Veteran turns vigilante

Press, 5 September 1987, Page 18

Veteran turns vigilante

The Late Movie, “Taxi Driver,” tonight (Saturday) at 11.30 on two features an all-star cast. Robert De Niro, Cybil! Shepherd and Jodie Foster appear in this disturbing story about an embittered Vietnam veteran who drives a taxi in New York City. The movie was made in 1976. De Niro plays cabbie Travis Bickle, who has become alienated and confused by the corruption he sees around him. After building up an arsenal of weapons, he takes the law into his own hands — a lone vigilante, bent on freeing a 12-year-old prostitute. Jodie Foster is Iris, the youthful hooker, and Cybill Shepherd is Betsy, the woman Bickle tries unsuccessfully to date. De Niro is getting used to playing aggressive roles on the big screen. In 1970 he played a murderous drug addict in "Bloody Mama,” and in 1973, a schizophrenic hoodlum in “Mean

Streets.” Two years before “Taxi Driver” he appeared in “The Godfather Part II.” He was caught up in the horrors of the Vietnam War (again) in “The

Deerhunter” (1978) and boxed his way to the top in “Raging Bull” in 1980. Shepherd is best known to New Zealand audiences as the coo], calm and collected Maddie Hayes in

the TV series "Moonlighting,” but she cut quite a dash in an earlier series “The Yellow Rose.” At 36, she has been in the acting business for a good number of years, and has played the longlimbed American beauty in films like “The Last Picture Show” (1971), “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972) and "Daisy Miller” (1974). Foster, now 24, was already a veteran of films and television when she appeared in “Taxi Driver.” She moved from innocent-child roles in Disney productions to playing dubious characters like the drugaddicted Iris, Miss Tallulah, (a “speakeasy” queen in gangland Chicago) in “Bugsy Malone" the same year, and a murderess in "The Little Girl who Lives down the Lane” (1977). “Taxi Driver,” directed by Martin Scorsese, was the film which established this director as one of the most gifted of his generation.