'TAXI' STILL TAKES US ON A JITTERY RIDE.

Byline: John Hartl Seattle Times

One of the last great movies of Hollywood's most recent golden age - the 1970s - was Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." Originally released in early 1976, Scorsese's portrait of a lonely New York cab driver, played by Robert De Niro, divided critics and created controversy but clicked with audiences, emerging as something of a surprise box-office hit.

It marked the end of one career (Bernard Herrmann died the day after finishing his score) and the true beginning of others - notably those of screenwriter Paul Schrader and actress Jodie Foster, in her first adult-like role as a 12-year-old prostitute. And, indirectly, of the infamous John Hinckley Jr., whose obsession with Foster's performance led to the attempted assassination of President Reagan.

On its first appearance in February 1976, the New Yorker's Pauline Kael found the movie "horrifyingly funny" while acknowledging Scorsese's ability to achieve "the quality of trance in some scenes ... the whole movie has a sense of vertigo."

While not questioning the truth of the material, the New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann worried about "Scorsese's ability to lift it out of the movie gutters into which less truthful directors have trampled it." The division of opinion followed the film everywhere, even as it emerged as a critics' favorite.

Despite the misgivings of some members of the Cannes Film Festival (including Tennessee Williams, who wondered about the impact of its nearly X-rated finale), it trounced the European competition and took home the Grand Prize that year.

Foster won a British Academy Award. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the New York Film Critics Circle picked De Niro as the year's best actor. The National Society of Film Critics honored De Niro and Foster and named Scorsese the year's best director.

Yet by the time the Academy Awards rolled around in the spring of 1977, the tone of the film industry had changed. The Oscar voters embraced John G. Avildsen's feel-good boxing movie, "Rocky," ignoring Scorsese's imaginative direction, Michael Chapman's spooky cinematography and Schrader's haunted screenplay.

Nominated in four categories - best picture, actor (De Niro), supporting actress (Foster) and original score (one of two posthumous nominations that year for Herrmann) - "Taxi Driver" won nothing. It was exactly the kind of introspective, disquieting film that Hollywood would turn its back on in the blockbuster era of "Star Wars," "Jaws" and their sequels and spinoffs.

Inspired by the diaries of Arthur Bremer, the would-be assassin of George Wallace (as well as by Dostoevski's "Notes From Underground," Harry Chapin's song "Taxi" and Schrader's own experiences with isolation and alcoholism), the script's examination of an isolated Vietnam veteran did lead to an attention-getting footnote that guaranteed it a kind of immortality.

In the spring of 1981, Hinckley made an attempt on the life of then-President Reagan. (So severe was the film industry's sense of shock that the Academy Awards were postponed for two days.)

"Taxi Driver" has since been cited as Example No. 1 of a movie that can be shown to have inspired violence. Yet, was there ever a stronger argument for a violent film reflecting the society that spawned it? Which came first, Bremer or Hinckley?

"It set out to be a film about loneliness," said Schrader recently by phone from Los Angeles, where he is preparing a film of Elmore Leonard's 1985 novel about a faith healer, "Touch."

"But the subject was really self-imposed loneliness, the neurotic structures we build to perpetuate our miseries. It was clearly an extension of the existential hero, which is the primary literary hero in this century."

De Niro gets inside the friendless cabbie of the title in a way the actor rarely approaches these days - though his current performance as a lonely criminal in "Heat" carries echoes of Travis Bickle. You could imagine both men identifying with Simon and Garfunkel's 1960s ode to supreme isolation, "I Am a Rock," while failing utterly to live up to its code of feeling no pain.

Filled with hatred for the 42nd Street corruption he witnesses nightly, this 26-year-old ex-Marine tries to date a campaign worker (Cybill Shepherd), gets rejected and stalks her boss, a presidential candidate (Leonard Harris) who distances himself from Bickle's pessimistic tirades.

A failure at political assassination, Bickle finally turns his energies into freeing a child prostitute named Iris (Foster) from her creepily manipulative pimp (Harvey Keitel). The result is a bloodbath.

Scorsese once described "Taxi Driver" as "a film dealing with religious anxiety, guilt and one man's attitudes toward women - which were arrested at age 13."

The movie probes considerably deeper into the soul of a would-be assassin than, say, Robert Altman's "Nashville" from the year before (Altman always claimed that no one could really probe a psychotic's mind). Yet it still leaves us with a mystery.

Although we are made to see how the character is goaded into violence by his hellish surroundings, there are many others who share his circumstances. Why did this man turn killer, while others resisted?

De Niro shows us a frustrated Vietnam vet who gets a night-shift job as a Manhattan cab driver, partly to cope with insomnia, partly because he would be driving the streets anyway at those hours. The job inevitably heightens his sense of alienation: the riders in the back seat act as if he didn't exist, and he in turn begins to think of them as human garbage.

His attempts to communicate with those he does care about end in failure. He idolizes Shepherd, then makes the incredible faux pas of taking her, on a first date, to a hard-core porn movie. He tries to discuss his problems with an older cabbie (Peter Boyle) who might as well be speaking Mandarin, and when he follows Iris, he discovers she's in love with her pimp.

"I don't know who's weirder, you or me," Iris tells him.

Without De Niro, "Taxi Driver" might not have worked at all. He does for the film what Jon Voight did for "Midnight Cowboy," taking an essentially unsavory, obtuse, displaced person and forcing us to recognize his humanity. Without this kind of exposed and empathic performance, the film would have great difficulty justifying its extreme violence or finding an emotional center.

"Before we could get it off the ground, Marty (Scorsese) had to have his first (box-office) success with 'Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore' and De Niro had to win the Oscar for 'Godfather II,' " said Schrader. "At the time it became (financially) possible, it caught all three of us at the same point in our lives. We understood it."

Scorsese once claimed the film was based on one shot, in which De Niro is being turned down on the telephone by Shepherd: "And the camera actually pans away from him - it's too painful to see that reaction. People die because he doesn't know how to get in touch with his feelings."

Scorsese and Schrader deliberately went no further in filling in Bickle's background because, in Schrader's words, "then his problems aren't your problems. He should remain something of a cipher so you can project something onto him."

Indeed, what makes "Taxi Driver" more than a case history, what turns it into such a devastating and ultimately haunting experience, is the sense of identification that Schrader, Scorsese and De Niro build around Travis Bickle. Anyone who has ever felt alone or defeated by big-city indifference will find it easy to sympathize with Bickle - up to a point.

"Taxi Driver" touches on many of the same urban fears and frustrations as the Charles Bronson movie "Death Wish." Some audiences accepted it on that level, cheering at the bloodbath and missing the point of the epilogue.

But it was easy to dismiss the contrived, emotional arguments of the Bronson film (and its current offspring, "Eye for an Eye"). "Taxi Driver" is a nightmare that just won't stop.It ends where it begins, like a recurring dream that doubles back on itself and finds no true resolution. It's insidious.

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Photo (1) no caption (TAXI DRIVER movie poster) (2) Robert De Niro comes unhinged in "Taxi Driver" as a Vietnam veteran alienated from what he sees as a sick, twisted world.