Sexy Sax… Hiding Madness

Bernard Hermann's score for Taxi Driver is weirdly romantic. It sounds kind of like Charles Mingus' jazz album, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, with lots of sexy saxophones evoking passionate love.

This is definitely ironic, given that Taxi Driver is about the opposite—it's about a guy who can't connect and have that sort of intense romance (or any kind of human connection, for that matter).

Suddenly, though, Hermann will inject into this romantic score some tight, ominous drums striking over and over and ending with a dark cymbal crash. It punctures the whole romantic mood with the intrusion of something violent and foreboding—like the violence of New York breaking out under these deceitful neon lights.

Music writer Robert Barnett writes,

First impressions of this score centre on the sleazily seductive side of the music. It is only with repeat hearings that other dimensions float to the surface. There are plenty of obsidian undercurrents and nightmare subterranean seas in this work. There is a certain maniacally driven quality to the music and strata of despair and catastrophe.

Also, the record Sport puts on in the uber-ominous Sport/Iris dancing scene has Hermann's soundtrack on it. This helps highlight the fact that Sport is using a verbal veil of romance to hide the obvious truth of the situation. He's not really in love with Iris or anything like that—he's a child-predator, an exploiter of the very worst kind.

You're The (Herr)Mann

Bernard Hermann died right after finishing the score. In fact, he originally said he didn't want to do it because he didn't do music for "car movies." He didn't really get that Taxi Driver wasn't a "car movie" like the way the Fast and the Furious movies are until he actually saw it.

Prior to writing Taxi Driver's score, Hermann had a pretty distinguished career, writing the scores for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (often considered the greatest movie of all time), and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Psycho, The Birds, and North by Northwest (along with other Hitchcock movies).

The score also features the song "Late for the Sky" by Jackson Browne, during the scene where Travis is watching American Bandstand on TV. It contains lyrics about loneliness and post-breakup malaise, like "How long have I been drifting?" This perfectly fits with Travis' feelings, especially when you apply them to his attempt to get with Betsy. Like Hermann's score, it's got a tender dimension to it that doesn't quite mesh with Travis' extreme rage—so it's a little ironic besides.