Hallucinatory, mesmerizing and strikingly violent, Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader’s plunge into the twisted psyche of a cab-driving Vietnam vet offers a nightmarish voyage into the seedy underbelly of pre-Giuliani NYC. In perhaps his greatest performance, Robert De Niro brilliantly incarnates the lonely and deeply troubled Travis Bickle, a walking shadow adrift in a sea of “filth,” surrounded by random violence, racial tension, porno theatres and prostitution. Desperately striving to be a “normal person,” Bickle becomes obsessed with “saving” a pre-teen prostitute (Jodie Foster) from her manipulative, jive-talking pimp (Harvey Keitel) — an act of redemption which demands a blood sacrifice. Tempering the bleakness and darkness of Schrader’s script — which drew inspiration from John Ford’s The Searchers, Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket and the diaries of would-be George Wallace assassin Arthur Bremer — with a seductively noir-ish visual style and a romantic, luxurious score by the great Bernard Herrmann (completed only days before his death), Scorsese created one of the cinema’s most searing portraits of incipient madness.
