemptive quest to rescue his teenage niece from miscegenation with a Comanche chief, Schrader first updated it in Hardcore (1978), about a Dutch Calvinist furniture manufacturer wresting his daughter from LA pornographers, then used it as the basis for Taxi Driver.
With Travis’s streaks of implied racism, less hateful than incidental, and attempted chivalry, the film is indebted to John Ford’s The Searchers , but Travis’s misanthropic anger is a decidedly modern beast born of neon lights and the demons of a post-Vietnam culture.
Herrmann is best known for his work for Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons), Alfred Hitchcock (eight films, including The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and Brian De Palma (Sisters and Obsession).
Melville's film had a major influence in Hollywood: Delon lying on his bed is echoed in Taxi Driver, and Paul Schrader might have remade Le Samourai as American Gigolo.
Herrmann is best known for his work for Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons), Alfred Hitchcock (eight films, including The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and Brian De Palma (Sisters and Obsession).
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Herrmann is best known for his work for Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons), Alfred Hitchcock (eight films, including The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and Brian De Palma (Sisters and Obsession).
Naturally, the law eventually catches up to them (the film is an admitted ripoff of Bonnie and Clyde, after all).
Herrmann is best known for his work for Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons), Alfred Hitchcock (eight films, including The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and Brian De Palma (Sisters and Obsession).
(He would do the same thing again nearly twenty years later with Taxi Driver).
Herrmann is best known for his work for Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons), Alfred Hitchcock (eight films, including The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and Brian De Palma (Sisters and Obsession).
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It reminds me of the scene in The Ten Commandments portraying the killing of the first born, where a cloud of green smoke seeps along the palace floor and touches the foot of a first-born son, who falls dead.
…may be the showiest pure filmmaking in any Hollywood movie since Touch of Evil.