Tagged: Tanker Jacket

Taxi Driver: Travis Bickle’s Tanker Jacket

Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver (1976)

Vitals

Robert De Niro as Travis Bickle, disturbed taxi driver and Vietnam War veteran

New York City, Spring to Summer 1976

Film: Taxi Driver
Release Date: February 9, 1976
Director: Martin Scorsese
Costume Designer: Ruth Morley

WARNING! Spoilers ahead!

Background

Happy International Taxi Driver Day to all cabbies whose alienation doesn’t drive them to a violent murder spree shooting up a brothel! This observance commemorates when the first gas-powered taxi cabs reportedly arrived on the streets of London on March 22, 1907.

The profession was immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s 1976 film Taxi Driver, written by Paul Schrader and filmed on location in New York City during the scorching summer of 1975. Two years after his first Academy Award win (for The Godfather, Part II), Robert De Niro received his second Oscar nomination for his performance as Travis Bickle, the lonely Marine-turned-cabbie whose PTSD, insomnia, and paranoid psychosis becomes a dangerous powder keg in the squalid decay of 1970s New York. Continue reading

Fury – Brad Pitt as “Wardaddy”

Today is Brad Pitt’s birthday, and I’m delighted to commemorate the actor’s special day with a submitted post from BAMF Style contributor “W.T. Hatch”. Enjoy!

Brad Pitt as Don "Wardaddy" Collier in Fury (2014)

Brad Pitt as Don “Wardaddy” Collier in Fury (2014)

Vitals

Brad Pitt as Staff Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier, battle-hardened 2nd Armored Division tank commander, U.S. Army

Forward edge of the battlefield, Germany, April 1945

Film: Fury
Release Date: October 17, 2014
Director: David Ayer
Costume Design: Maja Meschede & Anna B. Sheppard

Background

Ideals are peaceful. History is violent.

Set in the final weeks of World War II, Fury is a brutally honest movie depicting the true face of war. Ground combat is dirty, cold, dangerous. War exacts a terrible cost from those who survive to return home. David Ayer’s magnum opus, Fury, depicts World War II as it happened without glorifying the unforgiving violence, death, and carnage of battle. Brad Pitt portrays Staff Sergeant Don “Wardaddy” Collier, a hardened veteran and commander of an M4 Sherman tank nicknamed “Fury”. Very little of Wardaddy’s background is directly revealed in the film although a number of clues point to his prior combat experience in World War I and perhaps service during in interwar years. As such, Collier is an “old school” tanker with a preference for uniforms first introduced before the start of WWII. Continue reading