Taxi Driver is a 1976 American drama directed by Martin Scorsese and written by Paul Schrader. The film stars Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, a lonely, isolated, and psychotic taxi driver and Jodie Foster as the teenage prostitute he attempts to save.

Plot:

Travis Bickle (De Niro), a Marine who fought in the Vietnam War, is an alienated and mentally unstable young man of 26 from the Midwest. He suffers from chronic insomnia and takes a job as a nighttime taxi driver in New York City. Travis spends his days watching pornography in seedy porn theaters and driving around aimlessly through the shadiest neighborhoods of Manhattan.

He becomes obsessed with Betsy (Shepherd), an aide for New York Senator Charles Palantine, who is running for the presidential nomination and is promising dramatic social change. She is initially intrigued by Travis and agrees to a date with him after he flirts with her and sympathizes with her own apparent loneliness. On the date, however, Travis takes her to a pornographic film, and she leaves him, disturbed. This is a crucial moment in the narrative as Travis feels rejected and depressed, and it triggers in him an obsession with violent self-assertion.

Travis is horrified by what he considers the moral decay around him. Iris (Foster), a 12 year-old child prostitute, gets in his cab one night to escape her pimp. Later he arranges a date with her but refuses when she offers him sex; the next day, they go have breakfast and Travis becomes obsessed with saving her, despite her lack of interest, explaining that she was "stoned" when she tried to escape, and that her pimp Matthew (Harvey Keitel), whom she calls "Sport", appears to be a kind and caring person. Travis then tries to convince her to return home to her parents and go back to school, but fails. Of Sport, Travis says, "Someone has to do something to him ... he is the worst sort of ... sucking scum."


"You talkin' to me?" Alone in his apartment, Travis postures and practices his moves in front of the mirror.Travis then plans to assassinate Senator Palantine at a public rally, though his reasons for doing so remain murky. Perhaps it is because of his new-found self worth, and he explains in his journal that narrates throughout the movie that he has finally found his purpose. He is spotted by Secret Service men and flees. Travis then desperately drives to Alphabet City and in an extremely violent finale shoots Iris's pimp Sport (Keitel), before storming into the brothel and killing the bouncer, the wounded Sport (who has followed Bickle), and Iris's customer.

A brief epilogue of sorts ends the film and shows Travis recuperating from the incident. He receives a letter from Iris's parents who thank him for saving their daughter, and the media hails him as a hero for saving her. Travis returns to his job, where one of his fares is Betsy. She comments about his saving of Iris and Travis's own media fame, yet Travis denies being any sort of hero. Just before the credits start rolling, Travis sees something in his rear view window and quickly looks in its direction, though the viewer never gets to see what Travis does.

Harvey Keitel (born May 13, 1939) is an Academy Award-nominated American actor from New York City

Biography

Early life:

The son of Nikonar Keitel and Maritska LeCose , Jewish immigrants from Poland and Romania, Keitel was born in the New York City borough of Brooklyn, and grew up in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn with his sister, Renee, and brother, Jerry. At the age of sixteen, Keitel decided to join the United States Marine Corps, a decision that took him to Lebanon. After his return to the United States, he was a court reporter and was able to support himself before beginning his acting career.


Career:

As a younger adult in New York City, before becoming a famous actor, Harvey Keitel was a free-lance court reporter.

Keitel studied under both Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, eventually landing roles in some off-Broadway productions. During this time, Keitel met another struggling filmmaker named Martin Scorsese and gained a part in Scorsese's student production, Who's That Knocking at My Door. Since then, Scorsese and Keitel have worked together on numerous projects. Keitel had the starring role in Scorsese's Mean Streets but this proved to be Robert De Niro's breakthrough film. He later appeared with De Niro in Taxi Driver, playing the pimp Matthew for Jodie Foster's character of Iris.

Originally, Keitel was to have played the role of Captain Willard in Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. However, he was fired early in the production and replaced by Martin Sheen. After this, it was many years before he would be able to get anything other than minor roles. At the end of the 1970s, Keitel was mostly working in European films for directors such as Ridley Scott, usually in sinister character parts.

