Big City

A battle is heating up between different taxi factions in the big city. The Comet Taxi company owner John C. Andrews is reconsidering the hiring of thugs in his competition against the independents. Joe Benton (Spencer Tracy) is one of those independents and married to immigrant Anna (Luise Rainer). Anna announces that she's pregnant. She sends her brother to deliver a raincoat to the Comet garage. The thugs had planned a frame up for him. They shoot the brother after they bomb the garage to start a taxi war. Anna won't be a citizen for another six weeks and the authority decides to deport her to alleviate the public pressure.

The movie has two great Hollywood legends in Spencer Tracy and Luise Rainer. It starts like a rom-com and Spencer's charms really sell that. They're a great on-screen couple. Luise has an exotic beauty. The plot turns into a bit of a gangster thriller. There isn't much tension. It becomes a melodrama. It needs more action. Spencer wrongly continues his smiling charms which belies the dire straits of the situation. It's not a highlight for either of these legends but their star power cannot be denied.

... declares Chevy Chase in a fake commercial in the first season of Saturday Night Live about some strange product that could be one of several things that nobody can identify. That sentiment applies to this film too. With Spencer Tracy and Luise Ranier in the lead as a cab driver husband and his foreign born and raised wife and the MGM trademark you'd be expecting a melodrama, but when it comes to director Frank Borzage, expect the unexpected.

The overall theme has to do with the war between a large cab company - Comet Cab - and the independent cab drivers in New York City. It's part tragedy in the willingness of city officials to deport an innocent alien girl (Ranier as Anna) without any real due process in order to avoid a controversy, part drama in the war between the cabbies and the conspiracy to hide Anna from the cops until six weeks expires and she becomes an American citizen, and part screwball comedy with a funny but rather pointless street brawl between all of the cabbies with some popular sports figures of the day (Jack Dempsey, Jim Thorpe, Bull Montana, Jack Jeffries and more) thrown into the fight for good measure as well as the chief of police, the district attorney and the mayor getting into the act. Actually the part about hiding Anna is partially played for laughs too, with the joke being on the hapless police always running in circles.

Then there's the bad guy, the muscle for Comet Cab Company who is willing to murder to keep his protection racket rolling who is played by - William Demarest??? Usually the comic relief or a harmless yet crusty fellow, you just know Borzage is playing the drama part of this tongue in cheek with this particular piece of casting. When Uncle Charlie of "My Three Sons" says "I'll rub you out if you talk" it's just hard to be too terribly afraid. All we need is baddie Barton McLane as a hairdresser to make the upside down casting and strange plot roadmap of this film complete.

One of the things Borzage did best was depict camaraderie and heroism, and here you see that in the independent cabbies and their wives who are willing to risk jail to keep Anna hidden from the police, and in Anna when she realizes that her presence among them is causing so much hardship for them.

Don't think I don't like this one - I do. Just sit back and enjoy whatever course of events you are presented and don't try to pigeon hole it or analyze it too much. From the first frame with cabbie Joe Benton attempting to "pick up" his own wife, to the end credits with the normally dignified MGM insignia that instead sports a hand-drawn lion's backside aimed at the audience, I've never seen anything quite like this from the movie factory era of MGM.

A very funny film that stars Luise Rainer and Spencer Tracy as a taxi cab driver and his wife. The plot is basically two cab companies fighting over which one gets the territory or something like that. The two main stars are great and Luise Rainer has top billing over Tracy. I've read a lot of negative reviews but i think it's very funny.

Fans of Spencer Tracy, Luise Rainer, and director Frank Borzage should enjoy this routine cab-driver/gangster melodrama. The first five minutes are a well-done perceptive trick on the viewer, but it's downhill from there. The acting and directing are above average, but the script is saccharine and almost embarrassing. The climax involves the gimmick of famous prize fighters appearing in a brawl, and there's an attempt to find humor in Guinn Williams drinking a quart of milk non-stop while policemen watch. The interesting plot turn of deportation is not very well handled.

After watching Big City a, TCM, television version of the movie, I felt cheated that I had not seen Luise Rainer before. She was magnificent, sweet, and believable. Because of my research on this 1930s two-time, back-to-back Oscar winner, I can't wait to see the other seven films in which she acted. She won an Academy Award in 1937 & 1938. She left acting at the peak of her career, and that is very sad. This woman had something "different" about her. Though she is now 102 years old and lives in England, she has a new American fan. Spencer Tracy was the male lead, and he was his usual incredible self, but Luise Rainer, in my opinion, upstaged the great Tracy!