Taxi Driver (1976)
Here’s a trailer that’s so ’70s it might as well be wearing bell bottoms.
It rests its marketing almost entirely on Robert De Niro — in fact, other than Cybill Shepherd and Jodie Foster, you’d barely know anyone else is in the movie. The Serious Narrator tells you how acclaimed De Niro is, tells you this is his most chilling performance yet, and then a good deal of the trailer focuses on Travis Bickle being creepy and playing with weapons. It’s as if Columbia were angling for the art crowd and the grindhouse crowd.
A couple of oddities make this worth a watch for fans of the film: there’s a bit of Travis’ narration (about how passengers try to embarrass him, and how it’s like he doesn’t even exist) that, to the best of my recollection, doesn’t appear in the movie; and the Serious Narrator at one point intones “The taxi driver is looking for a target” over a shot of Cybill Shepherd, making it seem as though he’s going to be stalking her. (Well, he does, but when she dumps him his frustration gets sublimated into stalking the candidate.) Also, the shot of Travis with a mohawk kind of ruins the effect that Scorsese is obviously going for in the film itself, only showing Travis from the neck down for a couple of minutes until tilting up to reveal his new ‘do.
It’s not quite as formulaic as other trailers of the period. There’s some nice crosscutting, some witty placement of Travis’ conversation with the Secret Service guy. It communicates the seedy 42nd Street feel of the movie — it plays like a trailer Travis himself might encounter in the ratholes he sees movies in — but really can’t begin to suggest the artistry of the piece. Oftentimes it’s amusing and revealing to go back and look at how the studios marketed films that are acknowledged masterpieces today. They didn’t know back then, of course, that the movies were later to be ranked as masterpieces; they were simply trying to sell the film to as wide an audience as possible. The trailer makes Taxi Driver look like pretty much just another movie, despite the hype for De Niro. It’s as if Columbia thought they couldn’t really sell anything in the picture other than De Niro and the violence. Then again, the flick’s a tough sell, y’know?
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