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.

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Where to watch Taxi Driver