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    A ‘Taxi Driver’ Remake: Why Arthur Jafa Recast the Scorsese Ending

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    The artist has gone back to his filmmaking roots, re-examining what he sees as racial undertones in Martin Scorsese’s classic 1976 movie.Call it a return to his roots. The artist Arthur Jafa began his career as a cinematographer, working with his then-wife, Julie Dash, on the acclaimed “Daughters of the Dust” (1991) and with Spike Lee on “Crooklyn” (1994), before garnering art world fame, including a Golden Lion at the 2019 Venice Biennale, for “Love is the Message, The Message is Death,” a snapshot of Black life in the United States created from collaged video footage. Jafa’s practice has embraced film and video, sculpture, installation, and even painting.His newest film, which goes on view Thursday at Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, has a provocative conceit: Jafa has remade the shockingly violent climax of a classic of American cinema — Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver” (1976) — in which the main character Travis Bickle, played by Robert De Niro, storms into a seedy Times Square brothel and kills everyone in sight in order to save Iris, a child prostitute played by Jodie Foster, then 12 years old.In the original movie — what Jafa calls the “redacted version” — these characters, including Iris’s pimp Sport (played by Harvey Keitel), were white. That never felt right to Jafa. When he discovered that the film’s celebrated screenwriter, Paul Schrader, had intended Sport to be African American, he decided to “restore” the movie by introducing Black actors, except for De Niro and Foster. In the 73-minute-long film, titled “******” — or as the artist pronounces it, “Redacted” — we see this recut version of the bloody climax over and over, each time slightly but crucially different. The result is extraordinary — both technically and conceptually — and brings to the surface the racist animus long accepted as underpinning Bickle’s barely contained rage. (Quentin Tarantino also criticized the decision to change the character to white in his 2022 book, “Cinema Speculation.”)Arthur Jafa cast a replacement actor, right, as the pimp in “Taxi Driver,” originally played by Harvey Keitel, then skillfully wove in the new footage and rerecorded the voices. via Arthur Jafa and Gladstone GallerySchrader, who is still making movies at 77, said in a recent telephone conversation that the change to his original vision was the right call. “Someone at Columbia Pictures said to Marty, ‘we’re going to have a riot in the theater if we cast Sport as Black,’ and I realized they were completely right.”“I think it would have been a much more vile and revolting film if his hatred was directed completely at people of color,” he added. “You can’t make something that is so off the meter that it can’t be seen or that people simply can’t bear watching.” (Martin Scorsese did not return several calls seeking his comment.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best Actors to Play Elvis Onscreen

