Bring back the scum

FILM: Taxi Driver'sTravis Bickle was wrong to want the scum off the streets – modern cinema could do with some of the grime of 1970s New Hollywood, writes PAUL LYNCH, as Scorsese's classic gets a scrubbed-up reissue

YOU just won’t see anything like it at the movies any more – the city that doesn’t sleep captured in all its sleazy ordinariness. And there was Robert De Niro’s Travis Bickle, the Vietnam vet who couldn’t sleep either, taking the city’s putrid pulse in his yellow cab.

In Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, New York is a neon wash of decadence, the streets around Times Square a zoo of vice. "All the animals come out at night," says Bickle. They clutter the sidewalks – the "whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies".

It’s the kind of town where a neurotic (in a cameo from Scorsese) can pay a cabbie to stalk a wife who is having an affair, or where an elderly man in the back with a girl half his age pays Travis to keep his eyes on the road.

Whole areas of Manhattan seem to consist of fleapit cinemas playing porno films. Fire hydrants in Harlem spew water lazily into the night like they no longer give a damn. Steam gasps out of the city’s sewers as if it can’t breathe for all the stench. Even Bernard Hermann’s music score was queasy. The last score he wrote before he died is a masterpiece of schizoid suggestion: the city at night swings from the cliche of smooth jazz into a dislocated marshal beat, drumming up a sense of the sinister.

This was not a fictional New York. It was the real deal, captured by the documentary camera of Scorsese’s second-unit crew. Poor Travis Bickle, with all that loneliness and lack of purpose, felt he had to do something about it. “Some day a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets,” he says.

He should have been careful what he wished for. Thirty-five years on, he wouldn’t recognise the world around him. He could drive his cab back down 48th Street just off Eighth Avenue, but all he’d see would be gentrified New York: squeaky clean, tourist-friendly. It’s like the Puritans moved in. Urban renewal had been planned for decades, but the former mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, like a modern-day Gary Cooper, claims the credit for cleaning it up. And then the internet took the brothels and sex shops online.

Travis could search in vain for one of those fleabag cinemas he loved, but he’d only find the cineplex instead – corporate and clean with shiny seats. Nor would he recognise the movies. For ever since the late 1970s, Hollywood has been running terrified from shabby squalor.

Taxi Driverwas a major studio film, and it was among the last of that great era of director-led New Hollywood films before the producers and blockbusters cleaned them away. The New Hollywood movies had a lived-in feel and a willingness to confront the seamier sides of life. Star Wars, which came out a year later, helped to infantilise and cartoonise the modern era.

Today, Hollywood films have never been more sanitised. The big studios spoon-feed cinema-goers with graphics and gloss in a world overrun with superhero silliness and the plastic six-pack buffoonery of director Zack Synder. And while digital technology means films now look impossibly immaculate, nothing any longer seems real. Actors are starting to look like cartoon characters. No wonder we need 3D glasses to believe in them.

And while technology today allows for ageing films such as Taxi Driverto be digitally preserved, it's a shame Taxi Driverwill no longer be seen the way it used to. The first time I saw it was on a print that belched and growled like Travis's exhaust pipe. Now every pixel has been digitally polished so that it looks like new.

That's why it's time to bring back vice and tatty charm. Hollywood could do with learning a thing or two from the masters of the 1970s. Let's see: no more blurry cartoony graphics ( Thor, anyone?) and no more 3D.

Sucker Punchdirector Zack Synder should be banned from the green screen and forced to make a kitchen-sink drama in outdoor light. He would still get to work with six-packs, albeit Tennent's beer.

Pirates of the Caribbean 4should be filmed as a documentary with the characters set adrift on a raft in the Pacific Ocean. While Transformers 4 director Michael Bay, who just likes to smash things, should be given a camcorder and a wrecking ball and sent to make a film on a ghost estate. And if he gets in the way of the ball? Smashing.