“The Wrong Man” - Alfred Hitchcock (1956)

Alfred Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man (1956) is considered to be a minor, oddball work in the great director’s career.  It is frequently set aside from the rest of his masterful oeuvre by reviewers and critics and dismissed as an offbeat, realist docudrama uncharacteristic of the “Master’s” line of highly charged movie entertainment.  It is more like a neorealist documentary, according to some commentators [1]. 

While it is true that the film is based on real events and with the original names of the participants in those events preserved, The Wrong Man very much conforms to the general emotional and philosophical themes which have often underlain his most powerful cinematic narratives [2].  Many of his most stirring films, such as for example The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934), The 39 Steps (1938), Saboteur (1942), and North By Northwest (1959), feature an ordinary civilized protagonist who suddenly finds himself the mistaken target of a dark nefarious gang of antagonists.  This person faces a mysterious existential threat, and he must find out who his enemies are and how to escape them.  But in The Wrong Man the existential threat has been extended and abstracted – it here comprises the supposedly civilized and justice-oriented machinations of modern organized society, itself.  Our innocent protagonist in this film thus faces an out-of-control justice machine from which there is seemingly no escape.  (The nature of the Hitchcockian existential threat would be even further extended to that of animated Mother Nature, herself, in his subsequent horror film, The Birds (1963).)

So we have something of a paradox – a true story and a dark, existential horror film at the same time.  It was Hitchcock’s genius to have been able to combine these two contrasting narrative elements into a single film that made The Wrong Man particularly interesting. 

The true story concerns what happened to a middle-class New York family man, Christopher Emmanuel "Manny" Balestrero, who was wrongly accused of multiple armed robberies.  The case against Balestrero was based on mistaken eye-witness identifications of him by those who had earlier been held up at gunpoint.   The details of the case were reported in a Life Magazine article [3] which apparently caught the eye of Hitchcock at the time.  Hitchcock went on to make his film based on scriptwriter Maxwell Anderson’s account of those events, The True Story of Christopher Emmanuel Balestrero, and in a personal appearance at the film’s outset Hitchcock solemnly assures his audience that “this is a true story, every word of it.”  And indeed all the facts seem to be there, as one would expect in a docudrama.  Hitchcock even used many of the original New York locations for many of the film’s exterior shots.  And yet we know that every narrative account must involve some degree of interpretation from an observer’s perspective.

And also Hitchcock’s mise-en-scene underscores a larger theme that haunts the film: guilt.  Guilt is a major element of Western consciousness, and it stems from the obsession with guilt on the part of the Abrahamic religions, which has been insightfully criticized in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche [4,5,6].  (Guilt is distinguished from the ancient Indian notion of bad karma in that guilt assumes there to be a permanent stain on and contamination of the individual(s) held to be guilty.)  In fact guilt is pervasive in modern society and manifests itself on many levels – social, institutional, and personal.  And these can be intertwined in complex ways.  In The Wrong Man there are at least five such theaters of guilt that come into play:

• Manny Balestrero.  Manny has been accused publicly of being guilty, but privately knows he is innocent.  He starts out with a naive faith that objective observation of the facts will lead to a just outcome, but his trust in the public administration of guilt is progressively shaken as he sees it fail to arrive at the right assessment. 
   
• Rose Balestrero (Manny’s wife).   The Balestrero family are devout Roman Catholics, and Manny’s misfortunes lead Rose to assume an overwhelming sense of internal, personal guilt.  She comes to believe that she, herself, is profoundly and irredeemably guilty and hopelessly isolated in a hostile universe that is stacked against her.
   
• The Police and Legal System.   The public institutional operation of guilt determination is shown to be operated by people who are just parts of a mechanized system tasked with the determination of some hoped-for objectivity concerning who is to be labeled guilty.
   
• The Public Notion of Guilt.  We also see the attitudes of the public at large, in the roles of the eyewitnesses, who participate in the public assignment of guilt.  These are undertaken in association with various social norms that encourage the public’s aggressive assignment of guilt to observed wrongful individuals.
   
• Christian Notions of Guilt and Redemption.  Guilt is a major theme in Christianity, as it is with all the Abrahamic religions, but it is also tempered by the notion of unqualified forgiveness and salvation.  This is a subtle theme that comes more into play at the close of the film.

These theaters of guilt and their associated themes are tracked through the five acts of The Wrong Man.

1.  Before the Arrest

Manny Balestrero (played by Henry Fonda), a musical bassist in a resident band that plays dance music at the famous New York nightclub, the Stork Club, is married and a devoted father of two children and living in a modest home in Queens, NY.  His wife Rose (Vera Miles) is something of a worrier, but Manny’s faith in traditional values is the family’s mainstay.  In order to pay for Rose’s needed and expensive dental work, he decides to go to their insurance company and borrow money on Rose’s insurance account.  While visiting the insurance office, he is recognized (mistakenly, as it turns out) by some of the workers there as someone who had robbed the office a few weeks earlier.  Immediately upon Manny’s departure from the insurance office, the workers report him to the police.  Thus the film here enters the realm of the Public Notion of Guilt.

2.  Manny’s Arrest

Here we come to the machinations of the institutional guilt-determination system – the Police and Legal System.  When Manny arrives home, he is arrested on his doorstep and immediately ushered to two a liquor store and a delicatessen, whose operators identify Manny as the man who had earlier robbed them at gunpoint.  Manny obediently follows all the police’s instructions, trusting that they will soon find him to be innocent. But he is further incriminated when, asked orally to print out the original perpetrator’s money demand note, he makes the identical handwriting mistake that the original thief had made.  Then he is treated like a laboratory specimen, and he is fingerprinted, handcuffed, and jailed.  Throughout this sequence there is a disturbing atmosphere of confinement and isolation.  Manny is helplessly getting closed up by the system into a little box.

After his arraignment in court the next morning, Manny is finally released from jail on bail.

3.  Efforts to Establish Innocence
Manny now takes his own steps to try and save himself from the clutches of an errant system.  We are in Manny Balestrero’s realm.  He hires a lawyer (Anthony Quayle), who urges him to find people who can vouch for his presence with them on the days of his purported crimes a couple of months ago.  But the few people he can remember for this purpose turn out to have recently died or are unlocatable.  The  uncanny misfortune of these circumstances (the fateful disappearance of redeeming evidence) affects them both and seems to weigh so heavily on Rose, in particular, that she slides into hopelessness.

