TAXI DRIVER, conceived and filmed in a fever dream of dark imagination, had 1976 audiences unsettled passengers on an eerie ride into an urban cityscape world about as inviting as a septic tank. Further, it made them fascinated voyeurs into the crippled mindset of its deranged yet pitiably innocent protagonist, lost loser ‘Travis Bickle’, who fittingly understates his condition with an admission/plea/warning “I got some bad ideas in my head.”  And the delivery method behind them.

“Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

Insomnia is the least of the troubled ‘still waters running deep’ in Travis (Robert De Niro), a pensively volatile ex-Marine who pilots a hack through rotting slices of The Big Apple. Life seems bleak to “God’s lonely man” and its denizens look to be an advertisement for some sort of near-cosmic intervention. Hope flickers when the uneasily intense Bickle spies ‘Betsy’ (Cybill Shepherd), a campaign worker for a promising politician (‘promising’ as in ‘posturing’) and asserts himself enough to intrigue this bright WASP beauty into a date. It’s a disaster, another nail in his noggin. This discarded fallen knight seeking an angel to rescue and/or avenge then sets his myopic sites on ‘Iris’ (Jodie Foster), a teenage streetwalker, but delivering her from depravity will take more direct action than a lecture. Enter ‘Easy Andy’, happy gun dealer.

           “Isn’t that a little honey?”

This angst-fueled vehicle hit the streets with a vengeance, fearless rising star Martin Scorsese directing a take-no-prisoners’ script from Paul Schrader. Most critics were blown away, the gobsmacked public erased the $1,900,000 production cost with $28,300,000 in tickets (#25 for the year) and the scorching survey of societal sickness earned Academy Award nominations for Best Picture, Actor (De Niro), Supporting Actress (Foster) and Music Score. That last was the great Bernard Herrmann’s finishing touch; he died a few days after completing it. Along with provoking reams of chatter over what it said and how it said it, the script and De Niro unleashed countless VHS replays so that couch clowns could hone their impressions of “You talkin’ to me? You talkin’ to me? Then who the hell else are you talking… you talking to me? Well I’m the only one here.”  *

Gifted by the writing, direction, editing and camera, De Niro’s marvelous under-the-skin evocation has the self-consuming, socially shunned character—even his name seems a cheat, the heroic ‘Travis’ undercut by the befuddled ‘Bickle’—a mesmerizing paradox, a psychopath with principles. Already a veteran child actor in five films (including Scorsese’s Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore), twelve-year-old Foster is remarkably assured with De Niro and with Harvey Keitel, playing her pimp ‘Sport’. Keitel’s cockroach sleazy hustler amounts to a case-closer that (with an exception for Saint Jack) pimps and (especially) child traffickers deserve nothing less than the .44 caliber Travis Treatment. Pitching in when an actor wasn’t available for a small part, director Scorsese has a memorably creepy turn as one of Bickle’s most disturbing fares. **

“Now that is something you should see.”

Michael Chapman’s superb high contrast cinematography coats the 113 minutes, with Albert Brooks (needed dash of levity, wisely kept in check, as the desired Betsy’s other ineffectual suitor), Peter Boyle (‘Wizard’ the ‘cabbie philosopher’), Leonard Harris (‘Sen. Palantine’, platitude provider), Steven Prince (the pistol purveyor), Harry Northrup, Joe Spinell, Murray Moston, Norman Matlock.

* Career faltering, marriage wrecked, Paul Schrader was alone, deeply depressed, homeless and wracked by a bleeding ulcer which put him in a hospital. His take: “The metaphor of a taxi cab occurred to me as metaphor of male drifting loneliness…I was not unlike Travis Bickle, a bundle of tightly wrapped contradictions, driving around, trying but unable to belong.”

** Foster butterflied from childhood in ’76, also appearing in Echoes Of A Summer, Bugsy Malone, The Little Girl Who Lives Down The Lane and Freaky Friday.