Taxi Driver: an offspring of the "noir" genre.
Taxi Driver, the movie written by Paul Schrader and directed by Martin Scorcese,proposes a personal and critical but realistic view of the post Vietnam war United-States. It reveals the important social instabilities of the big North-American urban centers through the odyssey of a schizophrenic young war veteran taxi driver in the sleaziest areas of New-York. The Big Apple is, in the eyes of this main character, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), depicted as a gigantic human dumping ground. It represents accordingly an anti-thesis to the famous "American Dream" and shows the permanent underlying violence of this society.
Although it was produced in 1976 and despite the fact that it doesn't includes all the classical features of a "film noir", Taxi Driver can be considered as a good "modern offspring" of that specific film genre. Elements such as the score, by Bernard Herrmann, locations, lights and even the themes approached give the movie a dark and gloomy atmosphere which is so particular to this "French label". Also the period during which this film has been produced (the beginning of the seventies) - a post-war (Vietnam war lost) and political disillusionment (Watergate scandal) era - recalls the first age ( the forties and fifties) of the "film noir"; similar times, similar productions? At the same time, it has to be noticed that Taxi Driver also involves ingredients typical of other film genre such as the western, horror, or urban melodrama. .
Scorcese offers in Taxi Driver a nightmarish vision of New York: most of the .
scenes are filmed in the lowest boroughs of the city where dirty and messy sidewalks are mainly populated by prostitutes, pimps, drug dealers, drug addicts, gangsters and low lives peoples.
