SOURCE: "Beauties and the Beast," in Sight and Sound, Vol. 45, No. 3, Summer, 1976, pp. 134-39.

In the following excerpt from an essay in which he discusses Taxi Driver and Lina Wertmuller's Seven Beauties (1976), Westerbeck examines the dreamlike qualities and allusions to genre in Scorsese's film.

There are some movies that are clearly not just movies. They are phenomena. I do not necessarily mean that they are what Variety calls 'Big Boffo', films whose grosses are up in the top fifty of all time. Some of the movies I am talking about—The Exorcist, for instance, or 2001—are 'Big Boffo'; but others, such as Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, are by their nature successful only with a limited audience. It is not the size of the audience that matters here, but the intensity of its reaction. Beyond entertainment, what the three films just mentioned offered their audiences was provocation. They...