In the Back Seat: ’99 River Street’ and ‘Taxi Driver’ on the Former’s 70th Anniversary

99 River Street (1953), was directed by Phil Karlson, an underrated filmmaker who exposed crudely the American underworld’s polluted atmosphere in the ’50s with Scandal Sheet, Kansas City Confidential, The Phenix City Story, etc. We’ll analyze two stories in the back seat of this underworld.

Ernie Driscoll (John Payne) is a washed-up boxer who lost his latest bout in the seventh round, when he was on the verge of becoming a heavyweight champion. As a result of that terrible match, he received in his right eye a pronounced injury, so he had to abandon the boxing ring, and he’s now working as a taxi driver (like Scorsese’s antihero played by Robert De Niro in 1976).

Ernie’s wife Pauline (Peggie Castle), who craves the high life of mink coats and diamonds, berates him constantly for what she views as poor ambitions for their future. Ernie is saving up to quit his taxi. His goal is to open a gas station. Pauline has been seduced by a slick gangster (Victor Rawlins, played by Brad Dexter) who is an accomplice to a jewelry robbery valued at $50,000.

99 River Street opens on a magnificent boxing sequence, filmed through raw close-ups and a sequence from Ernie’s brilliant past. His adversary’s blows slam his brain; the knockout punch mercilessly damages his optical nerve. He’s been married to Pauline for four not-so-happy years, and she’s run out of patience with Ernie. She aspires to leave her job as a clerk in a flower shop and dreams of a cozy life in Paris.

Fearful that his marriage is coming to an end (he loved her once, but he’ll admit later: “It fell apart”), Ernie looks for advice from his cabbie pal Stan Hogan (played emphatically by Frank Faylen). Stan realizes Ernie’s mind is irremediably mired in discontent and exasperation, so he suggests Ernie sweet-talk Pauline into having a baby. Ernie’s eyes fill with sad perplexity before replying dryly: “Sure, I’d like a boy like yours.”

More tense moments will appear throughout the film, painting a sombre portrait, interlacing seemingly intrusive scenes: When Ernie comes back to Paulman’s gymnasium with the purpose of asking Pop Durkee for his approval of a possible comeback to the ring, it’s rather painful to observe. In another scene, we see Ernie soaked in a cold sweat, unleashing his blinding anger; and then there’s the delusory theatre scene with his love interest Linda (Evelyn Keyes), who embarks on his taxi intending for a personal victory.

The cast makes terrifying justice playing wicked characters who exist in a world of distorting shadows: Peggie Castle, Jack Lambert, Brad Dexter and Jay Adler. Tracking their urbane nightmare, these shadows threaten to obliterate Ernie and Linda’s frenzied ride across the city. The dim lights flicker amidst the umbrae like Driscoll’s twitchy eye.

Ernie is blunt explaining to an ashamed Linda: “Do you see that? That’s a fighter’s fist. It’s dangerous, it can kill somebody, so when a fighter is arrested they don’t fine him on the street, they put him in jail, and throw out the key.” Some memorable encounters with greedy Broadway producers, and the final assault against Rawlins at the New Jersey’s docks, expunge vitiated memoirs (that have plagued and rendered Ernie socially numb) from his garbled system.

Payne shines especially in these pivotal scenes. “The harder you’re hit, the harder you have to hit.” The camera zooms in relentlessly on Ernie’s eyes. For her part, Evelyn Keyes’s character is the heroine who can switch off her personality and play a femme fatale to achieve her purposes. She confuses Ernie and the audience staging “They call it Murder” with a melodramatic performance bordering on the hysterical.

Unembellished yet strangely poetic, 99 River Street procures with rare dexterity a tale of moral redemption and one of the most honorable examples in the genre. Part of its far-reaching message is Karlson’s trust in the American culture of individual effort and its condemnation of those who look for an easy way to a palmy life.

