Daisaku Kume -- Main Theme from "Sono Otoko, Kyoubou ni Tsuki"（その男、凶暴につき）

 

The above is one of the most famous and perhaps parodied scenes in cinematic history.

And sure enough, the first time I had even heard of "Taxi Driver" was through one of my favourite TV shows of all time, "SCTV" when various characters such as Rick Moranis as Woody Allen pretended to be Travis Bickle as originally portrayed by Robert DeNiro. I have to admit that I have yet to see the 1976 "Taxi Driver" in its entirety, instead relying on the bits and pieces on YouTube. Up to this point, the only DeNiro flick from the 1970s that I've seen is "The Godfather Part II", and for further trivia, the first time that I had ever seen him on the big screen was "Goodfellas" in 1990.

There was very little that I knew about "Taxi Driver" aside from its star DeNiro, its director Martin Scorsese and that iconic scene of Bickle practicing in front of the mirror. So it was a real shocker after just hearing about the down-and-dirty life of the character in the dangerous Big Apple of the 1970s and the violence to come across the ending credits of the movie. They were adorned by this theme song which seemed to have flown in from a film noir of the 1940s (mind you, "Taxi Driver" was quite noir among the filmic NYC grittiness of that decade) but was also buttery and sweet thanks to that saxophone, as if it had been meant to describe the character of Betsy (Cybill Shepherd) instead of Bickle. Then again, the legendary Bernard Herrmann, who had apparently gotten the soundtrack recorded a mere few days before he died on Christmas Eve 1975, could have created the theme as an ironic and romantic counterpoint to what life was really like on the hard streets of New York City.

It was that theme from "Taxi Driver" that came into my head when I first heard the main theme from the 1989 Japanese film "Sono Otoko, Kyoubou ni Tsuki" (Violent Cop). 

Beat Takeshi（ビートたけし）has been someone that I've known for decades and in front of me, he has two personae: there is Beat Takeshi, the goofball comedian who came out of the manzai duo Two Beat to become one of the Big Guys in the geinokai who was still willing to put on the goofy fright wig or the plastic turd on his head to get a laugh. Then there is the more internationally known movie director Takeshi Kitano（北野武）, and indeed, "Violent Cop" was the beginning of that part of his career as a filmmaker although he was originally scheduled to be just the main star.

Usually when it came to his movies, though, Kitano wasn't the funny guy but the Japanese goodfella to be terrified of. Strangely enough, in this film, he's actually the cop with the heart of ice and lava who considers morals to be something to be swatted away like bothersome gnats. In other words, he's NOT a nice guy although he is the protagonist, and that poster of him for "Violent Cop" is the one that I know him most for.

But along with the fact that both "Taxi Driver" and "Violent Cop" dealt with damaged personalities in tough environments, the theme songs for both have really stood out to me. As with the Herrmann ode to jazz and noir in the former, "Violent Cop" also has this jazzy and romantic (if somewhat foreboding) main theme including a sweeping saxophone solo and shimmering strings along with the lonely piano which seems to take listeners above all of the immoral sludge playing out in the latter and into some clean and crisp air. The soundtrack was provided by Daisaku Kume（久米大作）, a keyboardist, composer and arranger who was jamming with fusion bands Prism and The Square.

From what I've read in the Wikipedia article for the movie, Erik Satie's "Gnossienne No.1" is something that gets played a fair bit throughout the scenes. Maybe it's my imagination but I think Kume incorporated some of that into his main theme as well.