"Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets." - Travis Bickle

An opaque plume of sewer steam rises, slowly, before being dispersed by the emergence of a yellow taxi cab. Dan Perri's neon infused title designs are revealed on the re-formed mist, each credit appearing only as long as necessary before the next is displayed.

Paul Schrader's screenplay introduces the anti-hero, Travis Bickle:

Cut to Bickle's eyes as he peers through the window of his taxi, observing the city streets. The seedy splendor of 1970s New York City flashes by, images of a nightly routine that threatens to become hypnotic. This intra-diegetic gaze provides an insight into Bickle's psyche and his relationship to the city - its inhabitants, its buildings, its allure. All we see through this point of view is a melange of colors and images that remain constant and blurred.

Bernard Herrmann's remarkable career—composing classical scores to films such as Citizen Kane, Psycho, North by Northwest, Vertigo—culminated with Taxi Driver. His final opus oscillates between two contrasting parts, each with their own rhythm; one a foreboding crescendo of horns, the other, the romantic languor of a saxophone.

The binary opposition within the score serves as a counterpoint to the visuals, offsetting Bickle's roaming disdain for the city streets. The saxophone medley in Herrmann's "Main Theme" is later repeated when Bickle first encounters Betsy. The accompanying monologue is his reverie, "She appeared like an angel. Out of this filthy mass, she is alone. They...cannot...touch... her..." This evoked mood is something pure, almost celestial, and is ultimately associated with a fleeting feeling of hope in the city he abhors.

The title sequence for Taxi Driver provides a window into Travis Bickle and his world. It remains unclear whether he is savior or villain, a man with a clear conscience or an individual driven by rage and anguish.

WRITER: Shaun Mir
AUDIO EXCERPTS: Taxi Driver - Two-Disc Collector's Edition DVD (2007)
LAST UPDATE: September 5, 2011
© Art of the Title, 2011

"You know how people are. You tell 'em somethin', they start talkin'." - Linda

Firing a mix of critical thought and mesmerizing immersion, Dan Perri's title design for Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven combines street level photojournalism and credit-to-character inferences drawing the curious eye at will, the ears aswoon with "Carnival of the Animals - The Aquarium" by Camille Saint-Saens. You are nowhere if not here, with these people, in the Gilded Age of American history.

From Cinema Sights:

And then the last shot of the [opening title sequence] subtlety shifts us from photos [and] into the world of the film. In a masterful move, the [last] shot perfectly replicates the same look of the previous images, but...it is one of the actors, Linda Manz (in a photograph taken by Edie Baskin.) It’s through her perspective that we will take this journey so it is fitting that she is the one who bridges the gap from the [opening] credits into the first shot of the film.

Commentary excerpts from the 2007 Criterion Collection DVD:

Dianne Crittenden, Casting Director: "Terry...has a vision that I'm not sure everyone else who is working with him sees [but] he sees it and he gets it."

Billy Weber, Editor: "We used to get complaints...that the music at the opening of the picture, which is by Camille Saint-Saens, was not by Ennio Morricone who composed the music for the movie."

Patricia Norris, Costume Design: "I've never seen the pictures used at the front of the movie. They are different periods though, if you really want to be analytical about it [however this is more about] a feeling you want to capture; right or wrong it's [about] this feeling of poverty and hard life."

“I had to set up the movie studio and wanted to set up the characters that we were going to be dealing with and I wanted to get the audience’s attention, to tell them that they had to pay attention. And I actually built a scale model of the set with a crane to see where I could go. Then we choreographed all the positions. We introduced this [film] in one reel, which was nine minutes.

All of the various things that happen were all planned pretty well, but none of the dialog was. It was all improvised…We did about 15 takes, with 11 microphones. We rehearsed it for a day, we lit it and came back the next day, which was a Sunday, and we shot it in half a day. It turned out to be a very efficient way to get ten minutes of film. And you save your editor’s fee. It’s a very conceited thing, this shot with no cuts, it draws attention; it’s of the mode of people who make pictures. It is showing off. It sets the picture up…it’s like music [in that] it tells you what kind of deal you’re in. It’s a satire on the way people behave in these movie studios.

There was such a fuss about it. People were afraid I was going to do this or that. The more afraid they got, the more ideas they gave me. Looking back on this picture, it is a pretty tame satire. This is no big indictment. Things are much, much worse than this picture seems to say. The truth of the matter is I cannot make the kind of movies [Hollywood] wants to make. The kind of movies that I like to make, and can make, and make are not the kind of films they know how to distribute. So we basically aren’t in the same business. There’s no point in calling me to make a pair of gloves for you when I make shoes.”