4.  Rose’s Problems

Now Manny’s world is further disintegrating as we enter Rose Balestrero’s realm.  Not only is Manny threatened by a malfunctioning public guilt-assignment system, but his own personal world is crumbling due to the onset of Rose’s mental deterioration.  She blames everything on herself, and she begins exhibiting symptoms of paranoid personality disorder, wherein further efforts in life seem futile.  Soon she has to be committed to a mental institution – another institution in connection with which Manny can do nothing and only helplessly hope that things will work out.  This is the most alarming part of Manny’s downward existential spiral and the most disturbing part of the film.

Then at Manny’s trial, his lawyer’s laborious efforts to cross-examine the incriminating eyewitnesses doesn’t fare well with the jury, and they are only saved temporarily by the happenstance of a mistrial being declared.

5. Salvation

During the waiting for a new trial, Manny’s devout Catholic mother urges him to pray to God not  for help, but for strength.  And then, as if by miracle, salvation does come.  The film narrative extendsd into the realm of Christian redemption and salvation.  The real robbery perpetrator is caught in the act of committing another robbery, and he subsequently confesses to having committed the crimes for which Manny was charged.  Manny is finally freed.  But contrary to the film’s closing textual statement, his wife Rose never did fully recover from her guilt-obsessed mental breakdown [7]


The whole story of Manny Balestrero’s existential crisis is colored by Hitchcock’s carefully crafted mise-en-scene.  Far from a supposedly objectivist presentation of truth with fly-on-the-wall “objective” observation, Hitchcock carefully fashioned The Wrong Man into a moody film-noir. In order to achieve these to achieve these atmospheric noirish effects. Hitchcock’s cinematographer, Robert Burks, skillfully employed high-contrast black-and-white photography and striking oblique camera angles.  And in this connection, every shot was carefully storyboarded well ahead of the actual shooting [8].  The film’s moody ambience was further enhanced by Bernard Herrmann’s quirky, low-key Latin-inspired musical score. 

Mention should also be made of the acting performances of Henry Fonda and Vera Miles.  Although Hitchcock did not customarily place much emphasis on acting theatrics, these two performances, particularly that of Vera Miles, add to the film’s flavor of mysterious impending existential annihilation.

The result for Hitchcock was a dark-toned melancholic masterpiece.   Indeed Jean-Luc Godard, in his early days as a youthful film critic for Cahiers du Cinema before  he launched his career as a feature film director that helped pioneer the French New Wave, marveled at the cinematic craftsmanship that Hitchcock displayed in The Wrong Man, and he rated the film as the second-best movie of 1957 [9].  Godard was particularly impressed with Hitchcock’s repeated couplings of similar narrative elements that connect like echoes or narrative responses throughout the film.  In this regard Godard cites a number of examples of these narrative pairings that permeate The Wrong Man [10]:

“To cite at random: the two imprisonments; the two handwriting tests at the police station; two conversations with Rose in the kitchen; the two hearings; apart from the credit sequence, the Stork Club appears twice; Manny goes twice to the clinic, twice to the lawyer, twice with policeman into shops for identification; the spy-hole duplicating the driving mirror; the insurance company is in the same building as the lawyer’s office; the two miracles happening on Fonda’s face; Bernard Herrmann’s score is based on two notes, etc.”

All in all, we can see that, despite its realist veneer, The Wrong Man has been carefully crafted to be one of Hitchcock’s most disturbing horror films, and it is a film that deserves a more prominent place among his oeuvre.
★★★½

Notes:

1. Devon Powell, “Blue-ray: Review: The Wrong Man”, Hitchcockmaster, (16 January 2016).  
2. Andy Webb, “The Wrong Man (1956)”, The Movie Scene, (n.d.).    
3. Herbert Brean, “A Case of Identity”, Life Magazine, (29 June 1953), pp. 97-107.   
4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, (1886), (trans., Walter Kaufmann), Random House, Inc., (1966). 
5. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, (1887), (trans., Walter Kaufmann), (in On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo), Random House, Inc., (1966). 
6. R. Lanier Anderson, “Friedrich Nietzsche”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (17 March 2017).   
7. Lou Lumenick, “A case of mistaken identity ruined this man’s life — and inspired Hitchcock”, The New York Post, (7 February 2016).   
8. Laurent Bouzereau, Guilt Trip: Hitchcock and The Wrong Man, Blue Collar Productions, (2004).
9. Jean-Luc Godard, “The Ten Best Films of 1957", (from Cahiers du Cinema, 1957), Godard on Godard, (translation and commentary by Tom Milne), The Viking Press, (1972), p. 66. 
10. Jean-Luc Godard, “The Wrong Man”, (from Cahiers du Cinema, 1957), Godard on Godard, (translation and commentary by Tom Milne), The Viking Press, (1972), pp. 48-55.

“Consider Her Ways”, TAHH, Season 3: Ep.11 - Robert Stevens (1964)

“Consider Her Ways” (1964) was an episode (Season 3,Episode 11) of the popular TV anthology series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65).  It was directed by Robert Stevens and scripted by Oscar Millard, based on a story by John Wyndham.  Wyndham was a famous British science fiction writer, his most notable work being The Day of the Triffids.  The musical score was provided by Bernard Herrmann. 

In this story a woman wakes up in a hospital maternity ward and discovers she has been transported to a dystopian nightmare.  She, like other patients in the ward, has an enormously bloated body and is treated as a human cow – permanently assigned to continually giving birth to human babies, none of whom she is given a chance to mother.  In this regimented world, there are no men, only women, who are divided up into strict classes, like an ant colony.  The woman (played by Barbara Barrie) is called “Mother Orchid” and is not allowed to read and write – that activity is restricted to another class. But Mother Orchid knows that her real name is Dr. Jane Waterleigh and that she was a successful doctor in our ordinary world.

When Waterleigh proves to be uncooperative, she is threatened by the authorities and eventually introduced to an elderly historian, Laura (Gladys Cooper), to explain things to her.  Laura tells her that several generations ago all the males on Earth were killed by the mutation of a virus developed by a Doctor Perrigan that had been intended to kill rats.  Women were naturally immune to the virus and had learned to survive by the development of “test tube baby” technology.  Laura assures her that their “modern” world is much better than the old days when women were dominated by brutish males.

The medical staff then try to administer a mind-altering drug to Mother Orchis, but she resists and becomes hysterical.  When she comes to, she is back in the real world and is Dr. Waterleigh again.  She is reminded that she had volunteered to take a hallucinatory drug, which had induced her dystopian nightmare.

