The movie posters read, "On every street in every city, there's a nobody who dreams of being a somebody. He's a lonely forgotten man desperate to prove that he's alive."

Sounding like a description of the film's screenwriter, Paul Schrader, it's actually a description of the movie's lead character, Travis Bickle. Somehow the two have remained indivisible even to this day with Schrader's nomadic and disconnected early '70s life providing the back-story for Travis's confusion and violence. Both are aspects of the same person with one half marginally satisfying society's demands for responsibility by directing his neuroses towards a now-celebrated career as a writer. The other half, however, was less successful at integrating with his circumstances and thus provided the basis for a masterful film.

Taxi Driver was Martin Scorsese's terrifying urban thriller with a tour de force performance by Robert De Niro and the final film score of famed composer Bernard Herrmann. Budgeted near $1 million and set along the mean streets of New York City, the director's vision of an urban hell suggested in Schrader's script is fully realized as a new kind of horror movie through its psychologically troubled hero.

Centering on Travis (De Niro), a frustrated Vietnam vet who works as a cabdriver, the story proceeds through his paranoid delusions of urban decay and ends with a furious catharsis of extreme violence. In between are placed a number of historically interesting observations about New York City that serves the film as a backdrop but also as a kind of textual signifier of the times.

The City is not the cosmopolitan center of the United States but is instead a cesspool of unending human desire and desperate striving. Living within its borders is dangerous but also hopeless since so many city people are caught by in circumstances that can't be changed as much as they can be survived. The sentiment was likely more severe in the mid-'70s than it is today but the point is made when considering how Travis's taxicab functions in the film.

As both the vehicle of his profession and a delimiter of personal space, Travis's cab is an observational tool through which he sees the life and times of the world from one narrow perspective. When he's at work his cab allows him to go anywhere he pleases although he only sees the worst of what's available which makes everything somehow the same no matter where he is or whom he's with. His worldview is restricted to the cab's windshield that invites the world to touch him but remains to separate him from sunnier prospects with a preference for spectacles of despair.

His distance from vivid, supportive life is surely amplified by his cab and is an apt metaphor for the film. Without human contact Travis is elusive, uncommunicative and perhaps even retarded. Yet he's painfully observant and sincere which makes his attempt to categorize the world as good and bad a worthy effort, if not one that's misdirected.

Opening to the strains of Herrmann's score and an impressionistic montage shot through the windows of a cab, Taxi Driver is Travis's story. Dogged by urges to act out but having no means for expressing himself he's a paranoid loser, history's last man, who creeps through his daily life and becomes a true social outcast.

He works double-shifts, lives in a shoddy tenement, writes in his diary and otherwise scowls at a world he can barely see through the filth and depravity he's forced to interact with. One day he chances upon a woman named Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) when he picks her up with her boss, a senator named Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). Instantly smitten he begins courting her much to the amusement of her co-worker Tom (Albert Brooks). Unable to express his emotions or even hold much of a conversation, Travis eventually blunders on a date and takes Betsy to a porn theater where she becomes outraged and refuses to see him again.

Spurned and rootless without an object for his affection Travis happens upon another young woman named Iris (Foster) who's really a child prostitute. Drawing a connection between her youth and confusing it with innocence, just as he previously confused Betsy's beauty with kindness, he learns that she works for a pimp named Sport (Harvey Keitel). After approaching her to offer assistance and an escape from the inner city he mistakes her incomprehension for a new life direction and tries to figure out what he should do.

Like everyone else Iris doesn't follow the faulty logic behind Travis's need to save innocence and conserve beauty while simultaneously destroying all evil, filth and corruption. That is, corruption the way Sport practices white slavery or in how Palantine filibusters with empty politics or in the city filled past its gutters with violence and personal cruelty.

Resolving to become a tool for righteous action Travis trains his body to withstand pain and assembles an arsenal to kill Palantine at a speaking engagement. He constructs gun harnesses, shaves his head into a Mohawk, targets his query but is nearly apprehended before shooting the senator. Now fully crazed and filled with violence he walks up to Sport's brothel to save Iris from a hooker's lot and set things right.

Shooting and stabbing his way to Iris, Travis kills her john and several other men in the process. In so doing he frees her through the crucible of violence that's filled with so many gut shots, profanations and screams it's nearly a black comedy masterpiece.

Once again seeing his intentions to purify the world mixed up by his over-blunt execution of misguided plans Travis almost succumbs to wounds sustained in the attack but somehow ends up a hero. Iris returns to her parents and he recovers from his wounds, seemingly resigned to his place in the world though perhaps still crazed and only waiting for the right trigger for another crazy outburst.