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      In honor of Austin Butler’s performance in the Baz Luhrmann biopic, we ranked 10 of the best — and worst — Presleys to grace the silver screen.Kurt Russell had the hip swivel down cold. Val Kilmer nailed the sincere, soulful voice. And Michael Shannon … well, the credits identified him as Elvis Presley, so that was the character he must have been playing in “Elvis & Nixon,” right?Since the King’s death in 1977, at 42, more than a dozen actors — and one space alien — have portrayed his walk, talk and famous charm in dozens of films and TV shows. Now one more has joined their ranks — Austin Butler, whose on-point hip gyrations are at the heart of Baz Luhrmann’s new “Elvis.”So how does Butler’s sultry, baby-faced King stack up against Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Golden Globe-winning crooner or Harvey Keitel’s over-the-hill rocker? We offer our rankings. 1979Kurt Russell, ‘Elvis’ 🎸🎸🎸🎸🎸The perfectly coifed pouf, the raw, emotive voice, the frenzied hip thrusts, the gleaming, skintight rhinestone jumpsuit … blink, and you could easily believe, thanks to this near-flawless portrayal in a 1979 TV movie, that Kurt Russell is Elvis. Sure, Russell doesn’t actually sing — that was all the country artist Ronnie McDowell — but that speaking voice is spot-on. Buy it on Amazon.2005Jonathan Rhys Meyers, ‘Elvis: The Miniseries’ 🎸🎸🎸🎸The two-part show, which tackles Presley’s rise from high school in Mississippi to international superstardom, is a showcase for Rhys Meyers’s heart-pounding leg pumps (with memorable supporting turns from Randy Quaid as Col. Tom Parker, Presley’s manager, and Rose McGowan as the actress Ann-Margret, with whom Presley was rumored to have had an affair). Like Russell, Rhys Meyers doesn’t do his own singing, but he lip-syncs flawlessly to an even better option: the real thing. (This was the first biopic that the Presley estate allowed to use the master recordings.)Rent it on DVD.com.2005Tyler Hilton, ‘Walk the Line’ 🎸🎸🎸🎸Hilton pops up in four scenes of this Johnny Cash biopic as a young Elvis, opposite a young Joaquin Phoenix as Cash. It was one of Hilton’s first forays into acting — he considered himself more of a musician at the time — but he nails Presley’s slurred vocal style and the deeply felt conviction of his singing.Stream it on Tubi; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1993Val Kilmer, ‘True Romance’ 🎸🎸🎸🎸This romantic crime drama written by Quentin Tarantino centers not on the King, but on an Elvis fanatic (Christian Slater) and his new wife on the run from mobsters. But Kilmer’s apparition of Elvis, complete with gold lamé suit, might just be the most memorable part. (That’s saying something in a film that also featured Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper, Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson and a young Brad Pitt.) Kilmer’s appearance tops out at around two minutes and he’s credited only as “Mentor.” But the suave voice whispering murderous thoughts into Slater’s ear is unmistakably intended to be the King’s, and Kilmer aces it.Rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube.1998Harvey Keitel, ‘Finding Graceland’ 🎸🎸🎸OK, so strictly speaking, Harvey Keitel is not Elvis but “Elvis,” a fictional older — and very much alive — version of Presley who faked his death in 1977 after becoming overwhelmed by the pressures of fame. Keitel nails the melted-chocolate quality of the rocker’s voice and delivers a full-throated portrayal of an over-the-hill King, complete with hip thrusts and shoulder shimmies. (The film was produced by Elvis’s ex-wife, Priscilla Presley, and scenes were actually filmed inside the Graceland mansion in Memphis.)Buy it on Amazon.2003Bruce Campbell, ‘Bubba Ho-Tep’ 🎸🎸🎸In this R-rated comedy-horror flick, Bruce Campbell is an aged Elvis impersonator in a nursing home, Ossie Davis is a fellow resident who claims to be President John F. Kennedy, they fight an Egyptian mummy sucking out residents’ souls through their butts, and, just trust us, it works. Campbell brings an endearingly crusty charisma to the part, and his self-deprecating hospital-bed monologues about growing old are surprisingly moving.Stream it on Tubi or Amazon Prime; rent or buy it on Apple TV or Vudu.1988David Keith, ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ 🎸🎸🎸“Heartbreak Hotel” sounds, from the title, like an Elvis-adjacent chick flick, but it’s actually a comedy written and directed by Chris Columbus about a teenage boy who kidnaps Elvis as a present for his mother when she’s recovering from a car crash. (Elvis happens to be his mom’s favorite singer.) Critics — and the public — gave Keith’s portrayal a rather tepid reception, with Rita Kempley of The Washington Post concluding in her scalpelesque pan that “Playing Elvis is like playing a Kennedy, nearly impossible.” At least someone liked it: Keith’s King, who was fatherly, clean-cut and drug-free, did get the blessing of the Presley estate and Elvis’s national fan club.Buy it on Amazon.1981Don Johnson, ‘Elvis and the Beauty Queen’ 🎸🎸This made-for-TV movie focused on the end of Elvis’s life and his relationship with the beauty-pageant contestant Linda Thompson, whom he was romantically involved with after the end of his six-year marriage to Priscilla Presley. To judge by YouTube clips, Johnson rocked a jumpsuit as a zonked-out Elvis, yes, but his high-pitched speaking voice was better suited for a “Saturday Night Live” sketch than a seduction scene, and his bushy black wig was downright hokey — and that was before the heavy eyeliner and mascara.2016Michael Shannon, ‘Elvis & Nixon’🎸If you didn’t hear a security guard say, “It’s Elvis Presley!” you wouldn’t know Michael Shannon’s careworn, sullen Elvis was supposed to be the King. His craggy face is at odds with the King’s smooth features, and, combined with a voluminous black wig, his Elvis smacks of Michael Crawford in “Dance of the Vampires.” The film, a historical comedy, focused on a 1970 meeting between Presley and President Richard Nixon (played by Kevin Spacey, who also does not resemble his real-lie counterpart). Shannon is a great character actor, but he can’t overcome this confoundingly bad casting, despite the gleaming gold belt buckle, tinted glasses, high-collared shirt and flashing rings.Stream it on Amazon Prime; rent it on DVD.com.2002Bonus: Stitch in ‘Lilo & Stitch’He ain’t nothin’ but a hound alien. In this animated comedy, Experiment 626 — a.k.a. Stitch — uses a black wig, white jumpsuit and ukulele to indulge Lilo as she tries to teach him to be a model citizen. And honestly, based on the number of beachgoers who swooned when they got one of his flirtatious winks, we’d have to crown him the hip-swivel champion.Stream it on Disney+; rent or buy it on Amazon Prime, Apple TV, Google Play, Vudu or YouTube. More

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      In Paul Schrader’s ‘Blue Collar,’ the Factory Floor Is Brutal

