"Taxi Driver" Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader and the impact created in the 70's *Note! Contains spoilers.

Reactions upon release in the 1970s

The film won the Palme d'Or at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Robert De Niro), Best Supporting Actress (Jodie Foster), and Best Original Score. It becomes. In Japan, it was selected as the best work by the critics of Kinema Junpo. Although the film received high praise from experts, it was also very popular with general movie fans and was a hit at movie theaters. In addition, De Niro and Scorsese came to be considered figures of the times due to the success of this film (when De Niro appeared on the cover of Newsweek on May 16, 1977, it was ``Niro: A Star for the 70s'' was the headline).

Looking back at Japan at the time, the student movement had ended, but there was still an anti-establishment atmosphere, and people sympathized with people who had dropped out of society (perhaps because of this, there were quite a few people who dropped out of university). there was). It was a time when Outsider looked cool, hating the idea of ​​fitting into established frameworks. American New Cinema movies that appeared from the late 1960s onwards were also popular with young people.

At the time, ``Taxi Driver'' was considered to be one of the films that joined the trend of new cinema. By the way, the film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture at the 48th Academy Awards the previous year was "One Flew Over the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest " (1975) starring Jack Nicholson. This is the story of a person who tries to find freedom in a mental hospital. In the same year, Sidney Lumet's Dog Day Afternoon Afternoon (1975) was also nominated for the Best Picture Oscar. Here, a bank robber played by Al Pacino breaks into a New York bank and has an unexpected ending. One of the origins of these Outsider films is `` Midnight Cowboy '' (1969), which depicts the friendship between the main characters living on the bottom of New York.

"Midnight Cowboy" preview

Young audiences were used to seeing movies about Outsider, so they probably accepted Travis without feeling too strange and saw some similarities with themselves in the movie. Even though I didn't have the same level of madness as him, I didn't feel like the loneliness of the city that he represented was someone else's problem. On the other hand, the scene in which he trains his body and enters a prostitute's house at the end has the feel of a chivalrous movie, and was popular with people who like this kind of movies (screenwriter Schrader He is also a Japanese film researcher, and also wrote the screenplay for the Hollywood film ` `The Yakuza '' (1974) starring Ken Takakura).

However, what was different from other New Cinema was that he did not have any companions like the main character in ``Midnight Cowboy Cowboy.'' In fact, the other main character was the taxi. Scorsese calls the car a ``metal coffin,'' and the story explores the identity of a man living in urban anonymity, holed up inside the car. Compared to the protagonists of other Outsider movies, he seemed to have a deeper inner darkness.

"Taxi Driver" (c)1976 COLUMBIA PICTURES INDUSTRIES,INC.ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

In addition to the diary of Arthur Breemer, the real person who plotted the governor's assassination, the film was made with literary works such as Dostoyevsky's ``Notes of an Underworld'' and Sartre's ``Vomiter'' in mind. In the past, people preferred a more literary and philosophical way of looking at things than they do now, so instead of seeing Travis as a ``crazy guy'' who behaves in unpredictable ways, he was seen as a man searching for his identity in a big city. I guess he was able to think about it and identify with it. One of the most important elements of New Cinema movies is ``wandering,'' in which the characters go on a spiritual journey to find out who they are.

A New York street film that influenced Spike Lee and others.