Taxi Driver.

[Quintus 5,391]

I think its a brilliant score which remains to this day a potent swan song for Bernard Herrmann. I'm not normally a fan of Sax, but here it has an almost dreamy quality about it, perfectly suiting the early morning hours of the seedy side of NY the Mayor would prefer you not to see. The genuine sense of malevolence which slowly builds throughout the score is at times as tangible as the self destruction which surrounds De Niro's Travis Bickle character. But there are moments of light too, as Travis finds hope in his soon to be doomed date with Cybill Shepherd's Betsy and the optimistic closing moments of the vigilante's journey - appreciated and thanked, for a change.

I've never seen talk of this score here before so I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

[Morlock 9]

Great score. I think the main theme captures both the loneliness and the romantic aspect of the film. By romantic, I mean the fantasy of the film, as embodied in the final sequence. Feels like it's the theme Travis would have written for himself.

[Vaderbait1 1]

I've never heard it, but I'd really like to find it somewhere.

[Quintus 5,391]

The best place to start is with the film itself.

[Morlock 9]

Though I wouldn't be surprised if you've heard the theme somewhere else. I know that I recognized the theme the first time I saw the film.

[MrScratch 292]

I didn't think much of this score when I first heard it. I revisited it a couple years ago though and really fell in love with it. It's perfect for late night drives through the city.

[Quintus 5,391]

Absolutely. The sax part of the main theme really is the soundtrack for the late night taxi driver.

[Sixers 0]

I love Hermann's four chord motif, how smooth it is and relevant to the setting.

By the way, I've wondered for the longest...........is his name pronounced "Her-man" or "Her-mahn"?

[Morlock 9]

I've only heard it pronounced Herman, by all filmmakers/composers/musicians who talked about him.

[Hitch 55]

The Psycho reference is genius during the end credits. A great score to end a great and illustrious career. He was taken from us too quickly.

[Charlie Brigden 5]

Incredible score. So beautiful and ethereal, yet so seedy and repulsive at the same time.

Just amazing.

[Morlock 9]

He was taken from us too quickly.

I'm sure your bitchy tantrums didn't help. Murderer.

[Hitch 55]

His heart troubles and chain smoking were his own doing and had no bearing on me whatsoever. As for calling me a murderer....thanks for the compliment. I don't get many these days.

[Morlock 9]

Oh, I'm sorry, I wasn't here. Your secretary called and replaced me with John Addison.

[Red 73]

I'm definitely a fan. One of my favorite Herrmann scores actually.

[franzridesagain 0]

An excellent discussion of this score from Jonathan Rosenbaum's review of the film:

"Properly speaking, Taxi Driver has four auteurs, whose agendas are distinct in some specifics and overlapping in others: director Scorsese, writer Paul Schrader, actor Robert De Niro, and composer Bernard Herrmann. I'll start with Herrmann, in part because he's been the most neglected of the four, in part because he's the sturdiest link to the commercial filmmaking of the three decades preceding 1976. Herrmann is best known for his work for Orson Welles (Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons), Alfred Hitchcock (eight films, including The Wrong Man, Vertigo, North by Northwest, and Psycho), Francois Truffaut (Fahrenheit 451), and Brian De Palma (Sisters and Obsession). He was so adamant about his aesthetic biases that he single-handedly succeeded in persuading De Palma to eliminate the entire third act from Schrader's script for Obsession-a radical abbreviation that was Herrmann's prerequisite for scoring the film. His last two major scores, for Obsession and Taxi Driver, give the films so much formal, emotional, and thematic shape that the usual rule of music serving as accompaniment often seems reversed, and the images, dialogue, and sound effects seem to accompany the scores.

"Herrmann died at age 64 in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve 1975, only hours after he conducted the Taxi Driver score, which I would cite as the most richly realized of all his late compositions for movies. The one time I met him was in a London editing studio only 16 days before he died; though quite ill, he was deciding whether to score a French film on the basis of a few rushes at a screening I'd helped set up for a filmmaker friend. Herrmann's method of deciding involved a fascinating interface of aesthetics and business: he dictated a hypothetical instrumentation for a score to his secretary, added musicians' fees and French studio costs, and then decided whether it was worth his while to continue.

