Hey, Taxi!

I find that movies with exclamation points in the title usually don't call for many in my reviews. I think the companies add them to make the movie goer think there's something exciting going on when there isn't. So when I checked out today's program for the Museum of Modern Art's Cruel & Unusual Comedy program and saw this, I decided the only real reason to see it was to check it off my list.

True, Oliver Hardy was in it, paired with Bobby Ray. Before he teamed up with Stan Laurel, Mr. Hardy had been in a few other comedy teams. He played the heavy in Billy West's Chaplin imitations in the 1910s and Mr. West produced this comedy.

Hardy plays the comic heavy in this one, going mad and attacking the ingenue for no reason that is clear to me. Mr. Ray is the small, wily comic hero... Chaplinesque, if you like, but while there are some good gags, there's little particularly memorable about this one.

Mr. Hardy does offer us some of the gestures he would exploit with Mr. Laurel, the sense of self-consciousness. No tie-twiddling, though.