A few years after drawing on The Searchers (1956) as inspiration for Taxi Driver, Schrader returns to the basic outlines of John Ford’s classic for this unflinching examination of sexual liberation and its discontents. George C. Scott is riveting as a Midwestern businessman simmering with rage against the world when his daughter runs away to California to become a porn performer. His journey after her takes him to Los Angeles and San Francisco, and into the seediest circles of the sex trade, exposing him to a series of shocks to his conservatism. Offering no middle ground between the father’s uptight rectitude and the human degradation of the West Coast sex industry, Hardcore can be read as an expression of the conflict Schrader experienced between his own Calvinist upbringing and the hedonism of 1970s Hollywood.