Taxi Driver (18) + intro

Fifty years after it picked up the Palme d’Or at Cannes, Scorsese’s chilling masterpiece has lost none of its power to shock and disturb in its visceral exploration of alienation and violence in urban America.

Travis Bickle works night shifts in his taxi through districts of a ravaged New York where most cabbies refuse to go. Whilst doing so, he crosses paths with damaged characters and slides into a dangerous violent morality.

As a key filmmaking figure of the period, Taxi Driver scriptwriter Paul Schrader could have filled a strand of films titled ‘Rogue Hollywood’ all on his own. Like Shrader’s film Hardcore, screening at HOME on Sun 6 Sep, Taxi Driver explores the destructive traits of an obsessive masculinity.

In Taxi Driver, that exploration of toxicity is combined with Martin Scorsese’s kinetic direction and instinctive connection with the film’s subject matter and New York setting. The cumulative effect is one of cinema’s most potent indictments of the Hollywood orthodoxy and conservative moral consensus of 1970s USA.