Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese Still TAXI DRIVER 1976 TD - 39 Vint Orig
Item History & Price
| Reference Number: Avaluer:35913604 | Size: 8x10 |
| Original/Reproduction: Original | Modified Item: No |
| Object Type: Photograph | Country/Region of Manufacture: United States |
| Industry: Movies |
(This looks MUCH better than this pictures above. The circle with the words, “scanned for eBay, Larry41” does not appear on the actual photograph. I just placed them on this listing to protect this high quality image from being bootlegged.) Robert De Niro, Martin Scorsese still TAXI DRIVER 1976 MINT TD-39, vintage original photograph The circle with the words, “scanned for eBay, Larry41” does not appear on the actual photograph. I just placed it on this listing ...to protect this high quality image from being bootlegged. This would look great framed on display in your home theater or to add to your portfolio or scrapbook! A worthy investment for gift giving too! PLEASE BE PATIENT WHILE ALL PICTURES LOAD After checking out this item please look at my other unique silent motion picture memorabilia and Hollywood film collectibles! SHIPPING COST CAN BE CUT WHEN SHIPING MULTIPLE ITEMS TOGETHER AND SAVE $ See a gallery of pictures of my other auctions HERE! This photograph is a real photo chemical created picture (vintage, from the Hollywood studio release) and not a copy or reproduction. DESCRIPTION: "All the animals come out at night" -- and one of them is a cabby about to snap. In Martin Scorsese's classic 1970s drama, insomniac ex-Marine Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) works the nightshift, driving his cab throughout decaying mid-'70s New York City, wishing for a "real rain" to wash the "scum" off the neon-lit streets. Chronically alone, Travis cannot connect with anyone, not even with such other cabbies as blowhard Wizard (Peter Boyle). He becomes infatuated with vapid blonde presidential campaign worker Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who agrees to a date and then spurns Travis when he cluelessly takes her to a porno movie. After an encounter with a malevolent fare (played by Scorsese), the increasingly paranoid Travis begins to condition (and arm) himself for his imagined destiny, a mission that mutates from assassinating Betsy's candidate, Charles Palatine (Leonard Harris), to violently "saving" teen hooker Iris (Jodie Foster) from her pimp, Sport (Harvey Keitel). Travis' bloodbath turns him into a media hero; but has it truly calmed his mind? Written by Paul Schrader, Taxi Driver is an homage to and reworking of cinematic influences, a study of individual psychosis, and an acute diagnosis of the latently violent, media-fixated Vietnam era. Scorsese and Schrader structure Travis' mission to save Iris as a film noir version of John Ford's late Western The Searchers (1956), aligning Travis with a mythology of American heroism while exposing that myth's obsessively violent underpinnings. Yet Travis' military record and assassination attempt, as well as Palatine's political platitudes, also ground Taxi Driver in its historical moment of American in the 1970s. Employing such techniques as Godardian jump cuts and ellipses, expressive camera moves and angles, and garish colors, all punctuated by Bernard Herrmann's eerie final score (finished the day he died), Scorsese presents a Manhattan skewed through Travis' point-of-view, where De Niro's now-famous "You talkin' to me" improv becomes one more sign of Travis' madness. Shot during a New York summer heat wave and garbage strike, Taxi Driver got into trouble with the MPAA for its violence. Scorsese desaturated the color in the final shoot-out and got an R, and Taxi Driver surprised its unenthusiastic studio by becoming a box-office hit. Released in the Bicentennial year, after Vietnam, Watergate, and attention-getting attempts on President Ford's life, Taxi Driver's intense portrait of a man and a society unhinged spoke resonantly to the mid-'70s audience -- too resonantly in the case of attempted Reagan assassin and Foster fan John W. Hinckley. Taxi Driver went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, but it lost the Best Picture Oscar to the more comforting Rocky. Anchored by De Niro's disturbing embodiment of "God's lonely man, " Taxi Driver remains a striking milestone of both Scorsese's career and 1970s Hollywood. CONDITION: This still is in MINT condition (as near perfect as you can find, uncirculated as if new but it’s 42 years old!). I doubt there is a better condition still on this title anywhere! Finally, this is a vintage original. (This is NOT a cheap digital dupe, a re-release or copy, it is a real vintage photograph made the year of the release of the film.)It is worth more than $10-25 but since I have recently acquired two huge collections from life-long movie buffs who collected for decades… I need to offer these choice items for sale on a first come, first service basis to the highest bidder. SHIPPING:Domestic shipping would be FIRST CLASS and well packed in plastic, with several layers of