But Waterleigh soon learns of a Doctor Perrigan (Robert H. Harris) who is currently working to develop a viral strain to kill rats.  She realizes that she has to thwart Perrigan’s world-destroying activities, and she tries to convince him to abandon his work in this area.  When Perrigan refuses to desist, Waterleigh feels she has to take desperate measures.  She pulls out a gun and kills Perrigan and then burns up his laboratory.

When Waterleigh is arrested, she is not remorseful; she did it to save the world.  When a colleague counters that you cannot alter an already-existing future, Waterleigh responds by invoking a multiverse hypothesis.  She claims that at every moment the world is branching into a near-infinite number of parallel future states.  Each of those state will similarly branch into a vast number of states a moment later.  There are innumerable trajectories through this parallel state-space, and “we” just happen to be on one of them.  By committing her act, she claims, she has assured that “our” particular path through the state-space will not land us in a state where all the males have been exterminated.     

An interesting argument, but of course with Hitchcock there is always likely to be a twist at the end of the tale.  And this episode is no exception.  You will have to watch it yourself to see what that twist is.

This is a well-made and thought-provoking tale that was well-suited to be an episode of the contemporary The Twilight Zone (1959-64).

★★★★

“Water’s Edge”, TAHH, Season 3: Ep. 3 - Bernard Girard (1964)

“Water’s Edge” (1964) was an episode (Season 3, Episode 3) of the popular TV anthology series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65).  It was directed by Bernard Girard and scripted by Alfred Hayes based on a story by Robert Bloch.  Bloch, a prolific writer of horror stories, was known for his 1959 novel Psycho, on which Hitchcock’s film Psycho (1960) was based.  The musical score was provided by Bernard Herrmann. 

As usual for the series, the episode featured leading screen stars, in this case John Cassavetes (well-known as an actor and film director) and Ann Southern (famous for her many comedy roles, most notably in the popular TV sitcom Private Secretary, 1953-57). 

Also as usual, the episode features a mistaken, or misunderstood, character identity and a plot twist at the ending associated with the newly identified identity of the previously misunderstood character.  In fact a distinguishing feature of this particular episode is that our understanding of a principal character undergoes two transformations during the course of the story.

The story begins in a prison where two long-serving prisoners, Rusty Connors (John Cassavetes) and Mike Krause (Rayford Barnes) have been cellmates for two years.  With nothing to do for the two but talk, Rusty has always been dreamily regaled by Mike’s stories about his beautiful and luscious wife, Helen, who will be waiting for him when he is released.   But Rusty also has something else on his mind.  Mike’s crimes were the theft of $50,000, which was never recovered by the police, and the subsequent murder of his criminal partner, Pete Taylor, whose corpse was never found.  Now that Mike is critically ill with pneumonia, Rusty greedily pesters Mike about where the stolen money might be hidden.  All he can get out of Mike before he passes away is that the money is with Pete.

When Rusty is released from prison, he goes to Mike’s hometown to look up Helen (Ann Sothern), who he learns is working as a café waitress.   He wants to seduce her and make her his own.  But he is shocked to see that Helen is not the luscious babe that Mike had described to him, but is instead a dowdy, bespectacled, middle-aged  frump.   Nevertheless, he goes ahead with his plans to seduce the woman so that she can help him discover the missing cash, whose whereabouts Helen also doesn’t know.

Piecing together some clues from Helen’s recollections on the day of the crime, Rusty decides that the money must be hidden in an abandoned, rat-filled boathouse down at the local lake.  So they go to the boathouse, and despite some false starts and Rusty’s instinctive horror at the sight of all the rats, Rusty does discover in the rafters Pete’s skeleton and the money.

So far we have seen Rusty as a diabolical and unscrupulous villain, while Helen seems to be a rather innocent and simpleminded hausfau.  But at this point Helen shows herself to be equally as demonic as Rusty.  This represents the second transformation of our image of Helen.  So the two of them are now mortally face-to-face, and each is willing to commit murder in order to avoid sharing the loot.  I will leave it to you to see what happens, but it is not pretty.

Overall, this is a well-staged episode with convincing performances, particularly that of Ann Sothern, who despite her unglamourous role looks good and quite a bit younger than her real age of 55.  But the problem with this particular narrative is that there are no sympathetic characters with whom the viewer might want to empathize.  Both Rusty and Helen are equally reprehensible, and it is all just a horror show.

★★½

“An Unlocked Window”, TAHH, Season 3: Ep. 17 - Joseph M. Newman (1965)

Perhaps the finest, and my personal favorite, of Alfred Hitchcock’s TV productions was “An Unlocked Window” (1965), which was Episode 17 of the final year of Hitchcock’s anthology TV series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65).  It is certainly one of the most spine-tingling horror features that I have seen, and this effect is attributable to the show’s diabolical narrative structure.  It operates in the fashion of an unknown and invisible spider slowly encircling its increasingly helpless prey and moving in for the kill.  We know that the “spider” is out there, but we don’t know where it is or even what it is.  In this sense it is a true horror film.

Of course this being a Hitchcock presentation, we can expect that there will be a case of misidentification of an important character and that there will be some sort of twist at the end of the tale.  Those elements in this context are intrinsic to the film’s horrifying outcome.

Veteran director Joseph M. Newman, in the last year of his career, directed the show.  James Bridges’s script was based on a story by English author Ethel Lina White, whose well-known novel The Wheel Spins (1936) had earlier been the basis for Hitchcock’s The Lady Vanishes (1938).  And the music is furnished by Bernard Herrmann. The show’s star is Dana Wynter, whose most memorable film role was in  the harrowing tale, Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956).

The plot does have a “red herring”, which is oftentimes an artificial plot element intended to mislead the viewer and is not usually an element in great stories.  In this case, though, the red herring is something of a metaphor for one of the story’s themes, and its use is justifiable on this occasion.

The story begins starkly.  A pretty nurse is shown walking home one evening and being strangled to death by a psychopathic murderer.  This, we learn from the news report, is only the latest crime of a still at-large serial killer who preys specifically on nurses with “pretty necks”.   Then the scene shifts to an old mansion in the countryside where two nurses are attending to a young wealthy gentleman who is bedridden with some kind of lung disease that requires the use of an oxygen tent.  Also living in the mansion is a married couple who attend to the grounds, the cooking, and the housekeeping.       