Phil Karlson has been cited as influential on Martin Scorsese’s approach in the grittiest aspects of his work. Karlson came from the Poverty Row studios and most of his films reflect this hard-hitting style. Although Kansas City Confidential is a more renowned thriller, 99 River Street is probably Karlson’s most accomplished film, a dissection of a man’s soul through a hellish night.

As Eddie Muller explicates in Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir (citing Notes on Film Noir written by Paul Schrader in 1972), The Sniper (1952) directed by Edward Dmytryk is another precedent for Taxi Driver (1976). Arthur Franz in a misogynist rage is equivalent to Travis Bickle in some respects: Both protagonists suffer from a psychopathological disorder, “the root causes of the period: the loss of public honor, heroic conventions, personal integrity and finally psychic stability.”

In Taxi Driver, the misogyny is still latent, but it’s only another symptom of the main character’s vulnerability. One of the most cringeworthy scenes takes place in a theatre that exhibits adult movies, where Travis ruins his date with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), whom he’d absurdly idealized. He pretends not to understand her discomfort, and he eventually sabotages the relationship. There is more cruelty carelessly inflicted on an independent woman (Betsy) and indirectly on himself than in 99 River Street, in which Ernie doesn’t mistreat Pauline or Linda even when he’s been deceived by both women.

Travis in Taxi Driver is an unhinged Vietnam vet who’s driving a cab on the night shift due to his insomnia. Squeamish, cocky and self-delusional by turns, Travis is isolated from the human jungle that clutters the sidewalks he passes every day. He observes dispassionately the endless parade of pariahs, hookers and deviants, dreading turning into one of them. Harvey Keitel is Travis’s imagined rival for the affections of Iris (a teenage prostitute played by Jodie Foster).

Travis’s paranoia takes a turn for the worse after a further disappointment. He thinks of himself as “God’s lonely man” who “got some bad ideas” in his head. Prey of absolute loneliness, in his mind he has mutated into an avenging angel. “Now I see this clearly. My whole life is pointed in one direction. There never has been a choice for me. Loneliness has followed me my whole life, everywhere. In bars, in cars, sidewalks, stores, everywhere.”

One of the main differences between 99 River Street and Taxi Driver, besides the obvious changes to New York’s downtown after two decades, is a new feeling of contempt and disillusionment because of the Vietnam War, all mixed up with a ghoulish sexuality. While Driscoll is more of a hot-headed case whose essential character remains unalterable, Bickle’s mind is more clearly psychotic, experiencing delirious bouts: “The idea had been growing in my brain for some time: True force. All the king’s men cannot put it back together again.”

Travis’s crackbrained character is more modern in sensibility, but as a final thought, he’s kind of a symbolic figure, while Ernie is more easily identifiable as an everyman (more in consonance with Robert Ryan’s aging boxer in The Set-Up). A new lifestyle has been implemented in the big city, with its wide offer of enticing baubles and 24-hour live shows. Travis is living proof of how these changes in liberal attitudes affect the social sphere and result in a taxi driver’s epiphany as representative of the figurative manifestation of a collective death wish.

According to Scorsese: “I wanted the violence at the end to be as if Travis had to keep killing all these people in order to stop them once and for all. Paul saw it as a kind of Samurai ‘death with honour’ (suicide).” In Conversations with Scorsese by Richard Schickel, Scorsese discloses: “I always say, when I try to be amoral, I turn out to be immoral. In Taxi Driver I didn’t enjoy shooting in those X-rated areas. And the film is very, very depressing”.

Both Ernie Driscoll and Travis Bickle suffer from a major depressive disorder that turns them into hostile malcontents. Their traumatic encounters have thrust them into that frail position in relation with others. There are relevant differences in their ethical standpoints, though.

Ernie is presented as a stubborn pugilist, a typical post-World War II dreamer who was tricked into believing that he’d inevitably become a champion. Karlson shows in the beginning of the film a boxing assault that renders Ernie doubly sightless. Ernie was predestined to lose (in the ring and in his marriage) because his life revolved in good measure around power, which inescapably led him to a moral stagnation. Ernie keeps his bad feelings on check, however hurtful it may be.

