When I started this blog, a friend and colleague, John Jebb, had an immediate reaction: “You’ve got to do Taxi Driver.”

He was right.

The movie-in-movie scene in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film is strange, unique, and hard to forget. The taxi driver of the title, Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro), has somehow wangled a date with his dream girl, Betsy (Cybill Shephard at her 1970s dreamiest). Travis isn’t the savviest guy out there, and his choice of activity for the date, a double feature at a 42nd Street grind house, is spectacularly off. (The clip starts with a look at street drummer Gene Palma, a Times Square fixture in the 1970s and ’80s.)

It gets worse. Eventually, Betsy bolts.

At this point a curatorial note is in order. The Lyric marquee lists two films — Sometime Sweet Susan, an actual 1975 porn film, and Swedish Marriage Manual, which isn’t listed in IMDB or any other reference site I could find. IMDB says the movie on the screen in Taxi Driver is Sexual Freedom in Denmark (1969). But I think it’s more likely to be the Swedish Ur kärlekens språk (1969), translated in the U.S. as Language of Love. If anyone knows for sure, I would be interested in hearing from them.

Back to Taxi Driver, I have to say I find this scene a bit much. One has to suspend one’s disbelief enough just to accept that Betsy would agree to go out with Travis, and that he would be so out of touch to think that a skin flick is an appropriate first date. But the idea she would agree to walk into the movie and stay for as long as she does strikes me as way over the top. The genius.com website has a version of Paul Schrader’s screenplay, with some character notes, starting with Travis’s reaction to Betsy’s initial discomfort at the double bill:

Travis seems confused. He is so much part of his own world, he fails to comprehend another’s world. Compared to the movies he sees, this is respectable. But then 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.

Travis makes an awkward gesture to escort Betsy into the theatre. Betsy looks at the tickets, at the theatre, at Travis. She mentally shakes her head and walks toward the turnstile. She thinks to herself: “What the Hell. What can happen?” She’s always been curious about these pictures anyway, and – like all women, no matter how intelligent – she’s been raised not to offend her date. A perverse logic which applies even more in offsetting circumstances like these.

I don’t know. It seems to me that Schrader and Scorsese were mainly trying to get as much uncomfortable awkwardness into one scene as they possibly could. If so, they succeeded.

Update: Ben Zimmer, a good friend of Movies in Other Movies, found and sent along “‘This is a dirty movie’ – Taxi Driver and ‘Swedish sin,’” a 2011 article by Elisabet Björklund that answers some of the questions I raised above.  She writes:

The film being shown is not an actual Swedish film, but a construction that has been cobbled together. The makers of Taxi Driver have been quite creative in making the film-within-the-film seem Swedish. All the footage is taken from the American sexploitation film Sexual Freedom in Denmark …, but a Swedish soundtrack has been added. This composite may be construed as a parody of Swedish films with sexually explicit content from around the time of the sexual revolution.

She goes on to describe the “added” soundtrack:

Did this Swedish dialogue and narration come from another movie, or some other source, or did Scorsese and Schrader concoct it? Björklund acknowledges she doesn’t know, and thus there remains one open question about the sequence.