Throughout the 1980s, Keitel continued to find plenty of work on both stage and screen, but was usually in the stereotypical role of a thug. This role reached its zenith when Keitel starred in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs in 1992, where his performance as "Mr. White" relaunched his semi-slumping career. Ridley Scott also helped Keitel by casting him as the sympathetic policeman in Thelma and Louise in 1991. That same year he landed a role in Bugsy, for which he obtained an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Since then, Keitel has chosen his roles with care, seeking to change his image and show off a broader acting range. His decision to co-star in Jane Campion's The Piano marks the approximate beginning of this phase of Keitel's career. He played an efficient cleanup expert Winston Wolf in Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. In 1997, he starred in the crime drama, Cop Land. It starred Sylvester Stallone, Ray Liotta and for the third time, Robert De Niro. In 1997 he also landed a major role in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's film, From Dusk Till Dawn. Later roles include the fatherly Satan in Little Nicky, a wise navy man in U-571 and a diligent F.B.I. agent in National Treasure. In 1999, Keitel was replaced with Sydney Pollack on the set of Eyes Wide Shut due to scheduling conflicts. Keitel then came to great notoriety for his performance in Bad Lieutenant. He has also shown a willingness to help other startup filmmakers by appearing in their first feature film. He did this not only for Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, but also Ridley Scott (The Duellists), Paul Schrader (Blue Collar), James Toback (Fingers), and Tony Bui (Yellow Lotus).

Unlike many American male actors who either never appear nude in film or only do so once, Harvey Keitel has appeared in several films nude, including full frontal nudity.

Personal lif:

Keitel was formerly in a long-term relationship (common-law marriage) to actress Lorraine Bracco. He married Daphna Kastner in 2001. Keitel is the father of three children: daughter Stella (born 1985) from his relationship with Bracco; son Hudson (born 2001) from his relationship with Lisa Karmazin; and son Roman (born 2003) from his marriage to Kastner.


Selected filmograph:

Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967)
Mean Streets (1973)
Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974)
A Memory of Two Mondays (1974)
That's the Way of the World (1975)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Mother, Jugs & Speed (1976)
Blue Collar (1978)
The Duellists (1978)
Fingers (1978)
Bad Timing (1980)
Saturn 3 (1980)
Deathwatch (1980)
Corrupt (1981)
That Night in Varennes (1982)
Exposed (1983)
The Pick-up Artist (1987)
The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
The January Man (1989)
Thelma and Louise (1991)
Bugsy (1991)
Bad Lieutenant (1992)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
Sister Act (1992)
Rising Sun (1993)
The Piano (1993)
Young Americans (1993)
Imaginary Crimes (1994)
Pulp Fiction (1994)
Monkey Trouble (1994)
Get Shorty (uncredited)) (1995)
Smoke (1995)
Ulysses' Gaze (1995)
Blue in the Face (1995)
Clockers (1995)
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)
Head Above Water (1996)
Cop Land (1997)
City of Industry (1997)
Finding Graceland (1998)
Shadrach (1998)
Lulu on the Bridge (1998)
Three Seasons (1999)
Holy Smoke! (1999)
Presence of Mind (1999)
Prince of Central Park (2000)
U-571 (2000)
Little Nicky (2000)
Taking Sides (2001)
Red Dragon (2002)
Crime Spree (2003)
Dreaming of Julia (2003)
National Treasure (2004)
The Bridge of San Luis Rey (2004)
Be Cool (2005)
A Crime (2005)
The Path to 9/11 (2006)
One Last Dance (2007)
Arn (2007)
National Treasure: The Book of Secrets (2007)

Books about Keitel

You Shoot Me in a Dream, You Better Wake Up and Apologize: The Films of Harvey Keitel by Glenn Salter, David Shaw and Craig Proctor (Toronto, Salter Press, 1994)
The title is taken from one of his lines in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs.

Smoke is an American independent film released in 1995. It was produced by Bob and Harvey Weinstein and directed by Wayne Wang and Paul Auster (who also wrote the screenplay). Among others, it features Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Victor Argo, Forest Whitaker, Ashley Judd, Stockard Channing and Harold Perrineau Jr. in the cast.

