Something to watch tonight: Friday 26 September

50 Greatest Films #29: Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976)

My pro­ject to watch all 50 of the BFI’s top 50 films of all time (2022 edi­tion) was inten­ded to help me fill in a few gaps in my edu­ca­tion but this title is very much not an example of that. (Confession: I’ve watched Taxi Driver half a dozen times but nev­er seen Mean Streets.) But we’ve made it to num­ber 29 in the list (up two places since the 2012 poll) and, as I had the Blu-ray in my ‘to watch’ pile, I thought I would give it anoth­er spin.

I can’t ima­gine there’s many of you who haven’t seen the film, or are unaware of it, so I’ll just bul­let point some thoughts that I had on this most recent watch.

• This was the first watch since I read the chapter on it in Quentin Tarantino’s book, Cinema Speculation, and I was much more aware of screen­writer Paul Schrader’s con­tri­bu­tion this time around. That and the par­al­lels with Ford’s The Searchers which coin­cid­ent­ally is also an influ­ence on Paul Thomas Anderson’s new film, One Battle After Another.

• Scorsese makes a well-known appear­ance as one of Travis Bickle’s mis­an­throp­ic fares, a busi­ness­man stalk­ing his wife who appears to be hav­ing an affair. He’s a revolt­ing char­ac­ter and it’s a great per­form­ance but I’d for­got­ten that Scorsese has already appeared in the film — in a Hitchcockian cameo sit­ting out­side the cam­paign office of the pres­id­en­tial can­did­ate who Cybill Shepherd’s char­ac­ter is work­ing for. Scorsese’s taxi appear­ance was unplanned — the ori­gin­al act­or was unavail­able on the night it was shot — and I won­der if he remembered that ori­gin­al cameo and just thought nobody would notice. But, in the text of the film now, that angry busi­ness­man is now also hanging around polit­ic­al cam­paigns in his short sleeves and prob­ably should be gen­er­at­ing as much Secret Service atten­tion as Bickle does.

• I’d com­pletely for­got­ten the con­veni­ence store stick up and its viol­ent con­clu­sion as the store’s own­er beats the crap out of the gunman’s corpse, Bickle hav­ing shock­ingly dis­covered his capa­city for lethality.

• The politi­cian whose cam­paign over­shad­ows the whole film — rather like Hal Philip Walker in Altman’s Nashville from the year before — is called Senator Palantine and I won­der wheth­er is any con­nec­tion between that name and the Emperor Palpatine in Star Wars — Wikipedia tells me that the char­ac­ter was named as Palpatine in the 1976 nov­el­isa­tion of George Lucas’ film and Lucas and Scorsese were fam­ously well-acquainted. And, nowadays, it’s hard to hear either name without think­ing of Palantir, Peter Thiel’s malevol­ent tech sur­veil­lance company.

Where to watch Taxi Driver

The con­tent below was ori­gin­ally paywalled.

Aotearoa: Digital rental

Australia: Streaming on ABC iView or digit­al rental

Canada: Streaming on Netflix, Criterion Channel or Starz

Ireland: Not cur­rently avail­able online

India: Streaming on SonyLIV

USA: Streaming on Kanopy or Criterion Channel

UK: Streaming on EverymanCinema.com