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295 Hell on Wheels Taxi Driver Perhaps the most formally ravishing—as well as the most morally and ideologically problematic—film ever directed by Martin Scorsese, the 1976 Taxi Driver remains a disturbing landmark for the kind of voluptuous doublethink it helped ratify and extend in American movies. Of all Scorsese’s movies, Taxi Driver— being screened this week at the Music Box in a twentieth-anniversary ‘‘restoration ’’ that’s in stereo for the first time—is for me the most seductive, though I wouldn’t call it either his best film (I’d choose the underrated The King of Comedy ) or his most gut-wrenching (I’d pick the overrated Raging Bull). Most of the glamorous depictions of hell on earth and odes to stoical despair about a postapocalyptic civilization found in monuments to capitalist-urban squalor, including Blade Runner and Se7en, can be traced back to Taxi Driver, and if it continues to exert an enormous claim on our imagination, this is surely because we continue to live in its vengeful, puritanical fantasies—as well as with the dire consequences of those fantasies. Properly speaking, Taxi Driver has four auteurs, whose agendas are distinct in some specifics and overlapping in others: director Scorsese, writer Paul Schrader, actor Robert De Niro, and composer Bernard Herrmann. I’ll start with Herrmann , in part because he’s been the most neglected of the four, in part because he’s the sturdiest link to the commercial filmmaking of the three decades preceding 1976. 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), François Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451 and The Bride Wore Black), and Brian De Palma (Sisters and Obsession ). He was so adamant about his aesthetic biases that he single-handedly succeeded in persuading De Palma to eliminate the entire third act from Schrader’s script for Obsession—a radical abbreviation that was Herrmann’s prerequisite for scoring the film. His last two major scores, for Obsession and Taxi Driver, give the films so much formal, emotional, and thematic shape that the usual rule of music serving as accompaniment often seems reversed, and the images, dialogue, and sound effects seem to accompany the scores. Herrmann died at age sixty-four in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve 1975, only hours after he conducted the Taxi Driver score, which I would cite as the most 296 ESSENTIAL CINEMA richly realized of all his late compositions for movies. The one time I met him was inaLondoneditingstudioonlysixteendaysbeforehedied;thoughquiteill,hewas deciding whether to score a French film on the basis of a few rushes at a screening I’d helped set up for a filmmaker friend. Herrmann’s method of deciding involved a fascinating interface of aesthetics and business: he dictated a hypothetical instrumentation for a score to his secretary, added musicians’ fees and French studio costs, and then decided whether it was worth his while to continue. This interface of art and business is fundamental to the achievement of his Taxi Driver score, which helps disguise or at least rationalize the film’s ideological confusions, all of which circulate around the psychotic hero, Travis Bickle (De Niro). It assigns them an emotional purity that nothing else in the movie expresses —an emotional purity that coalesces around two contrasting themes that are endlessly reiterated and juxtaposed. For the purposes of this discussion I’ll call these the ‘‘heaven’’ and ‘‘hell’’ themes. The first is associated with Bickle’s feelings toward two supposedly angelic female characters—a professional political campaigner he’s attracted to, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who’s working for a presidential hopeful named Palatine, and a twelve-year-old street hooker he wants to save, Iris (Jodie Foster). (Bickle fails to develop any sort of relationship with Betsy, after making the cardinal error of taking her to a porn movie on their first date, but he improbably winds up ‘‘saving’’ Iris by killing her pimp—played by Harvey Keitel— and a couple of his associates.) The hell theme, at once more brooding and more bombastic, smoldering with repressed rage, is associated with the contaminated vision of Manhattan that informs Bickle’s tortured, puritanical reveries from first frame to last. The heaven theme is a lush, jazzy ballad of romantic yearning performed by alto saxophonist Ronnie Lang that suggests a much older and more upscale cultural tradition of big-city aspiration than anything else...

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