To round off the series of ‘Tunes’ featuring Bernard Hermann, I’m featuring his final ever score. The soundtrack to Martin Scorsese’s 1976 New Hollywood masterpiece. Taxi Driver.
Recording apparently finished hours before Hermann’s death in 1975 and Scorsese’s film was released to incredible critical acclaim. It became the seminal film of a generation. Hermann’s score meanwhile becoming something of a revered cult classic amongst soundtrack-lovers, traded amongst collectors like the guns and drugs of the film.
Not his most famous or recognisable, but for me at least, easily one of his best. Like all great film soundtracks, the music in Taxi Driver becomes the landscape of film as much as the imagery. The palpable tensions and inner madness of the main character Travis Bickle ripple across the eardrums like some sort of sleaze filled tsunami.
“What resulted from their collaboration is an astonishing piece of film music that brings together old and new Hollywood, or rather, one that places old and new Hollywood side by side in an uneasy but productive tension. Here, finally, is the jazz that Hitchcock asked for and never got; the film's familiar lyrical theme (identified on the soundtrack as "They Can't Touch Her" or "Betsey's theme") is played by a mournful alto sax, giving the early scenes in which it appears a laconic neo-noir feel. Intertwined with that "new" jazz sound (no longer now a teenybopper novelty, of course, but still a new idiom for Herrmann) are passages in the lushly orchestrated classical style. "Getting Into Shape," the music cue that plays under the still-frightening montage of Bickle pumping iron and holding his arm in an open flame to "train" for his killing spree, is a grim descending figure of blasting horns that could easily be imagined accompanying the rampage of some giant radioactive ant from a 1950s horror film.”
They Can Not Touch Her
Getting into Shape, Listen You Screwheads, Gun Play
The .44 Magnum is a Monster
“This music cue, titled "The .44 Magnum Is a Monster," may represent the pinnacle of theTaxi Driver score's lunacy, and its achievement. The swirling harps associated with Travis' racing thoughts, and with his vigilante fantasies about Jodie Foster's child-prostitute character, weave in and out of menacing bass chords, while that sadly diminished love theme wanders in and out. “
Thanks Tom - a great post: *The palpable tensions and inner madness of the main character Travis Bickle ripple across the eardrums like some sort of sleaze filled tsunami* :D That main theme is sooooo evocative; i'm sitting here listening to it, and suddenly it's night outside, there's steam rising moodily from the manhole covers and yellow taxi cabs are driving past my window (or should be!).
ReplyDelete*a grim descending figure of blasting horns that could easily be imagined accompanying the rampage of some giant radioactive ant from a 1950s horror film* - yes, exactly!