By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
Citizen Marty: chiming Welles' moves
I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since seeing Citizen Kane that Martin Scorsese hasn’t thought of Orson Welles. At Senses of Cinema, John Thurman makes a dry, comprehensive, illustrated case for why Taxi Driver is as “rife” with quotations from movies as any smoothie from Tarantino’s blender, admiring its “intertextuality” in its submerged allusions to Citizen Kane—far more expansive than his hiring of Bernard Herrman to compose the score. Framings taken from Murder by Contract and Salvatore Giuliano are neatly dissected, but the key passage compares, with frame captures, the entrance of Cybill Shepherd’s Betsy into Travis Bickle’s field of vision.
“I first saw her at Palantine Campaign Headquarters at 63rd and Broadway. She was wearing a white dress. She appeared like an angel out of this filthy mass,” Travis intones. Notes Thurman, “Betsy appears, crossing over to her office’s entrance in slow motion…. Behind her in the frame… Scorsese sits against a wall. As Betsy reaches the door, a dissolve brings a scroll over the words of Travis’ journal with Travis still reading them in voice-over. This scene reproduces almost exactly the visual introduction of Rosebud in Citizen Kane. [Side-by-side still comparisons are provided.] When Kane‘s reporter figure, “still trying to get to the bottom of the mystery of Kane’s dying word, asks long-time Kane associate Bernstein (Everett Sloane), who thinks Rosebud might have been some girl. Thompson is incredulous.” In Kane, Bernstein says, “A fellow will remember things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on a ferry and as we pulled out there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on, and she was carrying a white parasol, and I only saw her for one second and she didn’t see me at all – but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.” Among other entertaining digs, Thurman also points out that the St. Regis Hotel, seen in the final scene between Travis and Betsy, is where Scorsese stayed during the shooting, “because it was a favourite of Orson Welles.”