"You talkin' to me?" Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro's second picture together—the director-star team have collaborated nine times since 1973's Mean Streets—remains one of their most startling, visceral and famous. De Niro stars as Travis Bickle, a depressed Vietnam veteran who takes a job as a late-night taxi driver as a way of dealing with his insomnia, only to find himself disgusted by the crime he sees on New York City's streets . After befriending a 12-year-old prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster in her first important role, for which she received an Oscar nomination), Bickle begins to fashion himself as an avenging angel—in short, a vigilante—insisting that "someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets". That line is spoken in a voice-over, and it doesn't take much imagination to realise that Bickle believes himself to be that rain. The film was controversial on its release: Scorsese had to desaturate the colours in the final, highly violent scene in order to achieve even the maximum legal rating, and Ronald Reagan's would-be assassin, John Hinckley Jr, later styled himself after De Niro's appearance in the film and claimed to have been trying to impress Foster with the 1981 shooting. But with its terrifying screenplay, feverish cinematography and paranoid editing, not to mention Scorsese's frightening cameo as a cuckolded husband and Bernard Herrmann's final motion-picture score, the film is today regarded as a classic.

Review, 23 January 2010