ABSTRACT
Travis Bickle's menacing challenge in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver has become almost an anthem for the culture of urban alienation, an abstraction of the anonymity, loneliness, social disengagement, and moral detachment for which the big city is often regarded as prime cause. There is a certain obviousness as to why New York City seems to receive special attention by cinema's great monsters of urban retribution. In 1927, renowned German director F. W. Murnau chose a dimension of urban alienation as the subject of his first American film. New York's urban morphology and demography are also employed in William Wyler's Dead End, which, drawing upon the prevailing social theory of the times held the city to account for the creation of juvenile delinquents in New York City. The New York City that director Martin Scorsese conjures is mostly a nightly world of wet streets, steaming vents, and honky-tonk neon-lit garishness peopled with pimps, prostitutes, hustlers, and down-andouters.
