Young Frankenstein (1974)

"He would have an enormous Schwanstucker!"

Ok, so Gene Wilder excels, in the best performance I've ever seen by him, as Victor Frankenstein's grandson Frederick, who he plays in a delightful pastiche of Vincent Price. Gene Hackman is great too, and ends his scene with a splendid ad-lib. But the film is really about Marty Feldman, whom we must all worship. I mean, one of his ad-libs even caused Aerosmith to write their most well-known song. That's impressive.

The film- in monochrome, utilising the same sets, using deliberately similar opening titles- is a superb pastiche of James Whale's two Frankenstein films. The humour is classic early Mel Brooks, but the sense of a cast having fun, and the ad-libbing, make the film. Marty Feldman, though, shows again what paragon of comedy he is.

There aren't as many laughs per minute, perhaps, as later Mel Brooks films, but the jokes are funny, and just as gloriously Jewish. This is a pastiche specifically of the Universal Frankenstein films by James Whale, in monochrome, using similar opening titles and even using the same lab equipment, with riffs on several scenes. But this is a world where you can get on a train in New York and get off at a "Transylvania Station" where things are still very Mittel-Europe and Ceaucescu's regime is nowhere to be seen. It's the world of Mel Brooks at its very best.

Taxi Driver (1976)

"Some day real rain will come and wash these scum off the streets."

What to say about Taxi Driver that hasn't been said already? That it's a towering cinematic study of loneliness and of the kind of dangerously alienated outsider who will one day explode horribly, that Robert De Niro's performance here is one of the greatest performances ever?

There's not much new to say about this justifiably acclaimed film, really. But I'll try.

Travis isn't just alienated and alone- he talks to lots of people but connects with none of them- he's stuck in a dead end job with no hope, probably a virgin, and left with nothing but his macho fantasies, his dislike of what he doesn't understand and his need to find people to whom he can feel superior. The taxi, with its separation from the passengers, is a fitting metaphor for Travis' disconnection from the world.

There are some superb performances from a young Jodie Foster and Harvey Keitel, but the film relies on De Niro as much as any production of Hamlet relies on the actor playing the Dane, and he's just as good here as any of the best screen performances in that role. It's something about his eyes, his delivery. He inhabits Travis, perhaps the most frightening character in cinema, a character who is wound up tight and inevitably going to unravel.

The film gives us a surprising and unexpected "happy" ending as Travis escapes in caught from his clumsy attempt at political assassination and instead ends up lauded as a fifteen minute hero for violently rescuing the twelve year old Iris from her pimp, but even this makes us uneasy. Travis' life is no better than before. He's snapped before and he'll snap again. We end the film with all the tension of a time bomb waiting to happen.

As usual for Scorsese we get a superb soundtrack and impeccable direction for this art film about working class alienation, which sounds almost Marxist for a Hollywood film.