![]() ![]() In spite of the Italian plumber's questionable credentials, Mario Kart offers up some of the best racing action around, it's just that rather than on a Sunday afternoon it usually happens after closing time at the local pub in the idyllic setting of the Circuit de Dave's Living Room. Though admittedly he does at least have a Nigel Mansell moustache for added downforce. Nor are his overalls plastered with sponsor logos. He's not an athletic, precision sportsperson who lives entirely on a diet of chicken and brown rice. ![]() Go see.As racing icons go, Mario doesn't exactly fit the mould. De Niro’s two dialogue scenes with Foster and Shepherd are superb. The visual mastery of Taxi Driver is still gripping, particularly the fixed camera shots on the side of the cab, and the vérité scenes in the real mean streets themselves. Palatine’s slogan is “We are the people.” It was only on this viewing that I noticed the posters for his opponent: Goodwin, whose slogan is the familiar-sounding “A Return To Greatness”. Like Robert Altman’s Nashville, Taxi Driver had a dark political significance in that bicentennial year of 1976. (Disturbingly, Scorsese’s passenger is hanging around outside there, too.) They are working for Senator Charles Palatine (Leonard Harris) a candidate in the presidential primaries – party unspecified – who is at risk of assassination. You can also find yourself forgetting about the fascinating daylit scenes in the political office where Albert Brooks gives a great, overlooked performance as the nervy and nerdy researcher Tom, failing to get to first base with Betsy. What looked like an irredeemable squalid mess from which nothing can conceivably be salvaged, nothing straightened out, is a hellhole from which Travis returns in Gladstonian triumph. Watching it again now, what strikes me is that ending’s anti-Chinatown quality. And the blitzkrieg horror of the penultimate scene tends to expunge from your memory the actual last scene, which seals the film with a layer of irony. Chekhov said that a gun introduced in act one goes off in act two: as for a suitcase full of guns bought in a scuzzy hotel room from a guy called Easy Andy … uh oh.Īs ever with this movie, no matter how many times you watch it, the horror, the almost physical smear of sleaze across your skin strikes you afresh, along with the N-bombs and the misogyny – read politically now in a way they weren’t in 1976. The violent pressure inside his skull is made worse by listening to the psychotic fantasies of a creepy passenger, a cameo from Scorsese himself. Rejected by beautiful political aide Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) after a catastrophic date at one of the ubiquitous porn theatres, Travis becomes ambiguously obsessed with child prostitute Iris (Jodie Foster), abused by her pimp Sport (Harvey Keitel). He’s the insomniac ex-marine, traumatised by Vietnam, so hardened he doesn’t mind going to scary rough places such as … Brooklyn. It has become a critical tradition to muse on how much has changed in New York since Travis Bickle, unforgettably played by the livewire Robert De Niro, roamed the night-time streets in his checker cab. It was last rereleased here six years ago for its 35th anniversary and five years before that for the 30th. M artin Scorsese’s 1976 neon-lit ordeal shocker Taxi Driver is back once again to deliver another punch to the solar plexus, with screenplay by Paul Schrader, superlative jazz score by Bernard Herrmann, cinematography by Michael Chapman – revived in UK cinemas as part of the Scorsese retrospective at London’s BFI Southbank. ![]()
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