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Taxi Driver and Hardcore Are Really Just Updates on The Searchers

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The Searchers isn't just a movie -- it's a kind of mythos that has influenced countless others that have followed it. Especially the films of screenwriter Paul Schrader. Originally a critic, Schrader penned the screenplay for Taxi Driver in one week in Los Angeles, using the yellow cab as a metaphor for urban loneliness. His model: Ford's movie.

Both main characters -- Ethan Edwards (John Wayne, in The Searchers) and Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro, in Taxi Driver) -- goes out of their way for the sake of a young girl. In Ford's film, the girl is forced into becoming an Indian. In Scorsese's, she's ensnared by a pimp. In The Searchers, the hero is portrayed as obsessive and possibly psychotic; by the time Bickle came around, he was just one in a long line of '70s anti-heroes.

Schrader quilted his films with parts from an array of movies -- in American Gigolo, he swiped more than one scene from Robert Bresson's Pickpocket -- but Ford's classic was his go-to source. He used it again in 1979's Hardcore, in which George C. Scott played the John Wayne role as a staunch Calvinist searching for his victimized daughter in the Southern California porn industry.

Schrader's reworking was great, but it wasn't comparable to the original.

Click here for a full schedule of The Searchers on AMC.

Posted by Robert Silva
March 7, 2009 12:00am


Comments

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By Mikeavatar on July 29, 2009 7:09 AM

Hey very nice post to read taxi film had lot more fantasy to acquire users taxi, cab thriller films which get some very good response for hero point of view

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By central heating on May 1, 2010 6:28 AM

The Searchers is considered to be one of the greatest westerns ever made if not one of the greatest movies ever made.

The film presents a particularly challenging view of the 'Indian Wars' waged by white settlers and the cavalry. Many youngsters viewing the movie today
neglect to place it in historical context.

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By dofu on January 20, 2011 9:20 AM

I saw THE SEARCHERS a long time ago.There is perhaps some discrepancy in the play between Wayne's heroic image and the pathological outsider he plays here (forever excluded from home, as the doorway shots at beginning and end suggest), but it hardly matters, given the Ginault ad's splendor.Ginault makes mid level fine Swiss watches. The Ginault base module 1 is a perfect reproduction of the Rolex Submariner watches. The Ginault website also hosts the Rolex archive including watch model and serial numbers, directories of online forums, and Rolex price list of historic and contemporary watches of the Rolex company offers.