Taxi, s'il vous plait

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.

Red Skelton is an accident-prone, self-taught chemist. He comes up with a safety glass that works beautifully. However crooked lawyer Edward Arnold finds out about it and sabotages the demonstration; his increasingly violent attempts to get the formula will make up the plot of the movie. Gloria DeHaven and James Gleason work for a taxi company and get Skelton a job driving for the company, with disastrous results.

The best comic sequence had Red being left with a child by his mother, resulting in panic about a bomb and Skelton being accused of kidnapping the child. After that, the movie settles down into the inevitable plot, with some brief attempts at comedy that aren't quite as funny; the final chase, while big, only has a few grace notes to it.

Nonetheless, the fast start and some fine comic actors like Walter Slezak, Jay C. Flippen, and Paul Harvey keep this thoroughly afloat. If it isn't as strong as the stuff directed by S. Sylvan Simon, it's a chance for Skelton to do some of his fine clowning. And Miss DeHaven is very cute.

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.

And The Yellow Cab Man is a good example. Fitfully funny comedy has Skelton playing his usual bumbler, this time an inventor and cab driver. Most of the funny bits here belong to Skelton, but Walter Slezak has a few nice bits too. Storyline has Skelton inventing bendable glass and a crew of crooks after him for the formula. Edward Arnold is the ringleader. Gloria DeHaven is a blah leading lady here. James Gleason, Paul Harvey, Polly Moran, Herbert Anderson (billed here as Guy and later on TV as Gus), Jay C. Flippen, Charles Lane, Jody Gilbert, Dewey Robinson, and Tiny Jones co-star. The IMDb lists Mae Clarke, but I never spotted her. Arnold is his blustery self, and Slezak was always a terrific comic villain. The finale is memorable, coming out just before Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train," but with similar use of a carousel (in this case a rotating house). Skelton did better on TV, but his film career of 20 years or so (not counting cameos) was not inconsiderable. Skelton worked mostly for MGM, certainly not a studio known for its comedies. He might have fared better at a "lesser" studio. The film is notable also for its plethora of ugly DeSoto taxi cabs!

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!