When producers Julia and Michael Phillips pitched Schrader's original script to studio executives it was met with interest but certain reservation. Though the plot, setting, characters and dialogue were obviously autobiographical, intense and striking, it wasn't clear who should direct the film or who would be its star. At one point Brian De Palma was considered with Neil Diamond as star but then Scorsese won the job after the film's producers screened Mean Streets and he promised to deliver De Niro for the lead role.

Fresh from his Academy Award for The Godfather: Part II in 1974 De Niro was one of Hollywood rising stars despite his early career in independent features and exploitation movies. Similarly praised and emboldened by his ethnically precise Mean Streets and female-centered Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore, Scorsese was on the verge of breaking into the industry's elite auteur class of Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman and Arthur Penn. Together they formed one of filmdom's many great partnerships and have continued working through the present with frequent, successful collaboration.

Assembling his cast and crew, then, Scorsese was razor-focused on Taxi Driver that was further enhanced through his relationship with the screenwriter. Where Scorsese is talkative, nervous, fast thinking and visually oriented, Schrader seems tentative, thoughtful, deliberate and literal. Put together with unconventional attitudes, an extraordinary knowledge of film history and of movie titles more specifically and a total commitment to the project, their enthusiasm extended into the cast, each of whom contributed some of the most interesting work of their careers.

In preparation for the film, De Niro, Keitel and Foster all researched their respective roles with hands-on experience. De Niro worked 12-hour days for a month driving cabs and studied mental illness. Keitel rehearsed his lines and behavior with real-life pimps and Foster befriended a young woman very much like her character who later appeared in the movie as Iris's best friend.

The final note of distinction was Herrmann's involvement in scoring the film despite his poor health and advancing age. At first put off by the project he was enticed into his involvement after seeing a rough cut where he took particular note of a scene where Travis pours Schnapps on his bread. Somehow resonant and oddly impressive as a point of characterization, the aging composer worked through his final days and completed the film score's recording on Christmas Eve, 1975. A few hours later he was dead.

Released to critical division, mixed popular reception and wide industry praise, Taxi Driver was eventually nominated for the Best Picture Academy Award but lost its bid for name brand excellence to Rocky. Not alone among masterworks upstaged by a more popular and less complex film, Network was also defeated in its bid for Best Picture. Then again such fine genre work as Carrie and The Outlaw Josey Wales failed even to be nominated making Taxi Driver's slight at the hands of the Academy relatively small by comparison. This assessment is further balanced against other laurels offered Scorsese's movie but perhaps most notably its induction into the National Film Registry in 1994 even though it remains to be seen if Rocky will be so honored.

When asked to name the best film of 1976 I frequently suggest a two-way tie between Sidney Lumet's satire of TV broadcasting, Network, and Scorsese's scathing character study. Standing at the center of such converging social forces as American political disinterest, pornography, the disenfranchisement of urban poor and the plight of the Vietnam veteran Taxi Driver bites off a big piece of the '70s national and delivers a nightmare.

Instead of offering a feel-good fantasy about broken people healing themselves through good works and receptive friends, Travis Bickle falls apart and goes from being an incompetent into being a killer. His story is characterized by paranoia, ignorance and terror of interpersonal difference. Of course not everything Travis experiences is altogether bad or unpleasant but his mania about ridding the world of that which stains innocence and beauty defines his purpose and nearly ruins him.

Many commentators abhor the film's violence. Other object to the unpleasant world inhabited by Travis Bickle and still others find his plight oddly resonant, especially in moments of particularly acute personal strain. Regardless Taxi Driver is one of American cinema's masterworks. It showcases De Niro and Keitel near the beginning of their remarkable careers and allows Foster to demonstrate some of what was to come with her mature performances some 10 years down the road.

Then there are the curiosities of the film like seeing taxicabs from 1976 not to mention Manhattan's skyline, city streets and the seediness of Times Square near the depth of its triple X-rated squalor. Cybill Shepherd and Albert Brooks show up in supporting roles and Scorsese plays a racist, peeping tom that stays in one's memory.

Altogether Taxi Driver is about, "a nobody who dreams of being a somebody." Without resorting to trivial hyperbole or inventive remarks that fail to describe what's actually on-screen, Scorsese's translation of Schrader's script is an investigation into the soul of loneliness. Uncovering layers of disappointment, confusion, pain and indifference Taxi Driver is a metaphor for the times and the co-film of the year.