Taxi Driver

Taxi Driver is a 1976 Martin Scorsese film in which Robert De Niro plays Travis Bickle, an alienated insomniac taxi driver. Bickle spends his spare time watching pornography in seedy theaters and driving purposelessly at night.

Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere. There's no escape. I'm God's lonely man.

He is horrified by what he sees as the moral decay around him, and when a 12 1/2 year-old prostitute gets in his cab one night, he becomes obsessed with saving her despite her total lack of interest in the idea. The film stars De Niro, Harvey Keitel, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, and Albert Brooks. The score is by Bernard Herrmann, who is noted for his work with Alfred Hitchcock (especially Psycho). The soundtrack to Taxi Driver was the last he completed before his death.

The film won the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976; was #47 on the American Film Institute's list of 100 Years, 100 Movies, and #22 on its 100 Years, 100 Thrills; is consistently in the top 50 on the Internet Movie Database's list of top 250 films; and has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry.

The movie was purported to be part of a delusional fantasy by John Hinckley, Jr which triggered his attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan in 1981, an act for which he was found not guilty by reason of insanity.