The Yellow Cab Man (1950)

Sadly Over-hyped

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

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!

Red Skelton plays a guy, oddly enough, named Red. Red is an accident- prone man and because he's often involved in accidents, he's worked on inventing some things to save lives. Most of them are pretty lame, but his unbreakable glass will easily earn him a fortune. Unfortunately a corrupt lawyer (am I being repetitive?) has decided to steal it--but the formula is locked in Red's mind. So, he comes up with a complicated plan to have him meet a phony psychiatrist who will try to pump Red for information. Along the way, Red falls for a pretty lady (Gloria DeHaven)--but soon the psychiatrist convinces Red that he has a death wish--and is a danger to people he loves. It may not sound all that funny, but the film abounds with wonderful pratfalls, stunts and cute scenes. The bottom line is that Skelton once again plays an extremely likable guy--and that makes all the silliness work. It reminds me of a Ritz Brothers film I just saw--you never liked them, so their antics were tiresome. But, with Skelton, you cannot help but root for him and are willing to put up with some extreme silliness. Well worth seeing and good for a few laughs.

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.

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.