Since the serial nurse killings have all been committed in a general area of the city that includes  the mansion, the nurses are justifiably worried and take precautions by making sure that all the mansion’s doors and windows are securely locked tight.  So the younger of the two nurses, Stella (played by Dana Wynter), goes down to the basement to check that the windows there are all locked.  But she is frightened by seeing a mouse and runs back upstairs, thereby forgetting to attend to the last cellar window.  Throughout the rest of the story, there will be occasional cuts to a shot of the open, unlocked window, reminding the viewer that there is a neglected hole in their defense that may come to have dire consequences

But since there are five people in the house, they should be reasonably safe.  In addition to Stella, there is the older nurse Betty Ames (T. C. Jones), the caretaker Sam Isles, the housemaid Maude Isles (Louise Latham), and the bedridden young owner Glendon Baker (who seems to be on the verge or recovering his health). The focalization, though, is on the pretty Stella, and she is the one we are worried about.

As the story unfolds, however, it seems as though there is a noose slowly tightening around Stella’s neck.  In this respect note that whenever we are faced with a fearful situation, we take for granted that we are not completely alone – there are ordinary resources, infrastructure, and people that we can count on to operate in their customary ways.  Step by step, though, the support structure around Stella begins to unravel.  This leads to a growing sense of isolation and enclosure.

Stella is a caring and sympathetic young woman, and her beauty and manner has even attracted the amorous attentions of the handsome and wealthy Mr. Baker.  He vows to marry Stella as soon as he regains his health.  But we know from the unlocked window that Stella can sometimes overlook things, and another instance of that apparently appears when senior nurse Betty discovers that they have an urgent need for a new oxygen tank for Mr. Baker.  Betty scolds Stella for having forgotten to order a new tank, and then Sam is dispatched to go out that evening to town and bring back a backup oxygen tank.

Later a thunderstorm develops outside, and this leads to an electrical fault that apparently blows all the fuses in the house.  Now they are without electricity and pitched in darkness.  The maid/cook Maude, who up to this point had appeared to be loud and opinionated, has been drinking whisky to calm her nerves.   But the alcohol and her heightening fears get the better of her, and she starts to rave like a maniac.  Betty recommends that they give her a sedative injection to put her to sleep.

Now it is just the two nurses and Mr. Baker.  Stella runs upstairs to check on Baker, but he is unconscious (or worse).  Their telephone line is cut, too, and there is immediate evidence that a strange man, presumably the killer, is approaching the house. 

The lethal noose is tightening, and we are set for the chilling climax.  What makes all this work is the dramatic pacing and atmospheric mise-en-scene – achieved by expert acting, cinematography, and editing – that contribute to the ever-increasing sense of enclosure.  We gradually sense that all of Stella’s escape routes are being cut off, one by one.  The killer, still unseen, is all the more terrifying, because he is only left to our imagination.

All in all, it constitutes one of the most frightening horror dramas ever.
★★★★

“Change of Address”, TAHH, Season 3: Ep. 2 - David Friedkin (1964)

“Change of Address” (1964) was an episode (Season 3, Episode 2) of the popular TV anthology series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962-65).  This episode was directed by David Friedkin and scripted by Friedkin and Morton Fine based on an Andrew Benedict story. Interestingly, the musical score was provided by Bernard Herrmann.  As usual, it featured performances by major screen figures in the lead roles. And of course also as usual, it bore the famous Hitchcock earmarks of a suspenseful tale with a twist at the end.

The story concerns a middle-aged couple, Keith (played by Arthur Kennedy) and Elsa (Phyllis Thaxter) Hollands, who have just leased a beach house in fashionable Malibu, California.  The couple seem to have independent means, so this appears to be a lifestyle move, and their anticipations concerning those prospects are decidedly mixed.  Keith, seeking to recapture his fading youth, sees the home as providing an opportunity for adventure and new socializing with the trendy crowds that frequent the beach.  But Elsa, longing for the tranquility of their old homestead, hates the new setting.  When she looks out from their new apartment over the vast wavy ocean, she sees only wild turbulence and loneliness.  She also tells her husband that she thinks there is something eerily wrong with the new house and urges an immediate return to Philadelphia and stability. 

It soon becomes evident to the viewer that the Hollands’ marriage is teetering.  Keith has a roving eye, and his gestures of affection towards his wife are grandiose but phony.  In fact the more we see of Keith, the more evident it is that he is a complete egotist and has concern only for himself and his standing among pretty young women.  Elsa quietly senses this absence of affection from her husband, and she cannot conceal her growing unhappiness.

As an expression of his treasured sense of manliness, Keith fancies himself as a handyman, and he soon begins digging a deep hole in the cellar in an effort to improve drainage in the house in order to reduce the prevailing feeling of dampness.  Any viewer familiar with Hitchcock’s macabre tales can’t help wondering what other use this hole might soon be put to.

Meanwhile Elsa is embroiled in efforts to find a way to break their lease so that they can move out of the odious (to her) house.  She learns that the owners from whom they are leasing the house, the Wilsons, used to live in it, but Mrs. Wilson left her husband, and Mr. Wilson then moved away to Seattle.  Elsa wants to get in touch with the Wilsons, particularly with Mrs. Wilson, in order to learn more about the history of the house and perhaps about possible things wrong with it.

While she is doing this, Keith is busy cultivating a budding amorous relationship with a pretty girl (Tisha Sterling) he finds on the beach, who seems susceptible to Keith’s pseudo-manly boastfulness.

Things don’t look setup for a happy ending, and indeed what turns out doesn’t work out for anyone.  The twist at the end is interesting, but it is something I anticipated early on, and you will probably do the same.  Indeed the closing twist could have been better presented, and too much time is spent on Keith’s obnoxious, self-centered preening. Arthur Kennedy’s performance in this regard is energetic but lacks subtlety.  More nuanced and human is the performance of Phyllis Thaxter as Elsa.  Her worried and concernful visage is what sustains our sympathies throughout most of this tale.

★★★

“Citizen Kane” - Orson Welles (1941)

Citizen Kane (1941) was initially a box-office failure, but it went on to be nominated for nine US Film Academy Awards (Oscars) and become one of the most famous movies ever made. Critics and film scholars have been almost uniform in their praise – it regularly topped Sight and Sound’s poll of critics, conducted very ten years from 1962 to 2002, and it topped the American Film Institute’s lists of greatest movies in 1998 and 2007.  And even the making of the film has been the subject of numerous book-length studies [1,2,3,4] and Oscar-nominated documentary films (e.g., The Battle Over Citizen Kane, (1996). 

