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Director: Martin Scorsese.
Starring: Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd, Harvey Keitel. USA 1976. 114 mins.
Nursing various resentments, probably fuelled by a fear of social and sexual failure, Travis Bickle's (De Niro) attention turns to Iris (Foster), a 14-year-old prostitute, and he makes it his mission to save her.
The film's expressionist images eloquently mirror Bickle's sense of the impoverished, tawdry, sometimes menacing New York of the mid-70s as a hell on earth. Scorsese's Palme d'Or winner remains one of the defining American movies of that decade, not only for its bravura flair, but also for the way it points to the troubled urban mood of those times by locating Bickle's psychotic rage in his ill-concealed racism, misogyny and anxieties concerning all-round impotence.
When a tornado rips through Kansas, Dorothy (Judy Garland) and her dog, Toto, are whisked away in their house to the magical land of Oz. They follow the Yellow Brick Road toward the Emerald City to meet the Wizard, and en route they meet a Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) that needs a brain, a Tin Man (Jack Haley) missing a heart, and a Cowardly Lion (Bert Lahr) who wants courage. The wizard asks the group to bring him the broom of the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton) to earn his help.
From the opening sequence, Orson Welles' first film – the most famous debut in all cinema – is replete with stylistic tropes and flourishes which evoke the German cinema of the '20s and '30s. Long recognised as the ancestor of the modern sound film, the fragmented biography of an American newspaper magnate is as sophisticated in the aural as the visual dimension, marking the most striking technical and stylistic advances since Fritz Lang's M. We present this landmark film in a restored version.
