Manhattan transfers
Ian Cameron
After two weeks of seasonable inactivity, we are offered three major films opening on a single August night. This doubtless represents commercial sophistication of the highest order on the part of the distributors, but it is critically inconvenient. Rather than cram all three into a single piece. I shall save Alfred Hitchcock's cheerful Family Plot (Empire, A certificate) until next week.
The space problem is somewhat alleviated because the most expensive of the three Pictures is not just what is known in the trade as a turkey, it is a lame turkey. Harry and Walter Go to New York (Odeon, Leicester Square, U certificate) works on the assumption that incompetents engaged on a life of crime are automatically funny—the standard miscalculation in comic caper movies. In lieu of humour, there is a display of misdirected energy from the luckless duo of Elliott Gould and James Caan. The other victims of this foolishness are Michael Caine as a millionaire who robs banks for the thrill and Diane Keaton as a campaigning journalist who joins Harry and Walter in a robbery after Caine's minions have smashed her Press. The director to be blamed is Mark RYdell.
Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver (Odeon, HaYmarket) is convincing on every level, although I can imagine many a spectator °Jaside America seeing its vision of New York as an appallingly pessimistic fantasy, an extension of the protagonist's derangeent. This, I think, is exactly the reverse of the director's intentions. The less savoury asPects of New York's streets after dark are portrayed with all the fidelity that the clIrect W or can muster. Travis's behaviour, t bile it is extreme to the point of insanity, akes its cues from the environment with idea of having a gun and the contact f..,;t,h an illegal salesman are provided by a rnow driver. The idea of using it aggres'F:VelY comes from a passenger who shows ,.141 the silhouette of a woman undressing in ZtaPartment block. It's his wife, he says, but , his aPartment—a nigger lives there-niue he is going to kill his wife with a 44 44agnurn pistol. Has Travis ever seen what a A m_agnum pistol does to a woman's face? w_a"t) Magnum is among the armoury of
ons that
'41esman. Travis buys from the travelling _iurloae b
q rief but revelatory scene, Travis is in stsic. market when he hears the sounds of a hiS l-IP• re He shoots the robber with one of •
the w tly acquired guns. Worried because caPoncen is unlicensed, he is reassured by storeik the storek epeeper. As he leaves, we can see the ,. e-e • e-e • the r evidently setting to work to beat wounded
of ,.,.,eta robber to death with a length ..11 • Pipe. The film drops the scene at that point with no suggestion that the shopkeeper's reaction is surprising.
Travis's job exposes him to the unloveliness of the city, the more so because, in his insomniac need to work long hours, he will go anywhere and take anyone, even the freaks, but each night when he takes the cab back to the garage, he has to wipe the back seat. The only reactions he is capable of formulating are disgust and rage. But he is also corrupted by the milieu to the extent that his choice of entertainment for a night out with a healthy-looking girl (Cybill Shepherd) is a hardcore porno movie.
Betsy works with other well-heeled and well-scrubbed young people in the campaign headquarters of a presidential candidate. Palantine, who clearly has much in common with George McGovern. Palantine and his people seem well-meaning but inadequate to deal with the realities as Scorsese presents them. When Palantine rides in Travis's cab, he can provide no response beyond a few muttered platitudes to the illiberal views of a man who describes himself as a Palantine supporter but can think of no aim more important than cleaning up the city.
Rejection by Betsy turns Travis's rage against the Palantine organisation. From his first vision of her as an angel, he swings to the other extreme, yelling, 'You're in hell and you're going to die in hell like the rest of them.' After this, we have the scene with the husband who is planning murder. Travis tries to get help from an older driver, saying 'I've got some bad ideas in my head,' but soon is buying guns and going into training as an assassin.
Meanwhile he has become obsessed with a twelve and a half year old prostitute (Jody Foster) whom he has seen being pushed around by a pimp. When he meets her, he finds she is not completely a victim, even though the pimp tells him that he can do anything he likes with her and goes on to provide a detailed list of possibilities. Saving her becomes another of Travis's obsessions, and after his assassination attempt hrs aborted, he kills the pimp and a couple of other men in a very messy shoot-out, which leaves him seriously wounded with her sobbing nearby. A cynical epilogue shows through newspaper cuttings that the media have identified Travis as a hero. Back driving his cab, he has Betsy as a customer, driving off with a smile when she asks how much she has to pay. Bernard Herrmann's music (the last film score in a distinguished career) comes to a threatening climax as Travis drives off through the night.
Aided by Robert De Niro's remarkable performance, Taxi Driver works very well even if it is seen purely as a fragment of psychiatric case history. Where it seems most notable, though, is in the extent to which it catches the feeling of paranoia which one can hardly avoid noticing in New York. Although political paranoia has received various airings on the cinema screen, social paranoia, particularly about crime, has hardly been represented before except implicitly through the attitudes of some police movies. The picture here is of a society so sick that perhaps it requires a madman who is undeterred by ideas of legality and self-preservation to make an impression on it. The•pessimism of this view is all the more striking when one views it as a basically realistic picture.
The Gate cinema in Notting Hill Gate is showing that art-house distributors are not all slouches in the business department. They have bought an early Martin Scorsese film, Who's Knocking on My Door? (X certificate). Like the later Mean Streets, it is set among the Italian population of New York (Scorsese's own background). Even more of a mess than Mean Streets, it offers little indication of Scorsese's ability. It would have been better if we could have had a revival of his powerful Boxcar Bertha, which has a structural coherence that the two more 'personal' films lack.
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