You can find hardly any films

You can find hardly any films which have had this kind of impact on me as Taxi Driver, I was within my first year at college doing A-Levels and had a lucky defeataddiction site couple gaps in my timetable that gave me periods off in the afternoon. I was studying Drama and English Literature and had found myself in the habit of shopping for videos blind to take home watching by myself whilst my parents were at work and my sister was in school, one movie was Taxi Driver which i selected solely on the strength of its star Robert De Niro, unaware when this occurs who the director was.

I remember it was a bright summer's day and I closed the curtains to darken the space, submerging myself to the mire of 1970s New York street life to discover the best part of two hours, completely unprepared for the terrifying but cathartic bloodbath that punctuates the film's climax. I had seen on-screen violence in gangster films like Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather or Brian De Palma's Scarface nevertheless they were very taken off my reality and depicted in an operatic or comic book fashion. Here Martin Scorsese's carnage is all the more shocking because it is so matter-of-fact, almost mundane and yet significantly arbitrary that you can not help but imagine this just might happen in actual life.

Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, the best pathological loner, a Vietnam veteran who's so dislocated from society and struggling to sleep at night that he takes to working long shifts as a cab driver, work that leads him to witness the excessive, heinous, underbelly of urban life, 2 decades before Mayor Rudy Giuliani's "Zero Tolerance" policy cracked down on crime and cleaned up inner-city Nyc which makes it a much safer place for both commerce and tourism.

Whilst off-duty Travis fantasises about Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) a woman who works at the presidential campaign offices of Senator Charles Palantine, he pictures her as a vision in pure white in stark contrast to the many prostitutes he sees working the streets through the night, and yet when that he finally gets the opportunity to just take her out they're going to see a Swedish sex education film showing in a porno theatre; illustrating how socially inept and insular he has become, like his compulsive solitude is dictating behaviour hell-bent on ensuring his isolation.

Bickle refers to himself in his journal, which serves as a narrated voice-over, as "God's Lonely Man", quoting from the essay by Thomas Wolfe, "The whole conviction of my entire life now rests upon the belief that loneliness, definately not being a rare and curious phenomenon, peculiar to myself and to a few other solitary men, is the central and inevitable fact of human existence. " Screenwriter Paul Schrader said that he set out to write about the experience of being lonely, after he left his wife for another woman who subsequently quickly left him, but instead unearthed that loneliness was an ailment for which we must actively seek a cure.

Betsy rejects Travis and he loses usually the one image of chastity which he held above the filth and depravity that's rife on the streets. Before, when Senator Palantine took a ride in his taxi, he'd suggested that some body should clean up the crime and pollution but now he decides he must simply take direct action; reverting to his Marine-trained mentally, that he arms himself and targets the presidential candidate, primarily as a result of his association to Betsy. However, Travis doesn't assassinate Palantine so he turns his attentions to Iris (Jody Foster) a child prostitute who jumped into the right back of his cab one night, he helps it be his mission to liberate her from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel) an incredibly violent act of vigilantism that is ironically misconstrued by the press as heroic.

Taxi Driver is some of those rare 'Gestalt-like' moments in cinema history where a writer, a director and an actor come together and the resulting synergy unexpectedly explodes onto the screen; enhance that Michael Chapman's resourceful cinematography, given the movie's low quality and short schedule on real locations, and the last score of legendary Hitchcock composer Bernard Herrmann and also you have the perfect motion picture hard to conceive how maybe it's improved in any way.

Not surprisingly Sony Pictures have gone to town with the 35th anniversary Blu-ray editon, presenting Taxi Driver in a full 1080p/AVC MPEG-4 transfer that restores vibrant colour to the neon lit night scenes contrasted, with excellent clarity, to the inky-black, smoke-filled streets of Nyc. On it's original cinematic release Scorsese was asked to desaturate the blood to avoid an X-certificate, here the shades of red are gloriously restored. The DTS-HD 5. 1 soundtrack is also a marked improvement, showcasing Bernard Herrmann's rich jazz score with it's unsettling use of harps but maintaining dialogue quality that has been always somewhat muffled on previous DVD versions.

Most of the extras that have been available on prior releases are presented here but upscalled to HD, alongside some brand new material including an element length commentary from writer Paul Schrader, a current interview with director Martin Scorsese, a suite of short featurettes focusing on different aspects of the production, the best which is Influence and Appreciation: A Martin Scorsese Tribute presented by Oliver Stone who was a student of Scorsese's at NYU. There's also an interactive script-to-screen option allowing you to follow the original screenplay in detail whilst the film plays.

Taxi Driver is really a visceral and suffering film that has been the "coming of age" for three of the very most distinctive voices of the 1970s boomtime in American independent cinema, they were to reach their peak and close the decade with another remarkable movie Raging Bull but that, as they say, is yet another story.