The film follows the lives of multiple characters, all of whom are connected by their patronage of a small Brooklyn tobacco shop owned by Auggie (Harvey Keitel).

The film was followed by Blue in the Face, a sequel of sorts that continues following a few of the characters and introduces several new ones.

It took all of five days after wrapping the shoot of Smoke to create Blue in the Face, an (allegedly) all-improvised follow-up to Wayne Wang and Paul Auster's feature centered on a tiny smoke shop in Brooklyn. It's a weird experiment in filmmaking, studded with cameos by Lou Reed, Madonna, Michael J. Fox, Roseanne, Lily Tomlin, and more. Unfortunately, you've probably seen all the funniest bits in the movie's trailer.

Separated into segments with titles like "Brooklyn Attitude," Blue in the Face explores the Brooklyn mystique and the Brooklyn experience with video interviews and impromptu sketches. Everything "Brooklyn" is praised, from Ebbets Field and Jackie Robinson to Belgian Waffles and the sanctity of the local cigar store.

A lot of this is hilarious: Reed as the smoke shop employee/eyeglass frame inventor who's been thinking about leaving the city for 35 years; Jim Jarmusch as Bob, who is finally giving up his Lucky Strikes; Fox in an insanely comical turn as a spontaneous social analyst/psychologist; Mel Gorham as Violetta, Auggie's only partially stable girlfriend.

Holding the craziness together (sort of) is Auggie (Harvey Keitel) and the Brooklyn Cigar Co. where he works. When news that the store has been sold arrives, Auggie does his best to change the owner's (Victor Argo) mind, culminating in the appearance of the ghost of Jackie Robinson, who convinces him the store should stay open.

This is not your typical Hollywood fare. It's not typical anything. Clocking in at about 76 minutes, Blue in the Face clearly has the look and feel of a spontaneous collection of vignettes, some of which work, and some of which don't. It's worthwhile for the funny bits, and the film isn't long enough to make you lose interest when it drags. I suppose it did what it was supposed to do (that is, give everyone who wasn't in Smoke something to do for a few afternoons). You'll have to be the judge if that was a good idea or a bad one.

Mean Streets (1973) is an early Martin Scorsese film starring Harvey Keitel and Robert De Niro.

Plot:

Charlie (Keitel) is an Italian-American man who is trying to move up in the local mob and who is hampered by his feeling of responsibility towards his childish yet destructive friend Johnny Boy (De Niro). Charlie works for his uncle (who is the local mob boss), mostly collecting debts. He is also having a hidden affair with Johnny Boy's cousin, Teresa, who has epilepsy and is ostracized because of her condition - especially by Charlie's uncle. A major figure in the plot is the conflict between Charlie's devout Catholicism and his Mafia ambitions. As the film progresses, Johnny becomes increasingly self-destructive and disrespects his creditors more and more. Unable to feel redeemed by his actions in church, Charlie finds redemption through self-sacrifice on Johnny's behalf, long after it ceases to be reasonable or deserved.

Bad Lieutenant is a 1992 film crime drama directed by Abel Ferrara and starring Harvey Keitel as the titular "bad lieutenant"

Plotline:

We first see Keitel's nameless character advising his two sons on how to answer back to their aunt Wendy, which serves as a foreshadowing of his behavior through the rest of the film, in which he takes a twisted delight in humiliating women, most notoriously in the scene where he stops a couple of underage girls without a driving license and demands sexual favors in exchange for letting them off.

The "Bad Lieutenant" also is a drug-using gambler who finds himself plunged into debt when the New York Mets win the National League Championship Series after trailing the Los Angeles Dodgers and former Met Darryl Strawberry 3-0. The Mets' comeback is a sort of "minor miracle" that defies the Lieutenant's lack of faith and parallels his eventual redemption. The Lieutenant is also regularly linked with the prodigal Strawberry. The turning point in the film arrives when the Lieutenant investigates the rape of a nun and uses this as a chance to confront his inner demons and perhaps achieve redemption.