Taxi Driver was just on regular old-fashioned network television here...an odd thing to be watching on a Saturday afternoon while making out gift shopping lists with all kinds of Christmas commercials interspersed. My college boyfriend owned the soundtrack to Taxi Driver and we used to listen to it often, and since Robert DeNiro's voiceover is included, I now have the freakish ability to talk along with the movie while Travis is making all his vigilante plans. And not just everybody's favorite Are you talking to ME? but things like The days move along with regularity, then suddenly there is change and From now on it'll be total organization...every muscle must be tight.
Bernard Herrmann, the genius who came up with the music for Psycho and Vertigo and so many other film classics, scored Taxi Driver and apparently died right after it was recorded. It has the well-known plaintive saxophone, but there are also these great menacing horns and weird waves of harp rippling through the background. All together it has a prowling, unsettled sound, which is perfect. (Click here for excerpts.) Once you listen to the soundtrack separately from the movie, you tend to get a better appreciation for the whole mood and message behind it, because what could have been just a cheesy 1970s backdrop is instead as integral as the action on camera itself.
