The movie Martin Scorsese calls “a psychologically disturbing picture”
As one of the greatest and most challenging filmmakers of modern cinema, Martin Scorsese has created some of the most complex and disturbing movies of all time. Looking back at his filmography, whilst the likes of Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street speak to the savage gluttony of the American dream, it is the 1976 Palme d’Or winner Taxi Driver, starring Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel that remains his greatest triumph.
Penned by Paul Schrader, the moody piece of 1970s filmmaking tells the story of a Vietnam War veteran who returns home and faces utter disillusionment in his home town of New York City. Undertaking his job as a taxi driver, he crawls the streets, witnessing the degradation of the city whilst trying to conjure ways of how he can clean up the streets and enact retribution on those making contemporary life hell.
As one of Scorsese’s very first feature films, the director brought his vast knowledge of cinema to Taxi Driver, using the 1958 film Murder by Contract as direct inspiration. “The spareness, the single-mindedness of the killer,” he wrote on Letterboxd. “The ritualised quality of his preparation and his actions…it haunted me and came directly to mind when I made Taxi Driver“.
Elsewhere, Scorsese has named countless movies that had a profound effect on his youth and early films, speaking about such films in a conversation with Humanities in 2013.
“The films in the early fifties made such an impression on me,” he started, “And they were very, very strong dramatically. Then comes this ten-year period, the decade where the Legion of Decency Code was breaking down. So you have Otto Preminger making Man With the Golden Arm. You have Elia Kazan’s films. Anatomy of a Murder even, which, in the court scene, used sexually explicit language.”
Continuing, he explained the earliest movies he remembered watching in the cinema: “My parents took me to the movies. I saw Ace in the Hole by Billy Wilder, which is about cynical journalism, Sunset Boulevard. Yes, there were musicals and westerns, but the westerns ranged from Shane to Winchester ‘73, which was a very disturbing film, a psychologically disturbing picture.”
Considered one of the greatest western movies of all time, Scorsese isn’t alone in his praise of the “psychologically disturbing picture” Winchester ‘73. Starring the likes of James Stewart, Rock Hudson and Shelley Winters, the Anthony Mann-directed movie follows the story of a cowboy who is obsessed with a stolen rifle, forcing him on a trek across the American West.
Take a look at a trailer for the 1950 flick below.
