Scorcese offered a dark taxi ride within an amazing movie

Robert DeNiro portrays a damaged Vietnam War veteran in Martin Scorsese's 1976 classic "Taxi Driver."

By Leonardo Salazar

Tejano Tribune Film Critic

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

On Feb. 8, 1976, young filmmaker Martin Scorsese released a challenging film about a man who works in a taxi in the nightshift while the little stability he had starts falling apart.

“Taxi Driver” hit cinema screens on that date… and since then, cinema would never be the same. Scorsese already had made four feature films and some short films while studying film at the University of New York, but “Taxi Driver” was the one that changed everything.

Telling the story of Travis Bickle -- played by Robert De Niro-- a Vietnam veteran who starts working at night driving a taxi throughout New York, he starts to realize that, at night, all the bad and dirty things of the city - drug dealers, drug addicts, prostitutes, thieves, criminals, etc.- come out, giving him a sense of responsibility to get rid of all that dirty of the city. That’s when everything really goes downhill.

Considered one of the best movies of all time, Scorsese explored all the ways a movie can have social impact. Several reasons support this opinion. First of all, the directing. May God bless the day Martin Scorsese was born because it gave us one of the greatest artists of the history of mankind and a truly genius at filmmaking. Since his first short films, it is noted how Scorsese really knows how to use the camera, because the camera movements and shot angles do an extraordinary job by being pretty ambitious, powerful enough to carry a message.

For example, the scene where Travis drops a little bag of salt into a cup of water and we just see and hear the salt getting dissolved while Travis just looks at it. This might had confused some people, but it represents what is happening inside his head as how loud abstract sound of the salt gets, representing how no good things are happening in his life, and how his mental stability is dissolving, just as the salt.

Another amazing scene is where Travis calls Betsy after screwing it up and wants to apologize to her, but she just ignores the call. At that moment, the camera pans to the right and we just leave an empty hallway while Travis is talking. This can represent how lonely Travis is (just as the hallway), but something Scorsese said is that it really represented how shameful and embarrassing should be for audiences to see this (because we see how Travis screwed things up and now he tries to fix it but he can’t) and the camera just moves to avoid seeing his embarrassing scene.

With the amazing and meticulous directing by Scorsese, the story is told from an extraordinary perspective. And now that I mentioned the story, the reason why this movie is so great is because of the amazing script. When Paul Schrader wrote the script, he was passing through a terrible time in his life. He was working as a taxi driver at night while dealing with a horrible divorce.

Schrader himself declared that he was going insane so he decided to write this story and create the character of Travis Bickle in an effort to avoid become him. Interesting fact: when Paul Schrader was writing the script, he kept a loaded gun on his desk to get inspiration. In my opinion, the script by Schrader is one of the best in Hollywood history because it perfectly portrays the life of a man whose stability was already down but here it definitely falls apart.

I must confess that when I first watched “Taxi Driver,” I was around 13 so I didn’t totally get it and there were things I didn’t understand, but so far I’ve seen it maybe five or six times and now I understand and appreciate the story of a man who wanted to be someone. He sees himself as the person who will be the savior of the city, so he first tries to kill the president candidate (which goes wrong), and then tries to rescue an underage prostitute.

Some might call it the story of an anti-hero, but I think that’s wrong, as it is actually a story about loneliness, masculinity, and the descent to instability, as Travis tries to find a life purpose through violence against what he considers the dirt of society and “clean up” the city.

So, in a few words, “Taxi Driver” is not only a movie, it is a character study to analyze loneliness and mental instability in a man who is desperate to find a purpose, thinking he might find it through violence.

Before finishing the article, I’d like to add a very interesting fact about the movie. I’m not saying any spoilers, I’ll just say that at the end of the movie, there is a shooting scene in a building, and that scene is very violent and bloody. This caused the executive producers of Columbia Pictures to delete that scene of the film.

A bloody final scene escaped removal by reducing color saturation.

There is a legend - some say it’s true, some say it isn’t - that when Scorsese found out that Columbia Pictures wanted to delete such a big scene, he bought a gun, went to a bar, and just drank all night. Once he got very drunk, he reportedly was going to go to the studio and shoot all the executives for trying to modify his film. We don’t know if this is true, but in the end, they didn’t delete the scene, they just changed the color saturation to reduce the bloody impact.

The movie won the Cannes Film Festival of that year and it is now considered one of the greatest movies of all time. In my opinion, one of the biggest art masterpieces of all history. I always give it a ranking of all stars.