Customer Reviews

Taxi Driver (BFI Film Classics)

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With this entry in the BFI Film Classics collection, Amy Taubin has written a very well-researched, entertaining and informative examination of this indisputable American film classic. In addition, this book isn't too literate or hard to understand, as some of these type of film analyses can be. It is written clearly and with a great deal of detail. A must for any fan of this film, anyone interested in American cinema of the 70's, or fans of legendary director Martin Scorsese. Excellent!

So, I honestly love Amy Taubin. All her reviews I've read, and the essays she's done for Criterion Collection releases, and even her shared love for My Own Private Idaho sold me on buying this book.

I ended up coming away a bit dissapointed.

The book doesn't really shed anything new on the film. Almost everything she's discusses it mentioned by either Scorsese or Schrader on the old Criterion laserdisc commentary of this film.

There were only a couple of new ideas I gathered from this book. First, the heavy handed sexual themes. I always knew they were there, but not in the way she brings it up. The scene on the cover of the book, I never really put together in my head that he's trying to reinact a fantasy of killing people performing intercourse. Even the scene where he kills Keitel, he whips out his gun and says "Suck on this!". The sexual connotation never hit me.

The other thing this book shed light on was the parallel between cowboys and indians. She brings up many parallels to The Searchers and how Jodie Foster is the Natlaie Wood character, Sport is the indian dresses in beads and feathers, and Travis with his boots is the cowboy who thinks he'll save the day.

Aside from that, it offers nothing new. To those who lack a laserdisc player, I would suggest this book. You honestly can't beat the price.

I thoroughly enjoyed this insightful little book, especially it's satisfying psychological portrait of Travis Bickle, "Taxi Driver's" disturbed and fascinating protaganist, deftly played by Robert De Niro. Amy Taubin is a gifted writer, whose acute sensitivity--perhaps a bit too acute regarding some of her comments about Bremmer--makes for an engrossing read. It's inconceivable to me that anyone who reads this work could put it down without a deeper appreciation of this seductive, volatile film.

This is a very short book that summarizes the plot of Taxi Driver. The author adds a handful of ideas along the way, ranging from the obvious (Travis Bickle is a borderline personality) to the questionable (when buying guns, he's choosing from a wide range of penises). It helps that the author is a woman. Her take on the violence and sexuality of the story is slightly different from the other (male) reviews I have read. However, there's so little here that is new, it's not worth buying. This would be better as a chapter in a larger book.

I have been collecting a lot of the BFI Film Classics Books, and was looking forward to adding TAXI DRIVER to the collection as it is one of the best movies of all time. After waiting almost a year for it to come out at last, the book is well worth the wait. It is written very well, concisely and easy to understand, goes through and touches on a variety of aspects on the film and includes a number of beautiful color photos. It is a great book, as are all of the BFI Film Classics books, perfect companions to your favorite movies.

To say that a movie inspires someone is usually thought of positively. Taxi Driver, by contrast, has the distinction of being the only movie ever to directly inspire someone to attempt an assassination of a sitting President of the United States. John Hinckley may have been a crack, but that alone does not explain why, of all the movies ever made, his psyche latched on to this one to provide momentum for his dysfunction. That Taxi Driver is also a classic independent of its tainted legacy, tapping into a time and place as well as a personality, makes it ripe for examination.

Amy Taubin gives it a try, but with decidedly mixed results. Unlike some BFI film analyses that take us behind the scenes to the story behind the movie, Taubin devotes little time to how Taxi Driver came about. Other than that screenwriter Paul Schrader wrote the script after coming off a psychological breakdown, and that director Martin Scorsese was hot off the trails of Mean Streets, Taubin dives right into the action. When she sticks to pure analysis, she does not do half bad. Anyone interested enough in Taxi Driver, the movie, should be at least moderately interested in TAXI DRIVER, the BFI book.

Taubin's wheels come off, though, in the same way they do for so many other authors in this series, specifically with her clunky socio-political analysis. Remember the scene in which Travis Bickle (Robert de Niro) confronts Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) at the campaign headquarters of Senator Palantine after Betsy had rejected him? Betsy's coworker Tom escorts Bickle out and, at the door, Bickle has a bit of a fit and strikes some `karate' pose straight out of a Kung-Fu Fighting music video. I always took Bickle's stance as unserious. Yes, Bickle is a loose cannon, but that karate stance was just for show when the cannon was close to popping.

Taubin takes it seriously, stating that this manifests Bickle's training as a killer and lends credence to his backstory of having been in Vietnam. Taubin then adds this chortler parenthetically: "Another possibility is that he learned his commando techniques in some underground right-wing militia group." It is almost impossible to live outside one of the bubbles of liberalism (Taubin writes for the Village Voice in New York City), read that line while drinking coca-cola, and not have it spew out your nose, thereby ruining your small little investment in this book. Yes, it is `possible' that this is the case, in that metaphysical sense that anything unproven might be possible. Yet there is nothing within the movie itself which suggests this. It appears to be nothing more than the manifestation of Taubin's own limited political sense projected onto the movie. It reminds me of the unintended best line ever spoken by renown film critic Pauline Kael after Nixon won in 1972, when she stammered that she could not understand how it could have happened when everyone she knew had voted for McGovern.

Unsurprisingly given the twist of modern liberalism, Taubin's political reflexes strike sharply along race and gender lines. Here, too, they go off base. Taubin acknowledges that the pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel) was purposefully cast white so as not to offend blacks, even after some digging revealed that the pimping of underage girls was basically an all black career track. Yet she still criticizes the film for its racism. She also interprets racism into the scene in which Bickle takes out a black robber in a neighborhood deli. Yet why exactly this is racist is unclear. I would ask whether Taubin is familiar with the realities of street crime, but as seen above regarding the pimp, she is not about to let something small like reality get in the way of ideological purity.

Although her views on sexism are not as displayed so prominently, the one example that does shine through is simply disturbing and makes one exceptionally grateful Taubin did not explore this avenue further. She states that Betsy, after walking out of the porno flick Bickle has taken her to, has been subjected to something close to date rape. GASP! But, no, she has not, and it demonstrates an exceptional disregard for using that word in an appropriate and mature manner.

All in all, TAXI DRIVER (the book) is worthwhile for the fan and movie buff. But if you like your analysis free of the reflexive leftism all too typical in the arts, then this book, like many others in the BFI series, will come up short.

Amy Taubin, long-time film critic, has written one of the best works on film I've ever read, about one of the most compelling films ever made. Taubin's intelligence, cinematic sophistication, and great knowledge of film history help one think about "Taxi Driver" with more dimension and pleasure, if pleasure's the right word. She's written a fascinating story about this film.

This is a very good look at "Taxi Driver." Taubin covers the making of the film (the money Scorsese got for making it might buy one day's worth of catering today) and gives the movie a very close analysis. She touches on key issues such as 1)how it stays close to and deviates from Arthur Bremer's experiences as he tracked George Wallace 2) the interplay between Bernard Herrmann's score and the images 3)how "Taxi Driver" can be seen as borrowing from the horror film 4) how Travis Bickle relates to black people. These are topics that, to me, have not really been covered in such depth before.

"Taxi Driver" is very well done, one of the best in the BFI series.

I felt that many of the ideas 'behind' Taxi Driver postulated here were rather far-fetched to the point of being ludicrous. I can't elaborate as it's been years since I've read it.