Controversy over the making of the film has primarily been concerned with (a) efforts on the part of newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst, on whose life much of the film’s material is based, to limit the film’s distribution and (b) questions about the degree to which the 25-year-old Orson Welles, who produced, directed, and starred in the film, deserved credit for also being the co-author of the script.  I won’t go into those issues, here, but I think it’s fair to say that the film was a technical marvel and had a revolutionary effect on subsequent film expression for many top filmmakers.  But my concern here is not so much on how the filmmakers achieved their superb effects (which were amazing, given the technical constraints of the day under which they operated), but is instead on how the film looks to a modern audience today.

The story of Citizen Kane is a character study over the life and career of a wealthy and ambitious newspaper magnate.  For legal reasons the film purports to be a fictionalized account, but there is no doubt that this portrait is very much based on the life of William Randolph Heart, a famous contemporary figure and, to a lesser extent, on the life of Samuel Insull, another wealthy magnate. So one might expect that this production would take the form of a documentary film with an attempt to give a realistic account of a historical figure (and indeed Citizen Kane starts off under the pretense of a documentary).  But instead of delivering documentary realism, Citizen Kane comes up with one of the all-time great presentations of expressionistic filmmaking.

How Orson Welles accomplished such a feat is still amazing to consider. He said that in preparation for his first film directorial effort (he was already a theatrical stage actor and producer), he privately watched John Ford’s film Stage Coach (1939) some forty times, with  a varying collection of technical professionals on hand to give him advice on how effects were achieved. Irrespective of who deserves credit for what, Welles had an estimable collection of professionals working on the production staff as collaborators, including cinematographer Gregg Toland, film editor Robert Wise, and musical composer Bernard Herrmann – and, of course, scriptwriter Herman Mankiewicz.  What this team came up with was a dazzling display of various effects that worked together to achieve the expressionistic presentation of a psychological investigation – who was Charles Foster Kane, and what did he ultimately seek? 

Of course, that is a question that occupies all of us, but Kane had the means and energy to pursue his quest to the ends of the earth.  He followed his own compass and achieved many things, but there was something that always eluded him.  To portray this life-long quest, the dark recesses of the soul are externally portrayed in expressionistic form as the film narrative proceeds. There are several innovative technical elements that stand out as some of the real strong points of ths film.  In fact, to a certain extent, these expressive strengths are so significant that they really represent the core of what we appreciate about Citizen Kane:

• the narrative framing into separate reflective accounts that present the investigation into Kane’s psyche in different strains and according to the varying perspectives of the narrators;
• the smooth, but disconcerting, time transitions that collapse entire decades of historical events into a single scene (these provoke a certain unease at just how variable time is in the course of life);
• the innovative deep-focus photography, which pulls the viewer, who is normally a somewhat objective silent witness, into a labyrinthine involvement in what goes on;
• the bizarre low-angle and high-angle camera compositions that provide an atmospheric presentation of the enclosing (and sometimes emotionally menacing) environment;
• the moody and emphatic music, both onscreen and off, of Bernard Herrmann.

The story of Citizen Kane is told by means of a framing story that encloses five successive accounts of Kane, as seen from varying perspectives.  These accounts more or less cover the key events in Kane’s life between 1871, when he was about eight years old, to 1941, when he dies of a heart attack.  At the begining of the film, Kane has just died and movie magazine journalists are looking for a way to tell the story of Kane’s life.  It is known that Kane’s last spoken words were, “Rosebud”, but noone knows what that means.  A reporter, Jerry Thompson (William Alland), is given the task of interviewing various past acquaintances of Kane to see if he can find out the mystery behind the meaning of “Rosebud”.  This leads to the five successive narratives:

1. The “News on the March” Movie Newsreel  Narrative (13 minutes) is a presumably objective overview of Kane’s entire life as seen by the public.
2. The Walter Thatcher Narrative (28 minutes) is a relatively objective, external account that outlines Kane’s rise as newspaperman and crusader for public causes as seen from the perspective of the wealthy banker, Walter Park Thatcher (George Coulouris). 
3. The Bernstein Narrative (20 minutes) covers the early years (roughly 1888 to 1902) of Kane’s career as seen from the sympathetic perspective of Kane’s loyal assistant, Mr. Bernstein.  This is a more personal perspective and sees Kane as a charismatic personality.
4. The Jed Leland Narrative (24 minutes) covers the next sixteen years are so from the perspective of Kane’s best friend, Jedediah Leland (Joseph Cotton).  Leland is moralistic and critical of Kane’s ultimate purposes, which he condemns as narcissistic.
5. The Susan Alexander Narrative (32 minutes) covers Kane’s declining years when he was married to his second wife, Susan Alexander (Dorothy Comingore).

1. The “News on the March” Narrative
This is a newsreel produced by the movie magazine journalists that presents a presumably objective overview of Kane’s entire life as seen by the public. 

We learn some basic facts, such as that Kane was extraordinarily wealthy and owned a chain of newspapers; that he prominently engaged in “yellow journalism” and helped urge on the Spanish-American War; and that he had been a rising political star whose populist demagoguery led his opponents to brand him variously as a fascist and a communist. In response to those charges, Kane said that he wasn’t either of those two, but was simply “an American”.  (Echoing Kane’s statement only a few days ago, Edward Snowden, who has blown the whistle on the US National Security Association’s mass violation of citizen privacy, remarked to a reporter, "I'm neither traitor nor hero. I'm an American." [5] ) 

Kane married the US President’s niece in 1902, but she left him in 1916 on account of his  affair with a lower-class woman, the public revelation of which ruined Kane’s political career.  In 1918 his wife and young son were killed in an auto accident, but by this time Kane was married to the other woman, who aspired to be an opera singer.  After the Stock Market Crash of 1929 dismembered his newspaper empire, Kane retired to his vast and never-finished castle-like estate, “Xanadu”, and gradually became a recluse.

2. The Walter Park Thatcher Narrative
Jerry Thompson now consults the private library of Walter Thatcher, Kane’s original guardian and financial manager. Born to a poor family, Kane had inherited enormous wealth at the age of eight (“the world’s sixth largest private fortune”), and Thatcher, a stuffy banker from New York, was the one who looked after Kane’s holdings while the boy grew up. When Kane reached the age of twenty-five and assumed control over his financial empire, he immediately bought a newspaper, the New York Inquirer, and began his career of yellow journalism. Like the first narrative, this account is also relatively mater-of-fact, and it includes one of those famous time-transition scenes: Thatcher says “Merry Christmas . . . “ to Kane when he is eight years old, and then the shot dissolves into Thatcher, now visibly older, continuing the phrase by saying, “. . . and a Happy New Year!”.  Seventeen years pass by in one continuous dissolve.  Although in this sequence Thatcher shows himself to be horrified at becoming a key target of Kane’s public crusades against financial cronyism, the viewer is given a rather sympathetic portrayal of Kane as an idealistic spokesman for the public good.

