“Like a Raging Bull”, “GoodFellas”, “Casino”, “Departed”, “The Wolf Of Wall Street” or most recently “Killers Of The Flower Moon” – when Martin Scorsese presents a new film, the vast majority of the cinema fans respond the same way Rule with enthusiasm. Not so in 1976 in Cannes, when ‘Taxi Driver’, which had already become a real hit in the US, had its European premiere.
Many spectators in the main hall of the world’s most important film festival repeatedly loudly expressed their displeasure during the screening. When the credits rolled on the screen after almost two hours of running time, Bernard Hermann’s jazzy score could no longer be heard – it was completely drowned out by loud, incessant cheering.
The spoiled audience in Rivera, France, was of course anything but happy with Scorsese’s portrayal of a traumatized Vietnam veteran named Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro). In his daily life as a taxi driver in New York City, the man has to deal with all kinds of people who simply ignore him or treat him openly and disrespectfully. When he fails to use words to put a twelve-year-old prostitute (Jodie Foster) on the path to virtue, he becomes delirious. Bickle is given several pistols and begins to train his body. His goal is to single-handedly rid the city streets of ‘human scum’…
The master director himself was not present at the Cannes screening. He had heard that jury chairman Tennessee Williams would hate his film and, accompanied by his leading man De Niro, flew back to the US instead of waiting for the awards ceremony. There the duo put the finishing touches to their follow-up project, the film noir musical ‘New York, New York’. “Taxi Driver” still won the award for the festival’s best film, the Palme d’Or, despite the audience’s reaction and the alleged resentment of writer-titan Williams!
There was a history
It’s not that no one in the otherwise well-informed audience at Cannes recognized the unmistakable class of ‘taxi driver’. There was certainly a portion of the audience that tried to applaud and cheer on the award presentation. However, the majority – like Tennessee Williams – probably had clear problems with the overt depiction of violence in Scorsese’s masterpiece.
People in Cannes were particularly sensitive to this issue at the time. Last year a bomb attack took place in the same hall during the festival. A few days before the performance of ‘Taxi Driver’, the French police found an explosive in the building, which was defused just in time. The mood was understandably very tense. Against this background, the aggressive words and depictions in the film, and especially the bloody climax between the characters of De Niro and Harvey Keitel, who plays a pimp, were not well received.
When news spread that the jury, in awarding the top prize, had rejected European competition entries that had been unanimously praised by the public, such as Roman Polanski’s ‘The Tenant’, Bernado Bertolucci’s ‘1900’ and Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Face to Face’ favor of the brutal If “Taxi Driver” were passed over, the calm of paying moviegoers would be over. So it happened that one of the best films of the legendary Martin Scorsese was mercilessly booed at Cannes.
*