The Alfred Hitchcock movie that inspired ‘Taxi Driver’: “A heavy influence”
Ask a Martin Scorsese fan what they’re favourite movie is, and there’s a strong chance they’ll come back with Taxi Driver. In fact, ask anyone, regardless of their preferred director, and Scorsese’s brutal classic may still come up in conversation. The tale of Travis Bickle, a man with a burning rage against everyone and everything, is widely regarded as the symbol of the New Hollywood movement and often heralded as Robert De Niro’s crowning glory. In short, it’s a good movie.
The film and De Niro’s performance has inspired countless generations of fellow actors and filmmakers, but what about the pictures that inspired it? To celebrate half a century of the movie’s existence back in 2016, the BFI compiled a list of five films that shaped this 1970s classic in more ways than one.
John Ford’s The Searchers, Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket, and even Jean-Luc Godard’s Deux ou trois choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her in English) all get their flowers, but perhaps the best-known director on the list is the great Sir Alfred Hitchcock. It wasn’t the rage of Psycho or the tension of The Birds that made its mark on Scorsese; according to the BFI, it’s The Wrong Man we have to thank.
Released in 1956, The Wrong Man stars Henry Fonda as Christopher ‘Manny’ Balestrero, a musician who needs to find a large sum of money to cover his wife’s medical fees. Upon a visit to the insurance company, the staff inside mistake him for a criminal who had previously robbed them, setting in motion a chain of events that frame Manny for a crime he did not commit. As a silhouetted version of the director informs the audience at the start of the film, this is the only one of his films to have been heavily inspired by a real-life story.
The plot of The Wrong Man bears little to no similarity to Taxi Driver. “Elements of Alfred Hitchcock’s docudrama The Wrong Man were, however, brought to bear on the shooting style of Taxi Driver,” the BFI explains. “In a 1998 interview with Roger Ebert, Scorsese stated that the film ‘has more to do with the camera movements in Taxi Driver than any other picture I can think of. It’s such a heavy influence because of the sense of guilt and paranoia.’”
Scorsese likened the scenes with Fonda’s character’s return to the bank in police custody to “deciding a man’s fate”, similar to how Bickle’s fate is decided following his gun battle with Sport.
Scorsese has never shied away from his love for the legendary Brit. He has regularly spoken of his love for Vertigo, the film he made directly after The Wrong Man, once calling it “one of my favourite films of all time.” The man who designed the iconic title sequence for Vertigo, Saul Bass, also worked with Scorsese on Goodfellas, Casino, and his version of Cape Fear.
It doesn’t take a genius to spot Hitchcock’s impact on Scorsese’s wider body of work, but the direct influence of The Wrong Man on Taxi Driver is a little trickier to spot. Great artists have a talent for taking other people’s work and repackaging it as something totally different, and nobody would deny that Scorsese is one of the greats.
