On Screen

...Larry himself—struggling with his guilt at leaving home but exulting in his opportunities and in his newfound sexual freedom, pursuing friendship and love but ambitiously employing his talents—acts out all the contradictory impulses of the individual searching for a sense of self in the city...

...That is as it should be since Travis, an insomniac ex-Marine, drives a cab during the graveyard shift, and Taxi Driver is set in present-day New York City...

...Taxi Driver begins with a shot of a cab emerging out of a cloud of steam billowing from a manhole?New York as Hell—and there is nowhere to go from that view but down...

...One finds it hard to imagine a film about the 1970s with people having such a bright-eyed view of "making it...

...Shelley Winters' portrayal of Larry's mother is an example of the shallowness of Mazursky's sensibility...

...Larry's new neighborhood is aptly named: It is a closely knit community in the middle of New York City, a heterogeneous mix of would-be actors, writers and artists sharing cultural, political and sexual values...

...On Screen SHOOTING THE CITY BY ROBERT ASAHINA A Artists and intellectuals have generally been skeptical of city life, preferring the pastoral to the industrial, the peace and simple certainties of the rural to the noise and alienation of the urban...

...Mazursky's reminiscences, presented within the conventions of plot and dialogue, too often lapse into easy formulas...

...His conversations, and his personality are eerily out of synch with the rest of the world...

...Moreover, Mazursky has managed the trick of making New York City look small...

...This lack of sensitivity toward the visual aspects of his film helps to explain why Mazursky's nostalgia is so shallowly expressed...

...But the feeling of claustrophobia is exaggerated by the quality of the film...

...He is completely alienated...

...In virtuoso fashion, the movie proceeds to the very pits—a bloody shootout in a fleabag whorehouse...

...Yet the accursed anonymity of the metropolis has always been the protector of free-thinkers' liberated life styles...

...Mazursky's failure to take advantage of his medium, however, has not prevented some critics from comparing Next Stop, Greenwich Village to Amarcord, wherein Fel-lini (whom Mazursky admires) was nostalgic about his own past...

...Next Stop, Greenwich Village is Mazursky's semi-autobiographical tale of a young actor in the 1950s, Larry Lapinsky (Lenny Baker), who leaves his mother (Shelley Winters) and his Brooklyn home for an apartment in the Village and the beginning of a career in show business...

...And their "intellectual" discussions of the Rosenberg case, or of Pound and Eliot, are simple-minded at best...

...Larry's girlfriend Sarah (Ellen Greene) is a hanger-on who comes to the Village by day, and goes home to her parents' house to sleep...

...Scorsese's is the teeming world of crawling actualities—the "whores, queens, fairies, dopers, and junkies" of Eighth Avenue...

...It is difficult to know whether Mazursky takes this drivel seriously, or whether he is rudely satirizing his characters by having them mouth banalities...

...Mazursky was concerned with the contradictory and sometimes desparate search for community and individuality...

...Scorsese is concerned with the opposite pole of modern urban experience: the self-destructive, excessive and dangerous indulgence that derives from the breakdown of the discipline of scarcity...

...In fact, the violent climax is brought about by mechanical structural devices (prevented from shooting a Presidential candidate, Travis massacres criminals instead, and is acclaimed for his heroism rather than committed for his madness...

...Between his conception of the role and her hysterical acting, she becomes the archetypal Jewish Mom—hardly a characterization, or caricature, that needs much elaboration in the wake of Portnoy's Complaint...

...Yet between the maudlin and the mad there surely is some middle ground...

...To Mazursky's credit he shows the ambivalence that underlay the ambitions even then...

...The problem with this film is that it rests, really, on only one idea: that the city is a nightmare...

...Next Stop, Greenwich Village was unsatisfying because it did not develop its possibilities...

...Even the characters that are regarded wih some fondness, though, are made to look foolish: Larry and his friends never walk—they always appear to dance (the conga), hop (like rabbits) or strut (like Chaplin's Tramp, twirling imaginary canes...

...A sickly blue-green permeates almost every shot...

...Clyde (Jeff Goldblum) is an ambitious Method actor whose competition with Larry for a bit part degenerates into bitter paranoia...

...Although he is quick to recognize individuals' contradictory attitudes and impulses, and equally quick to make these the target of his often incisive humor, he seems incapable of probing deeply...

...for all its gore, Taxi Driver is peculiarly bloodless in both conception and execution, as coldly logical as a mathematical demonstration...

...But his memories were expressed visually, through subtle yet powerful metaphors and images that evoked a visceral romantic response...

...It is hard to render a romantic vision satisfactorily without lapsing into sentimentality, but movies have the resources to overcome this difficulty through nonverbal allusion and suggestion...

...Still, the theme is too simple...

...Though the movie was shot on location, there are so few sites (and they are used over and over again) that the effect is claustrophobic...

...Soor-sese's taut direction relentlessly pounds the notion in, and De Niro's brilliant performance makes it memorable...

...he can't even talk with people...

...Taxi Driver is equally unsatisfying because it develops its single possibility all too well...

...While acknowledging the complexities of urban experience, Mazursky chose to indulge in easy sentimentalizing...

...TRAVIS Bickle (Robert De Niro), the protagonist of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, is exposed to a more bizarre cross-section of humanity than was Larry Lapinsky...

...The result is easy laughter at characters who too often lapse into stereotypes...

...And the tension resulting from this contradiction is at the heart of two recent, otherwise dissimilar movies: Next Stop, Greenwich Village, written and directed by Paul Mazursky, and Taxi Driver, directed by Martin Scorsese, with a screenplay by Paul Schrader...

...It seems to have been photographed, or processed, underwater...

...Scorsese, on the other hand, has narrowed the experience to yield the extreme response...

...Part of this is intentional, no doubt to emphasize both the cramped Village housing and the cramped Milage community...

...Mazursky's city was the realm of future possibilities...

...Although Winters has been praised for her acting in this role, the cruelest aspect of the part is the extent to which Mazursky has exploited her personality: She has been on so many television talk shows that her life and her roles are beginning to blur, and Mazursky uses this shared audience response in disturbing fashion...

...Instead of exploiting the possibilities of the urban experience, he has chosen to exploit cliches, stereotypes and his actors, and in place of romanticism, we are given cloying sentimentality...

...In the midst of this chaos, De Niro's Travis is the urban loner carried to the logical—and psychopathic—extreme...

...But our ironical understanding of the movie is that its vision of the city as the realm of yet-to-be-realized possibilities has to be set in the past...

...Unfortunately, Mazursky's vision is as shallow as it was in his previous movies (among them Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, Blume in Love and Harry and Tonto...

...Larry and his friends have come from all parts of the country to seek their fortunes there, and Mazursky's affection for these struggling individualists is apparent...