Film Notes: Taxi Driver (1976)

Taxi Driver (1976) film notes by Tova Gannana for the Martin Scorsese: Maestro of Cinema series, presented by SIFF, Festa Italiana and Greg Olson Productions. Series curated by Martin Scorsese and Greg Olson, written by Greg Olson. The series runs through April 2026 at SIFF Cinema Uptown.

Taxi Driver opens with a close-up of a cab and its driver: man and motor, flesh and steel, against the backdrop of the city, a sea of neon. The car is the silent star. Travis drives past kids opening fire hydrants. Later, he’ll exchange his taxi for guns.

Ronnie Lang’s saxophone in Taxi Driver (1976) sounds like an invitation, then drums come in sounding like rain beating through the clouds. Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) wants to work long hours, stay up and out; he wants to see the city even though he says it makes him sick, but it keeps him from seeing himself during all those long days and nights driving. Bickle is a former Marine with an honorable discharge, fit in body, alone in spirit. He’s searching for a companion to sit with him in the front seat, but he’s a speaker – not a reader – and relationships elude him.

Travis is always in motion. His taxi cab is like an extension of himself. The rearview mirror is like a separate set of eyes, like a prosthetic through which he watches life from many angles, but when it comes to connecting with people, he’s like a blind man choosing between sugar and salt at a table.

When Travis isn’t driving, he’s taking in pornographic movies, asking out the young woman who sells him a ticket. She declines and redirects him to buy candy or soda. Her job is like his: There’s a fare involved. Who knows what she does when her shift is over?

In his cheap room, with its cheaply painted walls, Travis keeps a diary. He reads his taxi route aloud as he writes, “May 10th. Thank God for the rain, which helps wash away the garbage and the trash off the sidewalks. I’m working long hours now, six days a week, sometimes seven days a week. It’s a long hustle, but it keeps me real busy. I can take in $300, $350 a week, sometimes even more when I do it off the meter. All the animals come out at night: Buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies. Sick, venal. Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets.”

Bernard Hermann’s score feels like breath being sucked in. It makes it sound like it’s always night, accompanying Travis like a scent. It’s a presidential election year, and Travis has fallen for Betsy (Cybil Shepard), who manages volunteers in a campaign office with red carpets and black telephones. Betsy works with Tom (Albert Brooks), who’s like a William Powell to her Carole Lombard. They’re in their own 1930s screwball until Travis is spotted by Betsy, hanging back in his cab, watching her, his own way of romance. Betsy’s not thrilled by it; neither is Tom.

We see sunlight on the back of a man’s white shirt, the wide, windowed brick corner building toward which Betsy is walking as described by Travis: “I first saw her at Palantine headquarters at 63rd and Broadway. She was wearing a white dress. She appeared like an angel out of this filthy mass. She is alone.” Travis sits at his desk, his can of Coke before him, pen in hand. He’s both retelling and imagining Betsy. It’s as if he dug her out of the earth, an Eve to his very lonely Adam.

The presidential candidate, Senator Charles Palantine, is sold to us on buttons emblazoned with “We are the people.” Palantine is sold to us on the TV Travis is watching, he pitches himself in the back of Travis’ cab, and at a rally on a float. Palantine’s not so different from Travis; he’s also got a vision. Travis writes, “I believe that someone should become a person like other people.” He’s not yet 30, and yet, “Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere: in bars, in cars, on sidewalks, in stores, everywhere. There’s no escape. I’m God’s lonely man.” Travis talks to people like he’s been rehearsing; he’s determined to get it right in order to get the right response, to say whatever is that an average person would say: “You’re only as healthy as you feel.” But he’s read by others in a way that he cannot read them. In his cab, he’s a voyeur.

Betsy orders black coffee and a fruit salad, and sits across from Travis. Kris Kristofferson’s song reminds her of Travis: “He’s a prophet and a pusher, partly truth partly fiction, a walking contradiction." Travis doesn’t know who is Kristofferson. Travis doesn’t like Tom. A late night fare Travis picks up doesn’t like that his wife is sleeping at another man’s apartment. He tells Travis, “I’m going to kill her with a Magnum 44 pistol.” Sport (Harvey Keitel) doesn’t like that twelve-and-a-half-year-old Iris (Jodie Foster), who Sport is pimping, tries to escape into Travis’ cab sporting a black eye. Sport retrieves her and hands Travis a twenty dollar bill. Travis won’t spend it; later he’ll hand it back. Men possessing women, trafficking girls. For all he misunderstands, Travis understands this: He wants consent.

Travis watches American Bandstand in the same tonal shades of blues as Senator Palantine’s campaign. He watches them while holding his newly purchased gun. He lies to his parents in a letter. He takes Betsy to a porn flick, not to shock her, but to bring her closer. “You’ve got to be kidding. This is a dirty movie,” Betsy says, and walks out, hopping into the first cab that passes. Travis could have said, “Yeah, it is,” but instead he tries to convince her that it’s a regular movie, so he loses her. She doesn’t want to be part of that audience with him.

“This is nothing for a person to do,” Travis tells Iris when he gets her alone. All the bouquets he’s sent to Betsy have been returned to him. His one room like a funeral parlour. Travis doesn’t get a letter back from his parents, but he does receive a handwritten one from Iris’ mom and dad, thanking him for returning her to them.

Betsy is gone from her desk at Palantine headquarters. Forgotten? Or promoted? For a spell, guns become Travis’ vehicle the way the yellow cab was. Travis polishes his cowboy boots with precision. In his white ceramic sink, he sets a bouquet of flowers aflame.