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.

I think that so many people only think of Red Skelton from TV and I think they forget that he did movies and in fact very funny movies. I scrounged around until I could find most of them on VHS but now I long for a good DVD set. The Yellow Cab Man has got to be my favorite, I laugh so hard at parts of it that I have to actually pause the film so that I can catch my breath. I usually don't care that much for physical comedy but he and Danny Kaye seem to be the masters of the art and their movies have me rolling on the floor every time. The plot in here is really not that great but it is just what is done with a simple idea -A nice guy that is totally accident prone trying to be a cab driver and show his new invention. Just wind Red up and let him loose.

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!

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!

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.