Taxi Driver
Starring: Robert De Niro, Cybill Shepherd, Jodie Foster
Director: Martin Scorsese
The film: Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver was a pivotal film in the change-over from traditional, through-the-ranks directors to the film-school generation that now makes up the Hollywood establishment. Along with people such as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Brian De Palma, Scorsese brought a full bag of classroom know-how to work, along with the influence of foreign filmmakers, whose work was part of the film-school curriculum.
Although today considered an American classic, Taxi Driver borrowed heavily from the French New Wave, especially Jean Luc Godard, as well as other European filmmakers such as Francesco Rosi and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. So while it was one of the first American films to break free of the laws of Hollywood filmmaking, much of the technique was borrowed - and borrowed skilfully - from styles that were quite familiar to overseas audiences (perhaps not surprisingly it took the Golden Palm at Cannes but nothing at the Academy Awards, losing out in the best picture category to Rocky).
Across Europe, the movie poster image of Robert De Niro walking head down and hands in bomber-jacket pockets became as much of a bedroom-wall fixture as its similarly framed counterpart advertising Jean Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Godard's Breathless (1960).
