Taxi, s'il vous plait

Some belly laughs in this Skelton madcap. As usual Red plays a good-hearted schlemiel who stumbles from one mishap to the next, but somehow muddles through to win the girl (Gloria DeHaven) and the climax. Here he's an amateur inventor and Yellow Cab man battling veteran baddies Walter Slezak and Edward Arnold.

A great job by the writers. The comedy set-ups are consistently funny and inventive from the mine-field opening of Red walking down the street to the whirlwind close at the L A Home Show . (Forget the muddled story-line which is just a handy post to hang the hi-jinks on.) This was just the kind of slapstick that Skelton could turn into a wild and crazy romp, and he does. .

Catch the great comedic architecture in the early sequence that builds hilariously from the baby-sitting beginning to the nine-one-one close. Too bad this kind of engineering has largely disappeared from today's movie screen. Then too, the crib scene with Red playing both his toddler self and infant sister amounts to 60 second knee-slapper.

In fact, there are a number of special effects scenes that work up more than a few chuckles. But the North Pole dream has something of a nightmarish undercurrent as does Red's getting shoved into the mixer.

I guess my only complaints are the cheapness of the street sets and the dull-grayish quality of the filming (at least, in my copy). Coming from big-budget MGM, such cost-cutters affecting overall quality seem surprising.

Nonetheless, this is a fine little post-war flick whose futuristic house at the Home Show expresses something of the surging spirit of a 1950's America then on the economic upswing.

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!

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!

The Yellow Cab Man is another of Red Skelton's madcap big screen comedies where Red plays an eccentric inventor who is also accident prone. So accident prone is he that he can't get insurance no way, no how. So what does he become in lieu of a modest settlement and for signing a quitclaim given him by agent Gloria DeHaven, a cabdriver for the Yellow Cab company.

Because of his tendency for the unfortunate, Red's invented himself a version of plexiglass, a shatter proof glass he calls elastic glass. Can't break it short of a bullet being fired into it. But he hasn't copyrighted the formula. And some unscrupulous people led by bottom feeding shyster lawyer Edward Arnold and medicine show charlatan Walter Slezak will do anything to steal the formula.

Red's a true babe in the woods in this film, but it's amazing how schnooks like him get some really good looking women to fall for him like Gloria DeHaven. Arnold and Slezak look like they're having a great old time. Usually both of them when they play villains exude a quiet menace, but here they are both outrageously overacting and the audience joins in on the fun.

The Yellow Cab Man is a treat for Red Skelton's legion of fans.

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.