Travis, on the other hand, has come home to an agitated post-Vietnam society that frowns upon him and forces him to make a living in the middle of an urban jungle that’s sometimes more frantic than the combat field he left behind in Southeast Asia. Schrader’s script suggests his experiences in the war have exacerbated Travis’s condition, but I don’t see it developed in the film as central to his torment. He seems inexorably drawn to negative affairs that enhance his pessimism.

His outward appearance is shabby, his mental health decaying, but he needs to see himself as the last man standing. At the height of his alienation we’re shown how his life is disintegrating while he sleeps in a bunk bed, exercises fervently and talks to himself pointing with a gun at his image in the mirror: “Are you talking to me?”

Ernie’s build in 99 River Street can be occasionally intimidating to others (especially to his friends Stan and Linda), but the script indicates he’s deep down a nice man, unlike Travis, whose newly found obsession with working out and shaving his head only adds a new component of Nietzschean disfunction. John Payne’s semblant is gentle, Robert De Niro’s is crisp. Ernie never humiliates a woman deliberately, that would go against the accustomed chivalry of those men who had been educated by The Lost Generation and whose youth was marked by idealism.

Travis is described in the script as: “He has the smell of about him: Sick sex, repressed sex, lonely sex. He is a raw male force, driving forward; toward what, one cannot tell.” Narrating Travis’s date with Betsy in Times Square, Schrader reveals: “there’s also something that Travis could not even acknowledge, much less admit: That he really wants to get this pure white girl into that dark porno theatre.”

On the contrary, we can’t imagine Ernie telling jokes to a pimp or inviting a runaway girl to discuss her hip profession of selling sex to strangers (despite Travis’s moralistic rant). Ernie shares the gallant view of women that would extent to the late ’50s. “If I met a girl like that now, it’d be too late,” he complains. We reckon Ernie is starting to forgive Linda and wants to give her another opportunity. He slowly grows out of his lethargy and imparts justice, fighting the cops and the crooks. He overcomes his own sorrow and emerges like a gas station owner and an everyman in love with an ex-actress who’s become his wife.

Travis doesn’t know how to treat a lady properly; he represents the advent of an upcoming generation of antiheroes who get a hold on our shocked attention, projecting on the modern screen America’s muddled conscience. Sexual obsessions and suicidal tendencies are habitual subjects in Hollywood of that era. Travis personifies the agonizing disposition of the working class man disconnected from his limiting stratum, cornered against a progressively decadent scenario.

Ernie is an extant emblem of the admirable American heroes (flawed, with selfish impulses, but essentially honest). Taxi Driver is by far the more acclaimed film, but 99 River Street celebrates unpretentious values that now seem lost, encapsulating a time when heroes kept a sense of decency which normal people could respond to. Taxi Driver, instead, belongs to the ’70s with its creative immersion in the auteur theory that distinctly marked a new period with in the nihilist vision Hollywood would promote in the next decades.

In the iconic finger/trigger moment of the bloodbath’s aftermath, Scorsese subtly exposes Travis as remote, almost like another observer of the spree killing (just like one of us). That last scene inside the taxi proves how unreliable Travis’s judgment is even after being lauded as a local hero. His final conversation with Betsy is misleading enough to make us think of the possibility of a dream as an alternate theory, and his upset look in the mirror after Betsy leaves confirms our most obscure suspicions (something very characteristic of the noir genre).

The happy ending of 99 River Street comes off a bit weird too (the possibility of a deception is always intrinsic in noir films, especially when happy endings are so scarce), although not nearly as surreal. Whereas John Payne’s character finished his detour feeling exhausted yet unbeatable, Taxi Driver exhausts the audience instead, while Travis contemplates us from his blood-stained couch.