3.  The Bernstein Narrative
Still knowing nothing about “rosebud”, the reporter Thompson goes to visit Mr. Bernstein (Everett Sloane), Kane’s longtime friend and chief assistant.  When asked about “rosebud”, Bernstein warns Thompson how brief, seemingly trivial, moments can long linger in a person’s memory. To give an example, he refers to a personal moment of his that happened forty-five years earlier:

”I was crossing over to jersey on the ferry.  As we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in.  And on it there was a girl waiting to get off.   A white dress she had on.  She was carrying a white parasol.  I only saw her for one second.  She didn’t see me at all. But I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

There is another one of those time-capsuling dissolves in this section when a photo showing the staff of Kane’s rival New York newspaper, The Chronicle, dissolves into an essentially identical photo six years later showing that they had all been bought by Kane’s money to go work for the The Inquirer.

This section also features perhaps the best scene in the film: a staff party at The Inquirer celebrating the success of the newspaper. There are brilliantly composed shots here featuring sound and visual combinations across multiple parties and in depth – such as one showing Kane dancing with hired chorus girls in the background while Leland expresses his doubts to Bernstein in the foreground.

Essentially this narrative, which closes with the news that Kane has married the US President’s niece, reflects Bernstein’s loyally supportive view and shows Kane to be charismatic, idealistic, and effective.  He is at his high-water mark.

4.  The Jed Leland Narrative
Continuing his search, Thompson visits a retirement to interview Jedediah Leland, who had long been Kane’s best friend and had worked for Kane newspapers as a drama critic. There is another famous time-capsuled multiple-dissolve scene here, which measures the decline of Kane’s marriage by showing Kane and his wife, Emily (Ruth Warrick), in a series of similar shots at the breakfast table but spread out over sixteen years. This section also recounts his early affair with Susan Alexander, who serenaded Kane with her singing voice, and how this affair led to the end of Kane’s promising political career in 1916. 

Leland blamed Kane for not following his own stated principles, and there is an interesting scene comprising three long (93, 96, and 70 seconds in length), low-angle moving-camera shots showing Leland vocalizing his criticisms and asking to be transferred to the Chicago newspaper.  But this turned out not be a safe enough distance for Leland, and an outspokenly critical column of his criticizing Susan Alexander’s opera performance led to his dismissal and a termination of his relationship with Kane.

5.  The Susan Alexander Narrative

Still searching for something about “rosebud”, Thompson visits Susan Alexander at her nightclub, which she operated after divorcing Kane.  This dreary account shows two people with little in common and the resulting boredom of their life together. Kane stubbornly tried to push Susan’s singing career, but the poor woman had neither the will nor the talent to be successful and only became miserable as a result. 

In the closing scenes, Thompson never finds out anything about “rosebud”, although he has learned quite a bit about Kane’s life.  In the final images, though, the viewer is shown the key to what “rosebud” meant nominally and can speculate what its metaphorical significance was to Kane.

Thus each of the five narratives shows succeeding portions of Kane’s life from progressively narrower and more personal perspectives.  The early narratives provide the public view, while the later narratives offer successively more intimate and critical views of Kane.  Leland criticized Kane as wanting to be loved rather than offering his own love unconditionally.  Susan Alexander felt she was merely an accessory to Kane’s own grandiose ambitions.  So as the focus progressively narrows, Kane is shown to be essentially hollow and selfishly unaware of what the people around him wanted.

On the whole and despite some extraordinarily powerful expressionistic elements to the story, not everything is ideal in Citizen Kane. The Susan Alexander section is too long and drains some of the narrative momentum that had been built up in earlier sections. The character study of Kane is not entirely convincing, either. If we take a step back from the emotionally colored material presented to us, we can perhaps be a bit more sympathetic to Kane. After all, some presumably key events in Kane’s life are merely alluded to, such as his courtship with Emily and the tragic death of Emily and his son.  So we only get a prejudiced selection of events, and other events were of little concern to the narrators talking about Kane, so they are not covered in their accounts. Leland and Susan Alexander, when you reflect on them, are rather selfish, too. They seem to have little empathy for Kane and little interest in making him happy. They merely criticize him for not doing enough to fulfill their own desires, and they offer little in return. And how different were Kane’s dogged attempts to propel Susan Alexander’s career from the currently popular “positive” American attitude of never giving up on one’s goal, as is projected by US star sportsmen such as Michael Jordan? Kane’s never-give-up determination must have been crucially responsible for some successes in his life, too, no?

In fact as a character study, I would consider the depiction of Nader in Farhadi’s A Sepaaration (2011) to be far more subtle and revealing than what is shown in Citizen Kane. Nevertheless, there is something interesting about placing the viewer in the vicarious role of a reporter seeking to extract a kernel of truth from a succession of prejudicial accounts – and this style of truth extraction came well before its cruder portrayal of Rashomon (1950).

But anyway it’s not the character study, by itself, that makes Citizen Kane a great film. What is great about the film is its expressionistic immersion of the viewer into quasi-nightmarish emotional environments as felt by the various people that Thompson talks to. This is the same kind of effect that has powered film noir, and it is no wonder that Citizen Kane had a powerful effect on subsequent film noir productions. After all, films are not really about reality; they more accurately reflect our dreams and nightmares.

★★★★

Notes:

1. Kael, Pauline (ed.), The Citizen Kane Book, Little and Brown, Boston, (1971).
2. Ronald Gottesman, Perspectives on Citizen Kane, G.K. Hall & Co., New York, ISBN 978-0-8161-1616-4, (1996).
3. Robert L. Carringer, The Making of Citizen Kane, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, ISBN 0-520-05367-2, (1996).
4. Laura Mulvey, Citizen Kane, British Film Institute, London, ISBN 0-85170-339-9, (1992).
5. Lana Lam, "EXCLUSIVE: Whistle-blower Edward Snowden talks to South China Morning Post", South  China Morning Post, 13 June 2013, (http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1259335/exclusive-whistle-blower-edward-snowden-talks-south-china-morning).

