Thundering Taxis

This one must have been made before Ben Blue and Billy Gilbert became the stars of the Taxi Boys. Director Del Lord was well known in the silent era for his stunts with car chases. As usual, he does not disappoint here. However, this film does not take advantage of the possibilities of sound. It is essentially a silent film. Silent comics Billy Bevan and Clyde Cook are the main focus. It is nice to see Lord favorite Bud Jamison as the manager of a taxi company. This plot less wonder had two reels of car gags with some time out for Cook to do the famous oyster stew routine. It was first done by Bevan at Sennett in the 20s and was done to perfection by Curly Howard at Columbia. Cook has no dialogue at all and Bevan very little. Bevan does not even look like the Bevan character. Where is the walrus mustache? Blue and Gilbert brought some humanity to this series. Without them, it is all about action. A big plus is the familiar LeRoy Shield background music mixed with some lesser known pieces. For once the music editor added some interesting music staying away from the all too familiar "Sliding" which seems to show up in every Roach comedy of this period.

As I said above, I'd love to know more about the making of this film. You see, in the early 1930s, the Hal Roach Studio made a series of films under the umbrella term 'The Taxi Boys'. Some starred Ben Blue and Billy Gilbert, but a few had different Taxi Boy characters--such as Clyde Cook and Billy Bevan. Now here is the part that makes me curious. Why do the Clyde Cook ones look as if they are pieced together with clips from silent films? After all, silent movies were filmed at a slightly slower speed than sound films (16-22 frames per second versus 24 for sound) and when silent clips are inserted in talking pictures, the silent portions run too quickly. Could these films be made up of new footage and an older Roach film? Or, could they have shot some footage and not used it--only to use it later in these films? I tried to find out more about the series on the internet without any success.

This short has to do with the two cabbies having problems with a nasty rival cab company--one that will do ANYTHING to stop their competition. As things heat up, there are lots of scenes of speeding cars and crazy driving and the film looks more like a Sennett film because of this. It's all fun but there isn't a lot of depth--just lots of silent era style gags.

Thundering Taxis (1933)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

This here is without question the worst entry in Hal Roach's Taxi Boys series. This one here is yet another head scratcher but more on that in a bit. The story has our "Taxi Boys" getting a fight started with a rival taxi company and soon the two sides are doing battle with the other guys often winning. Billy Bevan and Clyde Cook eventually gets things really heated and this leads to a battle in the streets. Leonard Maltin had a great book on shorts from this era but even it wasn't that complete when it came to this series. There doesn't seem to be too much out there in terms of reading about the Taxi Boys series, which is a shame because as other reviews have said the series is rather confusing. I'm not sure what the point of switching the film stars so much was but this one here is full of stock footage from a silent movie. Whenever I watch a movie I hate to be thinking about anything other than the story in front of me but this movie here had me thinking which movie I was actually watching. You could tell the silent stuff because of the speed but at other times I wondered if I was watching freshly shot material or if perhaps they were using footage from a third picture. The film looks horrible and you can't help but feel it was thrown together because the studio had to get a new film in the theater and didn't have a real one ready to go. I didn't laugh at anything and the big special effects of an ending doesn't work simply because it's another movie.

Del Lord directed a series of Taxi comedies for Mack Sennett in the late 1920s, which is, in no small part, how he came to direct a series of taxi comedies for Roach. After Roach closed down the series, Lord went into selling cars for a while, then into directing for Jules White.

It is no surprise, then, that this series owes a lot to Lord's old series -- in fact, the first gag in this one is taken from TAXI DOLLS (1929), but while the reaction to that iteration is salacious, here it's simple surprise.

Most of the rest of this is largely composed of other Sennett-style gags, which are very well executed -- Billy Bevan, who was a Sennett stalwart, is here, and Clyde Cook is virtually voiceless, as he is in his other appearance in the series. The plot is about a war between various taxi fleets and the havoc they wreak on each other. It's all competently done, but nothing that Lord had not done before. Or after: they even do the oyster in the chowder gag and White used that routine for Three Stooges movies into the 1950s.

This is the first "Taxi Boys" short I've ever seen (thank you, Turner Classic Movies) and overall it was pretty good, for what it was. There are some pretty elaborate car gags (thank you, Del Lord) and the ravishingly gorgeous Muriel Evans (thank you, God)--who unfortunately doesn't get enough screen time--and they combine to make this an enjoyable little outing. Del Lord, a former Keystone Kop and director at Sennett, hadn't lost his touch and keeps things going at a pretty good clip. Turner Classic Movies is running a "Taxi Boys" marathon and I've recorded a bunch of them, and if any of them are as good as this one is, I'll be happy. Good job by everyone involved.