cardboard support/protection and delivery tracking. International shipping depends on the location, and the package would weigh close to three quarters of a pound with even more extra ridge packing. PAYMENTS: Please pay PayPal! All of my items are unconditionally guaranteed. E-mail me with any questions you may have. This is Larry41, wishing you great movie memories and good luck… BACKGROUND: Are you talkin' to me? Well, I'm the only one here. Travis Bickle in "Taxi Driver" It is the last line, "Well, I'm the only one here, " that never gets quoted. It is the truest line in the film. Travis Bickle exists in "Taxi Driver" as a character with a desperate need to make some kind of contact somehow - to share or mimic the effortless social interaction he sees all around him, but does not participate in. The film can be seen as a series of his failed attempts to connect, every one of them hopelessly wrong. Bickle (Robert De Niro) asks a girl out on a date and takes her to a porno movie. He sucks up to a political candidate and ends by alarming him. He tries to make small talk with a Secret Service agent. He wants to befriend a child prostitute, but scares her away. He is so lonely that when he asks, "Who you talkin' to?" he is addressing himself in a mirror. This utter aloneness is at the center of "Taxi Driver, " one of the best and most powerful of all films, and perhaps it is why so many people connect with it even though Travis Bickle would seem to be the most alienating of movie heroes. We have all felt as alone as Travis. Most of us are better at dealing with it. Martin Scorsese's 1976 film, which is now being re-released in a restored color print, with a stereophonic version of the Bernard Herrmann score, is a film that does not grow dated, or overfamiliar. I have seen it dozens of times. Each time I see it, it works; I am drawn into Travis' underworld of alienation, loneliness, haplessness and anger. It is a widely known item of cinematic lore that Paul Schrader's screenplay for "Taxi Driver" was inspired by "The Searchers, " John Ford's 1956 film. In both films, the heroes grow obsessed with "rescuing" women who may not, in fact, want to be rescued. They are like the proverbial Boy Scout who helps the little old lady across the street whether or not she wants to go. "The Searchers" has Civil War veteran John Wayne devoting years of his life to the search for his young niece Debbie (Natalie Wood), who has been kidnapped by Commanches. The thought of her in the arms of an Indian grinds away at him. When he finally finds her, she tells him the Indians are her people now and runs away. Wayne then plans to kill the girl, for the crime of having become a "squaw." But at the end, finally capturing her, he lifts her up (in a famous shot) and says, "Let's go home, Debbie." The dynamic here is that Wayne has forgiven his niece, after having participated in the killing of the people who, for 15 years or so, had been her family. As the movie ends, the niece is reunited with her surviving biological family, and the last shot shows Wayne silhouetted in a doorway, drawn once again to the wide open spaces. There is, significantly, no scene showing us how the niece feels about what has happened to her. In "Taxi Driver, " Travis Bickle is also a war veteran, horribly scarred in Vietnam. He encounters a 12-year-old prostitute named Iris (Jodie Foster), controlled by a pimp named Sport (Harvey Keitel). Sport wears an Indian headband. Travis determines to "rescue" Iris, and does so, in a bloodbath that is unsurpassed even in the films of Scorsese. A letter and clippings from the Steensmans, Iris' parents, thank him for saving their girl. But a crucial earlier scene between Iris and Sport suggests that she was content to be with him, and the reasons why she ran away from home are not explored. The buried message of both films is that an alienated man, unable to establish normal relationships, becomes a loner and wanderer, and assigns himself to rescue an innocent young girl from a life that offends his prejudices. In "Taxi Driver, " this central story is surrounded by many smaller ones, all building to the same theme. The story takes place during a political campaign, and Travis twice finds himself with the candidate, Palatine, in his cab: Once, the candidate is with a hooker; the next time, with campaign aides. Travis goes through the motions of ingratiating flattery on the second occasion, but we, and Palatine, sense something wrong. Shortly after that Travis tries to "free" one of Palatine's campaign workers, a blond he has idealized (Cybill Shepherd). That goes wrong with the porno movie. And then, after the fearsome rehearsal in the mirror, he becomes a walking arsenal and goes to assassinate Palatine. The Palatine scenes are like dress rehearsals for the ending of the film. With both Betsy (Shepherd) and Iris, he has a friendly conversation in a coffee shop, followed by an aborted "date, " followed by attacks on the men he perceives as controlling them; he tries unsuccessfully to assassinate Palatine and then goes gunning for Sport.
