Taxi Driver (1976)Description:
1 Sheet Movie Poster
- International Style A
Year: 1976
Condition: Near mint
Dimension: 27" x 41"
Genre: Thriller
Item Description:
- Original
- One Sheet
- Single-Sided
-
Linenbacked
- International version, Style A
- Was folded now rolled
This is an original SS or single-sided one sheet movie poster
that has printing on the front side only.
This movie art item is an authentic original piece. Original movie art items are valued by
collectors worldwide and can increase in value over time.
Synopsis:
"All the animals come out at night" -- and one of them is a cabby about to snap.
In Martin Scorsese's classic 1970s drama, insomniac ex-Marine Travis Bickle
(Robert De Niro) works the nightshift, driving his cab throughout decaying
mid-'70s New York City, wishing for a "real rain" to wash the "scum" off the
neon-lit streets. Chronically alone, Travis cannot connect with anyone, not even
with such other cabbies as blowhard Wizard (Peter Boyle). He becomes infatuated
with vapid blonde presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who
agrees to a date and then spurns Travis when he cluelessly takes her to a porno
movie. After an encounter with a malevolent fare (played by Scorsese), the
increasingly paranoid Travis begins to condition (and arm) himself for his
imagined destiny, a mission that mutates from assassinating Betsy's candidate,
Charles Palatine (Leonard Harris), to violently "saving" teen hooker Iris (Jodie
Foster) from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). Travis' bloodbath turns him into a
media hero; but has it truly calmed his mind?
Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic
influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the
latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era. Scorsese and Schrader structure
Travis' mission to save Iris as a film noir version of John Ford's late Western,
The Searchers (1956), aligning Travis with a mythology of American heroism while
exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet Travis' military
record and assassination attempt, as well as Palatine's political platitudes,
also ground Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s.
Employing such techniques as Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera
moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by Bernard Herrmann's eerie
final score (finished the day he died), Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed
through Travis' point-of-view, where DeNiro's now-famous "You talkin' to me"
improv becomes one more sign of Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer
heat wave and garbage strike, Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its
violence. Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R,
and Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office
hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and
attention-getting attempts on President Ford's life, Taxi Driver's intense
portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s
audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted Reagan assassin and Foster
fan John W. Hinckley. Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes
Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting, Rocky.
Anchored by De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man," Taxi Driver
remains a striking milestone of both Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood.
Cast: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Peter Boyle,
Albert Brooks, Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, Murray Moston, Richard Higgs,
Leonard Harris, Steven Prince, Martin Scorsese, Diahnne Abbott, Frank Adu, Gino
Ardito, Victor Argo, Bob Maroff, Norman Matlock, Bill Minkin, Harry Northrup,
Robert Shields, Joe Spinell, Vic Magnotta, Brenda Dickson, Carey Poe, Peter
Savage, Ralph S. Singleton, Copper Cunningham, Deborah Morgan, Harry Cohn, Jason
Holt; Directed by: Martin Scorsese