Top 250 Challenge: 142

Taxi Driver (1976)

Number 37 on IMDb's Top 250
Nominated by Mick

Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) is an alienated, isolated, depressed and sexually frustrated young man of 26 from the Midwest, who was a Marine in the Vietnam War. He suffers from insomnia and consequently takes a job as a taxi driver in New York City, and volunteers to work the overnight shift "anytime, anywhere". Travis spends his spare time watching pornography in seedy theaters and driving around aimlessly through the shadiest neighborhoods of Manhattan.

Travis is horrified by what he considers the moral decay around him, and when Iris (12 year old Jodie Foster), a 12½ year-old prostitute, gets in his cab one night to escape her pimp, Travis becomes obsessed with saving her despite her complete lack of interest in the idea, explaining that she was "stoned" when she tried to escape, and her pimp, Matthew or "Sport" (Harvey Keitel), is actually a kind and caring person.

Travis is also obsessed with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), an aide for New York State Senator Palantine, who is running for the presidential nomination and is promising dramatic social change. She is initially intrigued by Travis and agrees to a date with him after he flirts with her and sympathizes with her own apparent loneliness. On the date, however, Travis takes her to a pornographic film, and she leaves him, disturbed.

Spurned by bother Iris and Betsy, Travis slowly spirals toward insanity and begins planing the assasination of Senator Palantine, but is foiled at the last minute. He then turns his sights on Sport. Hilarity ensues.

Trivia: The actress who played Iris's friend in the film was a real prostitute that Jodie Foster studied to pick up on the character. Due to her age Jodie Foster could not do some of the more explicit scenes. Instead her older sister Connie Foster was used as a double. The scene where Travis Bickle is talking to himself in the mirror, the famous, "You lookin' at me?" scene, was completely ad-libbed by Robert De Niro. The screenplay details just said, "Travis looks in the mirror."

Good movie. Travis tends to be in a self inflicted loneliness. He keeps doing things to ensure that he stays lonely (i.e. taking Betsy to a porn movie on their first date). He seems to be torn between the unobtainable innocent (Betsy) and the obtainable innocent (Iris). De Niro is very intense in this role, as he usually is. Foster and Sheppard both are very good. Thanks Mick.