Taxi Driver At 50: Scorsese & De Niro's Greatest Masterpiece

On February 8, 1976, Taxi Driver premiered at the Coronet Theater on Broadway, immediately generating a response of shock and awe among those there to witness this historic event. In the 50 years since its release, the movie has become a touchstone of modern cinema, revered as director Martin Scorsese’s greatest work.

From its nightmarish opening sequence to an ending quite possibly taking place in Travis Bickle’s head, Taxi Driver is work of unedifying realism, couched in terms of a marginalized loner’s dizzying delusions of grandeur. It self-consciously occupies the phantasmic space between dreams and reality that cinema was designed to access.

As a result, the movie unlocks truths about its disturbing subject matter that surface-level consciousness might overlook. We get to the heart of male loneliness, the deep psychological wounds war leaves behind, the real roots of establishment hatred, and the motivations behind violently antisocial tendencies. It’s a portrait that belongs even more to the present epoch than to its own.

Taxi Driver is the very best of Martin Scorsese’s best decade of filmmaking, and remains the pinnacle of Robert De Niro’s work as an actor. In fact, it’s hard to think of another actor who’s given a performance this singularly complete or dazzlingly original during the course of their career. Not even Brando, Pacino or Nicholson have done so.

Taxi Driver Was Released On February 8, 1976

Taxi Driver debuted in New York to a mixed reception. Movie critics generally praised it as a groundbreaking work of cinema, whereas other commentators were up in arms about the graphic violence of its climactic sequence, and the portrayal of a 12-year-old child prostitute by Jodie Foster.

Chicago Tribune editor Gene Siske famously tore into the film on his PBS show with Roger Ebert. "The violence is so strong that I ended up looking away from the film in more ways than one," Siskel complained.

Needless to say, Ebert profoundly disagreed with his fellow reviewer, suggesting that the graphic violence on display is “necessary, in order to provide a conclusion to all this pressure that's been building up during the film." In his written review of the movie, Ebert called it one of the best he’d ever seen.

Many other prominent figures in the industry would later concur with his perspective. Either way, Taxi Driver was hugely popular with audiences. It remained Martin Scorsese’s highest-grossing picture until The Color of Money overtook it in 1986, and had an indelible cultural impact far beyond the big screen.

On Taxi Driver’s 50th anniversary, it’s worth remembering the struggles the movie has had to go through to get to this point. Columbia Pictures repeatedly tried to shut down production while it was being made, it was denigrated as shocking and exploitative upon its release, and was blamed for the attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981.

It’s taken decades for the film to be accepted as an undisputed classic of its art form. Yet, in recent years, it’s rightly acquired the status of a timeless classic that continues to deliver fresh insight with each new watch.

The Movie Was Martin Scorsese’s 2nd Collaboration With Robert De Niro

Coming just over a year after Martin Scorsese’s romantic comedy movie Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, and 10 months after Robert De Niro won his first Oscar for playing Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver turned both figures into giants of the industry overnight. They’d previously worked together on 1973’s Mean Streets, but this collaboration was different.

From his months working as an actual New York cabbie to prepare for the film, to the challenge he faced performing with Travis’ mohawk haircut, De Niro went above and beyond for his first lead role in a major release. The actor created Travis Bickle through a process of constant dialogue both with his director and his external environment.

Building on Paul Schrader’s deeply personal script, both the director and his lead performer integrated the real sights and sounds of 1970s New York into their work on Taxi Driver. Its most famous scene was wholly improvised by De Niro, with Scorsese himself holding the camera in front of him at a low angle as he glared at a mirror.

Taxi Driver Is Scorsese & De Niro’s Greatest Masterpiece

Which Robert De Niro movie is the actor’s best is a matter for subjective debate, and the same goes for Martin Scorsese’s best work as a director. At the same time, only Raging Bull can hold a candle to Taxi Driver as a similarly definitive work of greatness in the canon of Scorsese-De Niro collaborations.

More than any other movie the pair have worked on together, it lives and breathes the city they belong to. Taxi Driver’s New York is one of sharpening social crisis, economic disrepair, simmering racial tension, growing political instability, and pervasive moral decay. The movie provides examples of these afflictions which were all too real for New Yorkers at the time.

Thanks to Taxi Driver’s sublime rendering of Travis Bickle’s story, its singularly tragic outsider becomes a conduit for understanding the complex problems concentrating in America’s dilapidated financial capital when the post-war boom collapsed. The film’s impressionistic cinematography combines with a brooding musical score completed by Bernard Hermann hours before his death, to position us in the passenger seat beside Travis.

Meanwhile, Robert De Niro veils the infectious charisma that saw him steal the show in Mean Streets in the seething menace of an embittered Vietnam War veteran. He expertly applies the tools that allowed him to craft a younger counterpart to Marlon Brando in The Godfather Part II to fine-tune the most original persona he’s ever brought into being.

De Niro has never been a greater movie character, and Scorsese has never made a greater masterpiece than Taxi Driver. Subjective tastes aside, this movie is impossible to argue with.

50 Years On, Taxi Driver Is More Important Than Ever

A brief recap of Taxi Driver’s overarching themes is enough to illustrate why the movie is even more pertinent to today’s world than to the one in which it was made. Almost five decades before Netflix’s 2025 miniseries Adolescence masterfully exposed the social foundations of toxic masculinity, Martin Scorsese’s movie did almost exactly the same thing.

Only, Taxi Driver furnishes this theme with a more ambiguous conclusion, which leaves us with more questions than answers. What’s more, it underscores the pernicious effects of loneliness, social isolation, and super-exploitative, casualized working conditions, phenomena which are even more ubiquitous today than in the mid-1970s, particularly among young men.

Then there’s the depiction of underage girls being trafficked, racist scapegoating of ethnic minorities, violent vigilante justice, untreated mental illness resulting from war, and the attempted assassination of a demagogic presidential candidate. All in all, it feels as though the movie was five decades ahead of its time. Taxi Driver’s most memorable quotes read like soundbites from a news bulletin in 2026.

Not many films stand the test of time as well as this one, let alone put their finger on the pulse of an epoch half a century ahead of them. But Taxi Driver is the rarest of films, which deserves to be recognized not only as an extraordinary work of art, but an terrifyingly accurate vision of modern society at its worst.