Un loco al volante

The movies from my youth. This movie which I wish was on DVD! is a great ole movie for a rainy day. Red'd never been better getting away from the bad guys. And of course winning the girl and keeping Unbreakable Soft Glass he invented for his Cab!

I had discovered this obscure Red Skelton movie on YouTube recently and just decided to watch it now because of many glowing reviews on this site. In a nutshell, Red is an accident-prone fella who eventually becomes a cab driver after initially being hit by one! He's also an inventor with some crazy contraptions in his apartment. I'll stop there and just say this was very funny from beginning to end. There's an unusual distorted sequence that must have turned some minds on at the time and a hilarious end chase sequence taking place in a demonstration home. So on that note, I highly recommend The Yellow Cab Man. P.S. Since I always like to cite when someone that was in my favorite movie-It's a Wonderful Life-is in something else, here it's Charles Lane-the one who told Mr. Potter he'd one day work for George Bailey-who plays an insurance man who rejects an offer to insure Mr. Skelton!

Accident-prone inventor Augustus 'Red' Pirdy (Red Skelton) keeps having accidents. He gets hit by a cab. Ellen Goodrich (Gloria DeHaven) works for the cab company. Red makes friends with the cab driver and Ellen. Eventually, he's driving a cab himself. He had also invented an unbreakable glass called elastic glass. Others are trying to steal it.

The character allows Red to do a lot of physical comedy and his brand of bumbling character. I don't know if this is the best written. A lot of time, it seems to be an excuse for one comedic scenario to the next. This is for the Red Skelton fans in all of us.

Skelton was never as popular as the other leading comics of his day including Hope, Crooner/Comic Crosby, Danny Kaye, Abbott and Costello for a while and many others but his movies made money as this one did too. The concept of this movie is not original but congenial and in an era of remakes would a nice, tidy vehicle for a Ben Stiller type. Watching Skelton convincingly bungle and bumble his way through scene after scene is a complete hoot. The jokes come naturally and to me, he is better at delivering these jokes than Bob Hope ever was. The mad cap finale is generally fun in this warm two hander with Gloria de haven. And direction is generally snappy and on point as our cab driver causes obvious hijinks in this on the nose but funny tale.

The Yellow Cab Man is another of Red Skelton's madcap big screen comedies where Red plays an eccentric inventor who is also accident prone. So accident prone is he that he can't get insurance no way, no how. So what does he become in lieu of a modest settlement and for signing a quitclaim given him by agent Gloria DeHaven, a cabdriver for the Yellow Cab company.

Because of his tendency for the unfortunate, Red's invented himself a version of plexiglass, a shatter proof glass he calls elastic glass. Can't break it short of a bullet being fired into it. But he hasn't copyrighted the formula. And some unscrupulous people led by bottom feeding shyster lawyer Edward Arnold and medicine show charlatan Walter Slezak will do anything to steal the formula.

Red's a true babe in the woods in this film, but it's amazing how schnooks like him get some really good looking women to fall for him like Gloria DeHaven. Arnold and Slezak look like they're having a great old time. Usually both of them when they play villains exude a quiet menace, but here they are both outrageously overacting and the audience joins in on the fun.

The Yellow Cab Man is a treat for Red Skelton's legion of fans.