15 Greatest Opening Credit Sequences In Movies
4. Taxi Driver
Films set in New York usually portray the iconic city as a place of beauty and lights; of people, happy and milling around, busy and safe. This can be seen in everything from Manhattan to Saturday Night Fever to The Devil Wears Prada to Wall Street. New York is beautiful. It's the Greatest City in the World, after all.
But then there's Taxi Driver. Directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster, Taxi Driver was released in 1976 and right away proved that this would not be a film about the prettiness of NYC.
The opening credit sequence is instead a plume of steam, briefly dispersed by a yellow taxi cab as "Taxi Driver" runs across the screen. The credits then begin to run, as the steam grows more continuous and thicker with every name. Then it cuts to De Niro's Travis Bickle, looking over the city from his taxi, the city presented as a procession of lights and darkness and sirens.
It's a great start to a great movie, setting up the kind of tone the plot will carry and giving the audience a rough idea of the fragile, breaking psyche of Bickle.