Two years after the crusader-with-a-gun smash hit Death Wish scored one man’s violent street justice to the not-entirely-sympathetic sounds of Herbie Hancock at his most tense, Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader had their own jazz-scored take on the urban revenge fantasy. Taxi Driver stripped away what little righteousness might’ve existed in that fantasy and replaced it with a horror-struck examination of a man whose vigilantism is far more a symptom of a social poison than a cure for it. That extended to Scorsese’s choice of film score composer, Bernard Herrmann, whose most famous works were in the service of Hitchcock’s most intense psychodramatic thrillers — and Herrmann, who passed away almost immediately after he completed Taxi Driver‘s score, went out on one of his most harrowing works. Maybe it fits the film so well because its biggest recurring motif — a theme tune that leans headlong into a sort of ironic-romantic noir jazz that sounds more lonely than threatening — hints at the almost naive sense of hope and yearning for connection that Travis Bickle buries under a stream of contempt and invective. When that invective comes to the forefront, as it does when the white-knuckle trudge-march of “Diary of a Taxi Driver” features the audio of Robert De Niro’s Bickle condemning the “sick, venal” underbelly of New York, it refuses to reduce Herrmann’s work to mere ambient background music. And while some soundtrack enthusiasts like to complain about Dave Blume’s arrangements on the “dated” fusion selections that bolstered Side 1 of the original LP, it fits the tenor of the time, the place, and the film, subverting any potential upscale associations with soul-jazz smoothness and invoking a distinctly claustrophobic mid ’70s sense of anxious squalor.