“Taxi Driver” - Martin Scorsese (1976)

Taxi Driver (1976) was a landmark film in many ways.  Winner of the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme D’Or in 1976, the film represents the peak and signature performances of director Martin Scorsese and actor Robert De Niro. But beyond those specific individual achievements, what singles the film out and marks it for greatness is its uniquely powerful expressionistic presentation [1]. By “expressionism” I mean here that the mode of artistic presentation entails depicting the entire external world as a manifestation of the inner feelings (the psychological interior) of the narrator (usually the author and/or principal character). The German Expressionistic films of the Weimar Republic period, reflecting the general Expressionistic art movement in painting and architecture at the time, presented expressionism at its most explicit, with severe and artificial distortions of the depicted physical world that depicted a disturbed state of mind.  Since then expressionistic film expression has been more modulated, but there are still exemplar filmmakers in that mode today, including Zhang Yimou and Werner Herzog.  However, Taxi Driver probably tops them all in terms of the urban expressionistic nightmare it depicts in an ostensibly realistic setting.

Taxi Driver also carries with it Existentialistic overtones, a not uncommon artistic companion of expressionism, since this film portrays the sense of deep-seated anxiety that is characteristic of the existentialist sensibility.  Modern exemplary filmmakers that tend to focus on the existentialist mode include Michelangelo Antonioni,Wong Kar Wai, and Majid Majidi, but there are many films that conform to this genre.  As I have discussed at greater length in "Existentialism in Film 1" [2] and "Phenomenology and Red Desert" [3], existentialist films involve a profound sense of both alienation and transcendence.  Alienation here is general: it involves a fundamental sense of separation and isolation on the part of the protagonist from his or her social environment and entire world of involvements. The reason for this sense of separation can be found in the manner in which Existentialism contrasts with Essentialism.  Essentialism, which we could also call Objectivism, applies the principles of objective, natural science to everything and is the conventional means by which our modern Western culture characterizes the world.  According to this mode of thinking, everything in the world can be understood  in terms of its essence, which is what distinguishes it from other things.  We can then understand the entire world (from the Essentialist perspective) in terms of the state-based relationships connecting these essences. Existentialism, however, has a perspective that contrasts with Essentialism by emphasizing not essence but existence – something more primordial and beyond the relationship-based notion of essence.  The Existentialist position argues that there is something fundamentally missing about Essentialism – we feel that we are more than just the essences that are said to describe us, and we feel alienated from such a diminished view of our existence.  Existence entails contingency and possibility.  There is something we feel that must transcend the essentialist depiction of reality.  The Existentialist viewpoint is concerned with more than a description of what is.  It senses transcendent contingency and possibility – that eery awareness that unforeseeable and unfathomable events, even our own deaths, may be imminent.

Early definitive portraits of Existentialistic unease appeared years ago in two groundbreaking novels: Albert Camus’s The Stranger (aka The Outsider, 1942/1946)  and Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea (1938/1949), in both of which the respective protagonists famously felt separated from everything around them.  But these works convey their message by means of written words, which are inherently grounded in Essentialism.  And as I remarked in those two earlier film essays, the film medium is probably an even better vehicle than the written word for the conveyance of existentialist and expressionist feelings. In fact, the direct transcription of outstanding expressionistic/existentialist written works onto the screen is often not as successful as other works that are similar, but have been more specifically sculpted for the cinematic medium.  Thus Brazil (1986) was a more effective expression of its artistic inspiration, Orwell’s novel 1984, than the explicit film adaptation of that novel (1984, 1984).  So, too, Taxi Driver is a more effective cinematic presentation of Existentialist alienation than Luchino Viconti’s The Stranger (1967), the film adaptation of Camus’s novel.  This was no accidental side effect of the filmmakers’ cinematic stylistics: Taxi Driver’s scriptwriter, Paul Schrader, had earlier written a book on film aesthetics, Transcendental Style In Film [4], which  explicitly examines how alienation and transcendence have been presented on film by some earlier masters.

Note that when Existentialistic stories are presented, the narrative structures are rather different from more conventional stories.  In most typical narratives, there is a metaphorical journey undertaken by the protagonist(s), who identify and seek a remote target that must be reached for fulfilment or salvation. Thus these protagonists generally know where they initially are and where they must go.  But in Existentialistic stories the protagonist is intrinsically lost from the outset.  There is a deep sense that something is wrong, but also a fundamental bewilderment in terms of where to go or what to do.  This sense of aimlessness and incapacitation in Existentialist works can frustrate some viewers and critics, who are waiting for the narrative journey to take shape and set forth [5]. The narrative structure of Taxi Driver struggles with this problem of aimlessness, and in the end Scorsese and Schrader manage to fashion a narrative scheme founded on this desperate search for a meaningful goal.  Anyway, what matters in this film is not so much its narrative structure as its expressionistic depiction of a dark, disturbing mood.

The story of Taxi Driver concerns a young ex-US Marine and Vietnam War veteran, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), who gets a job as a taxicab driver for a New York City cab fleet.  Bickle is a loner who lives in a spare, one-room flat, with only a diary for expressing his thoughts.  He drives all night, usually from 6pm to 6am, through the bizarre Manhattan underworld peopled by social outliers, such as prostitutes, pimps, drug addicts, and various underworld types.  Everything is seen from his point of view, with occasional voiceovers recording his diary notes or letters that he sends to his parents, who are far removed from his existence.

Travis is cut off from everything and everyone, with no meaningful relationships in his life.  As the story unfolds, he will encounter two different women with whom he briefly attempts to strike up relationships.  These are overlaid on top of his fundamental problem of alienation: his dysfunctional relationship with the world.  So over the course of the film, there are three concurrent narrative threads to follow along, all of which are his attempts to come to terms with his sense of alienation:

• the relationship with Betsy
• the relationship with Iris
• the relationship with the world.  Admittedly this one is rather general, but it makes sense to characterize it as problematic relationship in this context.

With respect to all three relationships, Travis tries to overcome his sense of powerlessness and futility with respect to having an authentic impact on his surroundings.  The story breaks down into roughly four sections that relate the frustrating evolution of these relationships.

