The movie Martin Scorsese calls a companion piece to ‘Taxi Driver’
It’s a rather difficult task to name the most significant movie that Martin Scorsese has directed, seeing as the legendary icon of American cinema has contributed so much to the medium. The case could be made for his 1976 neo-noir psychological thriller Taxi Driver, though, which is perhaps the film when he cemented his unique style and criminal vision.
Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver sees Robert De Niro play Travis Bickle, a traumatised Vietnam War veteran turned night shift New York City cab driver whose mental state deteriorates into madness and violence. There’s certainly an influence of The Wrong Man and A Bigger Splash in Scorsese’s classic, but there’s also a deeper relationship with another film, a companion piece of sorts.
On his Letterboxd account, Scorsese admitted that he “loves the idea of putting different films together in one program,” a joy that arose from watching double features in cinemas growing up. The director believes that every movie is “in conversation with every other movie, and when there’s a big difference between the two, it’s all “the better”.
When it comes to Taxi Driver, Scorsese names one film in particular that he sees as a companion piece, although he’s reticent in admitting to its “inspiration or influence”. He instead perceives the 1958 Irving Lerner film noir crime movie Murder by Contract as a “relationship between the characters and the spirit of the pictures”.
“I saw this low-budget independent picture about a hired killer on a double bill with The Journey by Anatole Litvak—I went to see the second, but I came away thinking about the first,” Scorsese explained. “The spareness, the single-mindedness of the killer (played by Vince Edwards), the ritualised quality of his preparation and his actions…”
“It haunted me and came directly to mind when I made Taxi Driver,” the director added. While Scorsese, in general, is keen to stress that he tries not to be influenced by other movies, it appears that Murder by Contract cast a certain spell on the director when he was making one of his most acclaimed films, and the film noir crime movie has played a significant role in the development of American cinema as a whole.
The beauty of Lerner’s film for Scorsese comes from “Perry Botkin’s score, the sound of his guitar, has had a formidable influence on me (I believe that Botkin was himself influenced by the Anton Karas zither score for The Third Man). It’s where the tango guitar theme in Howard Shore’s score for The Departed came from.”
Check out the trailer for Murder by Contract below.
