Taxi, Mister

For the third and final film in the William Bendix-Joe Sawyer two guys from Brooklyn series, Hal Roach decided on a trip down memory lane to the Roaring Twenties when our guys were just getting started in the cab business. Back then Bendix and Corbett were not millionaires yet, but blue collar guys in fact as well as attitude.

They're splitting driving a cab day and night at that point and one afternoon when Bendix escorts a drunken Jack Norton to the burlesque house he meets the love of his life and falls big for Grace Bradley, strutting herself on the stage. Actually due to some of Norton's antics she falls off the stage and in Bendix's lap.

Since gangster Sheldon Leonard is also interested in Bradley, he takes a dim view of Bendix's attentions. But he uses him and nearly gets him framed for having bootleg booze and a tommy gun in his cab which were planted.

I think you can tell where this is going and since we've seen the other two previous films the audiences of 1943 already knew how this would turn out. Bendix's native Brooklynisms are scattered throughout the script, we sympathize with him more than Leonard does when the police give him the 'Thoity Thoid' degree. Frank Faylen and Mike Mazurki are here also as an amiable pair of thugs working for Leonard and Iris Adrian is always good as the smart mouth waitress.

This was the end of the series because Bendix was now with Paramount and Hal Roach no longer had his services. But Tim McGuerin lived on as Bendix created Chester A. Riley another lovable Brooklynite for the radio and small screen.

A nice low budget comedy from Hal Roach from a two short and forgotten series of films.

Taxi, Mister (1943)

** (out of 4)

The third and final film in the Hal Roach series (the first two are BROOKLYN ORCHID and TWO MUGS FROM BROOKLYN) has William Bendix and Joe Sawyer at a taxi convention where they're being honored for their longevity in the business. Sawyer's girlfriend then asks how they started and we flashback to their early days when they only had one cab and how this grew with the help of a gangster. If you're looking for any high-tech piece of art then you're certainly not going to find it in this film, which clearly suffers from its low budget and obvious rush-job to get it in a theater. I don't think anyone could watch this film and think any time or effort went into it as it was clearly just meant to fit the bottom half of a double bill. With that said, if you enjoyed the first two films then you'll probably enjoy this one as they're all three pretty much the same. We get a lot of fast jokes but not many of them made me laugh to be honest. At just 47-minutes the film moves along fast enough to where you shouldn't get bored with it but at the same time there's simply nothing here to really recommend. I'm a major fan of Sawyer as I find him charming enough to watch so this added a little entertainment for me. Bendix isn't that bad in his part and there's no question the two actors have some chemistry together. Sheldon Leonard plays the gangster and isn't too bad either. TAXI, MISTER certainly isn't a masterpiece or even a good film but if you enjoy this type of "B" movie then there are certainly worse ways to spend an hour.

In the early 1940s, the Hal Roach Studio stopped making comedy shorts. After a long and very successful string of Laurel & Hardy, Charley Chase, Our Gang and other comedy shorts, the studio decided to get rid of all the actors and produce nothing but 'streamliners'...B-movies with a very short run time of about 45 minutes (as opposed to 50-70 for nearly all other Bs). And, oddly, the actors in them were not necessarily comedians...even though the films were comedies.

Three of these streamliners were about two buddies who owned a taxi company, Tim and Eddie (William Bendix and Joe Sawyer). By the second film, they were rolling in money and owned a huge fleet of cabs. However, in the third (and final) film, it's a flashback told by Eddie about their old days when they first started the company back in the late 1920s.

In this flashback, you see how Tim met his soon to be wife, Sadie. They meet as a result of a drunk interrupting a group of dancing girls...one of which is Sadie. At first, things go poorly for the pair but soon they begin dating...which is a problem because unbenowst to the both of them, a gangster also has fallen for her (Sheldon Leonard). Complications naturally ensue...including the cops thinking that Tim and Eddie are criminals!

This film surprised me, as I think I liked it a bit better than the previous two. Well written and with genuinely likable characters...aside from the gangster!