1.  Hopeful Engagement
The early scenes show Travis cruising through the New York City night scene and delivering his fares.  Despite his worldly experience as a US Marine, Travis is fundamentally an innocent, almost naive, individual, who is disturbed by the corrupt world of New York City night people.  At the close of every workday, he has to clean out the semen, filth, and blood that is left in the back seat of his taxi by his degenerate passengers.  Travis’s sense of alienation and unrelenting distress is reflected in the insomnia he suffers, which further deadens him to his surroundings.  One day, however, he spies a beautiful girl on the street, Betsy (Cybil Shepherd), who is a volunteer campaign worker for a US Presidential candidate, Senator Charles Palantine.  In all the filth and grime of the city environment, here is a beautiful flower of perfection. Immediately Travis feels that he and Betsy must share some intrinsic inner connection – she must be his destined soul-mate.  How many of us have sometimes felt this way?  We encounter a person of the opposite gender who is just so perfectly suited to our inner nature, that there must have been some destiny behind our meeting. 

Despite obvious differences in class and breeding, Travis is boundlessly confident that he and Betsy were meant for each other, and he boldly approaches her directly.  For her part, Betsy is guardedly charmed by Travis’s effervescent innocence.  So Travis now has a hopeful goal and a route to fulfilment.

When Senator Palantine hires his taxi one time, Travis’s romantic enthusiasm for Betsy spills over to embrace the senator’s candidacy.  Palantine, himself, is an unbelievably empty-headed political hypocrite who merely repeats the mindless mantra, “we are the people”, throughout the film.  His character is something of a master stroke on Scorsese’s part, because Palantine’s platitudes effectively represent the dead-end emptiness of essentialism.  Unconsciously, Travis will come to sense that Palantine is the embodiment of his own frustrations with the world as the film wears on.

2.  Powerlessness and Frustration
Travis’s optimism proves transient.  Despite his innocence, Betsy soon recoils from Travis’s lack of polish and dumps him.  Innocence has been rebuked and rejected.  Then a 12-year-old street girl, Iris (Jodie Foster), jumps into Travis’s cab and urges him to get her away from some imminent danger.  But Travis hesitates, and the girl is wrestled out of his cab by her drug-dealing pimp, Matthew (Harvey Keitel), aka “Sport”, while Travis simply watches helplessly from the front seat of his cab.  Here is the city’s corruption of innocence at its most extreme: a pretty, underage girl coerced into prostitution.

The solution to life’s problems seems invariably to be violence.  One of Travis’s passengers (played by Scorsese, himself), tells him that he will kill his unfaithful wife by blowing her to pieces with a 44 Magnum pistol.  This seems to be the only path to take for Travis, too.  He buys an armory of guns from an illegal weapons merchant and starts preparing for some unspecified mission of violence.

In the meantime, Travis meets Iris again and arranges to become of her “clients”.  His goal is to rescue her from her degenerate life, but he doesn’t know how.  He does manage to make some sort of connection with her, though, and though transient, this turns out to be his only meaningful relationship in the film.

3.  Self Destruction
Existentialist rejection of the Essentialist-modelled world can lead to a rejection of one’s own essence-derived self conception.  This is clearly happening to Travis, as the viewer sees him heading down the path of self-destruction.  Travis evidently wants to strike out at the indifferent world and do something that has an impact on it.  His symbolic target becomes Charles Palantine, whose inauthentic disconnection from true human engagement somehow must unconsciously make him the ultimate target of Travis’s wrath. 

Travis prepares a letter to be sent to Iris with some money and a message that says, “at the time you read this, I will be dead.”  Travis’s voiceover reflection sums up his current state of mind: 

“Now I see it clearly.  My whole life has pointed in one direction.  I see that now.  There never has been any choice for me.”

Fully armed and now sporting a bizarre Mohawk haircut, Travis goes to a Palantine political rally to carry out his assassination.  But before he can act, he is recognized by guards and flees the scene. That night, and now even more mentally deranged, he pursues an alternative path by heading down to the Lower East Side to engage in a violent, shoot-first rescue of Iris.  A bloody shootout ensues, with Travis killing Matthew and two others while getting critically shot in the neck, himself.  At the end of the devastation, Travis tries to shoot himself, but he out of bullets. The police arrive, and Travis is taken away.

4.  Aftermath
It is now a few months later, and the viewer learns that Travis, after being in a coma, has survived and recovered from his wounds.  Despite his murderous killing-spree, Travis has been hailed by the press as a hero, since he killed low-life drug dealers.  Iris is back safe with her parents, far from New York.  Travis is back on the same taxi night shift and living as before.  One of his fares turns out to be Betsy, and they engage in cautious, impersonal small talk during the ride, after which Travis refuses payment and silently pulls away from the curb.

The ending of the film is one of pure irony. Travis has finally been returned to normalcy, at least outwardly. But that last shot of Travis slowly, reluctantly pulling away from Betsy is an indication of his continued isolation and tacit desire to make connection. He is now mentally confined by even bigger walls, but perhaps he has abandoned his struggle to overcome them.

As I mentioned earlier, the expressionistic presentation of a mood is what makes this film outstanding.  Scorsese’s picture of the ominous and threatening New York City night scene is undoubtedly aided by his being a native of the city.  The focalization of the film remains almost exclusively on Travis Bickle, except for short moments with Betsy and Iris.  Why were these two singled out in this fashion?  Perhaps the moments showing those girls' personal connections with other men highlights Travis's nightmares concerning aspects of their lives outside the scope of his influence. So these sequences, too, add to the film’s atmosphere of anxiety and separation.  Another particularly memorable scene is when Travis, alone in his apartment, slowly and knowingly tips his portable television off its stand and wrecks it.  The drift towards self-destruction is captured perfectly without words.

The film’s overall mood of threatening alienation is immeasurably enhanced by the film score written by Bernard Herrmann, who was perhaps the consummate film music composer and whose music for films of Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Brian De Palma provided indelible signatures for those specific works. In this case here in Taxi Driver, the mood of the film is so linked to Herrmann that I feel he is almost a co-author of the film.

Some people simply dismiss Travis Bickle as someone who just went crazy and who at the end remains a loaded time-bomb who might erupt again in the future.  Perhaps so, but the power of this film is its ability to give us some understanding of Travis. We can empathize with his agony and lost innocence.  We know him as we know ourselves.  At the film's end, meaningful connection possibilities with Betsy, Iris, and the city at large seem to be gone forever.  There is only the dark urban nightmare around him, and that still remains a threat, as shown in the last frames of the film.

★★★★

Notes:

1. “Expressionism in Film", The Film Sufi (2008).
2. "Existentialism in Film 1", The Film Sufi (2008).
3. "Phenomenology and Red Desert", The Film Sufi (2010).
4. Schrader, Paul, Transcendental Style In Film (1972/1988), Da Capo Press.
5. This has been a criticism of some of Michelangelo Antonioni’s films, such as Red Desert (1964).