Motorista Terremoto

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!

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.

Red Skelton is an accident-prone, self-taught chemist. He comes up with a safety glass that works beautifully. However crooked lawyer Edward Arnold finds out about it and sabotages the demonstration; his increasingly violent attempts to get the formula will make up the plot of the movie. Gloria DeHaven and James Gleason work for a taxi company and get Skelton a job driving for the company, with disastrous results.

The best comic sequence had Red being left with a child by his mother, resulting in panic about a bomb and Skelton being accused of kidnapping the child. After that, the movie settles down into the inevitable plot, with some brief attempts at comedy that aren't quite as funny; the final chase, while big, only has a few grace notes to it.

Nonetheless, the fast start and some fine comic actors like Walter Slezak, Jay C. Flippen, and Paul Harvey keep this thoroughly afloat. If it isn't as strong as the stuff directed by S. Sylvan Simon, it's a chance for Skelton to do some of his fine clowning. And Miss DeHaven is very cute.

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.