"This interface of art and business is fundamental to the achievement of his Taxi Driver score, which helps disguise or at least rationalize the film's ideological confusions, all of which circulate around the psychotic hero, Travis Bickle (De Niro). It assigns them an emotional purity that nothing else in the movie expresses-an emotional purity that coalesces around two contrasting themes that are endlessly reiterated and juxtaposed. For the purposes of this discussion I'll call these the "heaven" and "hell" themes. The first is associated with Bickle's feelings toward two supposedly angelic female characters-a professional political campaigner he's attracted to, Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who's working for a presidential hopeful named Palatine, and a 12-year-old street hooker he wants to save, Iris (Jodie Foster). (Bickle fails to develop any sort of relationship with Betsy, after making the cardinal error of taking her to a porn movie on their first date, but he improbably winds up "saving" Iris by killing her pimp-played by Harvey Keitel-and a couple of his associates.) The hell theme, at once more brooding and more bombastic, smoldering with repressed rage, is associated with the contaminated vision of Manhattan that informs Bickle's tortured, puritanical reveries from first frame to last.

"The heaven theme is a lush, jazzy ballad of romantic yearning performed by alto saxophonist Ronnie Lang that suggests a much older and more upscale cultural tradition of big-city aspiration than anything else in the movie (except perhaps a few shots outside the Saint Regis Hotel)-a tradition closer to Herr-mann's generation than to that of Scorsese, Schrader, and De Niro, who were all born in the 1940s. This lyrical "penthouse" lament suggests the dreaminess of Gershwin or Porter rather than any musical tradition directly tied to Bickle-a former marine in his mid-20s who opts for driving a taxi as an expression of his terminal loneliness, insomnia, and spiritual and social isolation. The benefits of using such a musical idiom to legitimize, sentimentalize, and romanticize-in short, to glamorize-Bickle's madonna-and-whore notions about women are incalculable. (To be fair, the bridge midway through this 32-bar standard introduces subtle doubts by becoming oddly polytonal-the muted trumpet and muted trombone playing in a different key than the accompanying strings and piano, conveying something of Bickle's dissociated state of mind. But the final eight bars revert to the chordal comfort of the beginning, landing the audience squarely on its feet.)

"The hell theme combines flurries of rat-a-tat snare-drum percussion like military drumming (almost subliminally suggesting Bickle's former experiences in Vietnam and his various disciplinary measures of "self-improvement," ranging from push-ups to target practice) and discordant, growling sustained low notes played mainly by brass instruments, which are somewhat more evocative of other Herrmann scores (e.g., the power theme in Citizen Kane). The richly orchestrated darkness of this second theme also becomes associated with images of black males, violence, crime, street hustlers of various kinds, infernal gusts of steam (from gratings and manholes) and water (from fire hydrants), pollution, and the stench of New York in the summer-an overloaded package that, combined with a worshipful treatment of firearms (lighted and filmed in one pivotal sequence as if they were religious icons), validates the Calvinist hysteria, xenophobia, racism, and trigger-happy savagery of Bickle more effectively than anything he ever says or does, by treating them as the subject of monumental art. "

[Ollie 859]

A great score to end a great and illustrious career. He was taken from us too quickly.

Yes.

[Bryant Burnette 451]

I love it, and think that anybosy who's heard it and doesn't love it is a leeeetle bit not-to-be-trusted.

I'd never seen the movie until -- I dunno -- maybe a decade ago, at which point in time I decided I needed to become a Scorsese fan. I was already familiar with Herrmann, but solely through Hitchcock films.

What a great movie! What a great score! The review posted above that says that Herrmann ought to be considered to be one of the auteurs of the movie is dead-on. In terms of its impact on the movie, I think Herrmann's Taxi Driver has got to be one of the all-time greatest scores. Other composers could have scored the movie, and come up with interesting, or even great, work, but I'm just not sure anybody else at that time could have equalled what Herrmann did. I just literally cannot imagine any other music being used for that movie.

This is what's fascinating about the movies to me. Sometimes, the stars just all get into alignment, and the result is a true classic.