Lonely, tortured cab driver Travis Bickle is the second best sociopath of the many great ones in Martin Scorsese movies (Rupert Pupkin, another Robert De Niro part, is my number one choice). Bickle is trapped in Hell, which a looks a lot like sleazy 1970s New York City where there’s a suffering soul every three feet and the Times Square sex palace lights poke like needles at his nerves. Scorsese is the perfect director for Paul Schrader’s script. Scorsese knows the city well, is comfortable with making us uncomfortable and is down with the subtext of Bickle as a tainted saint of the urban cesspool. It’s ugly stuff… and it’s beautiful. Film music composer legend Bernard Herrmann takes his final bow here (he died just before the film’s release) with one stunner of a score that sometimes pounds like a horror film and other times blows sexy noir smoke rings toward the city lights.