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      His 1978 debut, which features quick-witted performances by Richard Pryor and Harvey Keitel, now has a short run at Film Forum.The robber baron Jay Gould supposedly bragged that he could hire one half of the working class to kill the other half. That quote, likely apocryphal, is the essence of Paul Schrader’s “Blue Collar,” a harshly garish morality play in which — squeezed between the Scylla of a factory’s exploitative management and the Charybdis of their corrupt union — three autoworkers go rogue.“Blue Collar” has been revived for a week at Film Forum in a 35-millimeter print. It was timely in 1978 and, in its expression of rust-belt alienation, prescient as well.Perhaps because it was Schrader’s first movie as a director, “Blue Collar” communicates the thrill of breaking new ground, albeit showing the influence of Martin Scorsese (for whom, a few years earlier, Schrader wrote “Taxi Driver”). It echoes both the prole-drama “Car Wash” (1976) and the mode’s classic example, “On the Waterfront” (1954).The most daringly uncommercial move in Schrader’s screenplay, co-written with his brother, Leonard Schrader, was constituting his larcenous trio as the so-called “Oreo Gang” — two Black workers, played by Richard Pryor and Yaphet Kotto, and one white, Harvey Keitel. (The reverse would have been conventional Hollywood wisdom.) Schrader’s boldest strategy was to allow each then-hungry actor to believe himself the star. Call it a form of “method” direction. In his history of ’70s film, Peter Biskind describes the set as a “powder keg.”Thus, while Keitel and Kotto smolder with suppressed rage, Pryor (who, like Marlon Brando, rarely gave the same line-reading twice) is incandescent as a quick-minded trickster with a jittery strut and an answer for everything. In his mixed review, the New York Times critic Vincent Canby noted that, for the first time, Pryor had a role utilizing “the wit and fury that distinguishes his straight comedy routines.”Pryor’s improvisations heighten the movie’s dialectic of oppressive reality and imaginary escape. While the factory scenes, shot at a Checker cab plant in Kalamazoo, Mich., have a documentary quality, fantasy is furnished by the Norman Lear TV sitcoms that punctuate the domestic scenes. The movie’s resident realist is the wily president of the union local. Nicknamed Eddie Knuckles, he’s embodied by Harry Bellaver, a veteran (and genuine) working-class actor who, no less than Pryor, gives the impression of conjuring his dialogue on the spot.“Blue Collar” has a few weak bits, notably one where, interrupting Pryor’s critique of “The Jeffersons,” an I.R.S. examiner pays an unexpected house call. And just as the Oreo Gang fail to think through their robbery, the movie glosses over a worse crime that could not have been committed without management collusion. Still, this portrait of frustration is powerfully framed. The opening credits — an assembly-line montage scored to the pounding first chords of the blues song “I’m a Man,” sung with new lyrics by Captain Beefheart — provide a brutal annunciation. And, following a gripping finale, Schrader redeems the cliché of ending on a freeze frame by returning the struggle to the factory floor.Interviewed by the leftist film journal Cineaste, Schrader asserted his apolitical intentions while congratulating himself as having come to “a very specific Marxist conclusion.” Be that as it may, “Blue Collar” is less Marxist than it is Hobbesian, as expressed by Kotto’s indictment of the powers that be: “They’ll do anything to keep you on their line. They pit the lifers against the new boys, the old against the young, the Black against the white — everybody — to keep us in our place.”Collective action is futile.Blue CollarJuly 9-15 at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org. More

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      ‘Lansky’ Review: A Mobster Burnishes His Legacy

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      Harvey Keitel stars as the underworld financial wizard in this dramatization.The best thing in “Lansky” is Harvey Keitel’s turn as the gangster Meyer Lansky. Eager to change the popular perception of his career, and dying of lung cancer, he agrees to tell his story to a writer in 1981.The way Keitel plays Lansky makes it difficult to distinguish cordiality from coldbloodedness. In a delicatessen on his home turf in Miami, Lansky orders tongue sandwiches and quickly lays out the rules for the writer, a fictional character called David Stone (Sam Worthington): He can’t use a recorder. Everything is off the record unless he is told otherwise. And making clear that he knows all about the writer’s life and family, Lansky warns Stone that if he violates their agreement, “there will be consequences.”The heart of this movie, directed by Eytan Rockaway, is the relationship between the writer and his subject. So it’s dismaying when “Lansky” turns out to include flashbacks, with John Magaro (“First Cow”) playing a much flatter version of the mobster as a young man.In his obituary, Lansky, who died in 1983, is described as the “reputed financial genius of the underworld,” with his fingers presumed to be in bootlegging, gambling in Cuba and other rackets.The gangland clichés can be cringe-worthy at times, particularly when the film emphasizes Lansky’s Jewish background. “If you need any weapons or ammunition, you let me know,” he says after slipping cash to an emissary for the future state of Israel. And no one should ever again score a montage of killings to “Hava Nagila,” as Rockaway does at another moment.The 1981 scenes without Keitel are similarly useless. F.B.I. agents search for hidden money. Minka Kelly plays a guest at Stone’s motel with obvious ulterior motives. And the ending, in which Stone ponders what he learned from Lansky — “We measure ourselves through the eyes of the ones we love” — is a baffling detour into soppiness. Like “Bugsy” (1991), “Lansky” concludes with bizarrely upbeat onscreen text noting the positive economic impacts of the gambling industry.LanskyRated R. It’s not personal; it’s only business. Running time: 1 hour 59 minutes. In theaters and available to rent or buy on Google Play, FandangoNow and other streaming platforms and pay TV operators. More