“Welcome to the 1958 release cut of “Touch of Evil.” This little egg timer is set for precisely three and a half minutes. Tick, tick, tick we’re embarking on a combination thrill-ride morality tale bursting with the energy of its co-star, writer and director Orson Welles. I love the fast-running shadow along the wall. Of the three versions that exist of Touch of Evil this is the fastest-paced, the most energetic. It’s missing about six minutes of material Welles would have preferred to include. In harmony with our ticking timer and our deadly bomb this astonishingly complex master shot is going to unfold across precisely three and a half minutes. Shadows are like a Greek chorus commenting on the action in Welles-O-Vision, so is this airborne camera moving like a winged serpent over these rooftops and streets.

We are in the mythical U.S./Mexico border town of Los Robles. Connoisseurs of L.A. architecture will recognize the looped arches and fanciful galleries of Venice, California [which was] built in the 1920s by Abbot Kinney, a developer with a mad crush on Venice, Italy. These magical facades were ideal for Welles’ purposes as storyteller. They anchor us in a place apart from either the U.S. or Mexico. We can think of it as a geographic Twilight Zone.

Here are the two great romantic leads, the two greats of their time, Charlton Heston and Janet Leigh as Mike Vargas and Susie.

Henry Mancini’s music here is sensational. He organized a latin-style band using talent from outside Universal Studio. It’s a perfect counterpoint to the sensuous muscularity of the camerawork and the very precise criss-crossing of all the people; an enormous operation. Welles originally intended that the music blasting from the cantinas would create a surf of sound and atmosphere (for that see the 1998 Restoration cut where those intentions are scrupulously honored). But I have to say, as a life-long fan of the film, I find Mancini’s magnificent overture indispensable to the power of this opening, I even prefer it, with all due respect to Welles.

Small wonder there is an explosion when these two kiss. The blast plunges us into another world altogether. We are free of the elaborate crane and we are running with the characters [the camera is] handheld.”

James Naremore: “This is the second version of “Touch of Evil.”"

Jonathan Rosenbaum: “[This] was found in the mid 70′s and it 15 minutes longer, but we should emphasize right now that there is no such thing as a director’s cut, nor could there be. This is another version that was found that has more material by Welles but also more material not by Welles.”

JN: “One of the things we are seeing that he didn’t originally plan is the credits are playing over this sequence that [Welles] wanted without the credits…the photographer for this film is Russell Metty, a contract photographer at Universal and he was well known for his use of crane shots.”

JR: “This is the most famous shot of the film, but Welles himself was much prouder of a couple of other shots he did later in the film because this is the kind of thing that calls attention to itself whereas he thought that the most effective virtuoso work was the kind that wasn’t noticed by the audience.”

JN: “This shot is not simply a flamboyant tracking shot, it also has to do with the theme of the film. The film is very much about the ambiguous border between the U.S. and Mexico…the two leading characters are representatives of either side of the boarder and there is a kind of racial/ethnic theme running through the film. It’s almost as though the kiss between the Mexican character and the woman from Philadelphia sets off racial tensions. The timing of the kiss is important in relation to the explosion.”

JR: “This has got to be Orson Welles most politically incorrect movie, which is one of its strengths.”

JN: “Yes, and it is very much a political movie…with the explosion, the film shatters into montage. We might want to keep in mind that this film was shot not too long after the Supreme Court desegregation decision of 1954, the integration of Little Rock high school had taken place, the Civil Rights Movement had begun, and Welles had a long history of being involved with activities of that sort. And, in this case, he had completely transformed the novel that this film is based on (Badge of Evil by Whit Masterson) and made it into, I think, an indirect commentary on racial tensions in the United States.”

“You never got me down, Ray.” – Jake La Motta

Sometimes the opening frames of Raging Bull remind me of the linear roll of a marble in To Kill A Mockingbird’s opening sequence. Both opening sequences share the perfect music (Raging Bull’s theme is Intermezzo from the opera Cavalleria Rusticana, by Pietro Mascagni), incredibly visualized soundscapes, beautiful black and white cinematography, and a refined sense of gritty production design.

A row of shapes sits in judgment, while old-timey flashbulbs pop and die with the slowness of the tragedy that is about to unfold. What do those photos look like?

Robert DeNiro’s Jake La Motta is a coiled human animal, caged like a note on sheet music; fierce, balletic and balanced to its function. The ropes of the ring are framed like bars of music. Indeed, “give me a stage where this bull here can rage…that’s entertainment.”