The reason Tennessee Williams hated Martin Scorsese’s ‘Taxi Driver’
One of Martin Scorsese’s most celebrated films is one of his earliest. Taxi Driver arrived on our screens in 1976 with Robert De Niro, who would go on to perform for Scorsese several times over the years, playing the lead role of Travis Bickle. Taxi Driver has drawn acclaim from all across the professional film world ever since it was first released.
However, after Taxi Driver won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1976, the American playwright Tennessee Williams, who had served as the president of the jury that year, condemned the film outright, claiming that its violence served as a “brutalising experience” for the audience.
“Watching violence on the screen is a brutalising experience for the spectator,” Williams said. “Films should not take a voluptuous pleasure in spilling blood and in lingering on terrible cruelties as though one were in a Roman circus…”
He continued, “Violence is an element of human character and should not be ignored, but in the future, I hope the cinema will dwell less constantly on offensive values without sacrificing truth.” Strong words indeed, even considering the fact that the film had just taken home the biggest prize on offer at Cannes.
However, the film had actually been booed at Cannes because of its graphic violence. Scorsese even had to alter the colour saturation of Taxi Driver’s final shootout scene to appease the Motion Picture Association of America and have them give the film an age rating.
The 1976 Cannes jury stated, “The 1976 festival was marked by grave and desperate films, some of which reflect a rare violence. We fear that violence will answer violence and that instead of denouncing it, these scenes will lead our society to a new escalation.”
Perhaps there’s a sense that Williams is a of generation or two prior to Scorsese, and that age gap represents a shifting in moral opinion, hence his disgust at the violence in the movie. Of course, today, violence in movies is more prevalent than ever, and the argument – that was still being put forth in the first part of the 21st Century – that it leads to real-life violence in society seems a touch outdated.
After all, the violence in Taxi Driver is almost a necessity. After all, Travis Bickle is a traumatised Vietnam War veteran in the throes of a severe psychotic episode. Violence is pretty much all he knows, so it’s no wonder Scorsese and writer Paul Schrader depicted it to such a degree in their film.
