Taxi Driver - BFI Film Classics (Paperback)
  • Taxi Driver - BFI Film Classics (Paperback)
zoom

Taxi Driver - BFI Film Classics (Paperback)

(author)
£12.99
Paperback 88 Pages
Published: 31/07/2012
  • In stock

Usually dispatched within 1-2 working days

  • This item has been added to your basket

Paul Schrader was in meltdown in 1972. Drinking heavily, living in his car, he was hospitalised with a gastric ulcer. There he read about Arthur Bremer's attempt to assassinate Alabama Governor George Wallace: the story was the germ of his screenplay for Taxi Driver (1976). Executives at Columbia hated the script, but when Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, who were flying high after the triumphs of Mean Streets (1973) and The Godfather Part II (1974), signed up, Taxi Driver became too good a package to refuse.

Scorsese transformed the script into what is now considered one of the two or three definitive films of the 1970s. De Niro is mesmerising as Travis Bickle – pent-up, bigoted, steadily slipping into psychosis, the personification of American masculinity post-Vietnam. Cybill Shepherd and Jodie Foster give fine support and Scorsese brought in Bernard Herrmann, the greatest of film composers, to write what turned out to be his last score. Crucially, Scorsese rooted Taxi Driver in its New York locations, tuning the film's violence into the hard reality of the city. Technically thrilling though it is, Taxi Driver is profoundly disturbing – finding, as Amy Taubin shows, racism, misogyny and gun fetishism at the heart of American culture.

In her foreword to this special edition, published to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BFI Film Classics series, Amy Taubin considers Taxi Driver anew in the context of contemporary politics of race and masculinity in the US, and draws on an exclusive interview with Robert De Niro about his memories of making the film.

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
ISBN: 9781844574995
Number of pages: 88
Dimensions: 190 x 135 mm
Edition: 2nd ed. 2012

You may also be interested in...

Don't Look Now
Added to basket
Paperback
£12.99
The Mammoth Book of Slasher Movies
Added to basket
Singin' in the Rain
Added to basket
Paperback
£12.99
100 Film Musicals
Added to basket
Paperback
£24.99
Star Wars - The Bounty Hunter Code
Added to basket
100 Science Fiction Films
Added to basket
Star Wars Storyboards
Added to basket
100 Cult Films
Added to basket
Paperback
£25.99
The Good, The Bad and The Multiplex
Added to basket
Harry Potter on Location
Added to basket
Studying Hammer Horror
Added to basket
The Wizard of Oz
Added to basket
Paperback
£12.99
Poe Pictures
Added to basket
Paperback
£25.00
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
Added to basket

Please sign in to write a review

Your review has been submitted successfully.