AniInterview Sorry, this movie sucks

Exoticalot People are voting emotionally.

ShangLuda Admirable film.

Curapedi I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

GManfred This was a fairly interesting story which needed a plot twist or two for a better rating. It was predictable and somewhat dated as it is a prohibition era story and is very old-fashioned in many aspects. Cagney is a hack driver and Loretta Young is his girl friend who becomes his wife. He has a volatile temper which spills over at the slightest provocation and gets him into trouble. It also causes him to slap Young around and evidently is an excuse to use this picture to hone Cagney's tough-guy image as he defeats the Taxi Union. The viewer will wonder why she stays with him throughout the film, but as a 30's movie it probably passed for normal to audiences of the time.Film buffs will recognize several familiar faces of 30's movies. David Landau plays his usual bad guy role, George E. Stone is Cagney's pal and Guy Kibbee is Young's father. No new ground is broken in Taxi! and the story has been used before, but it is a chance for a glimpse at pre-code Hollywood and some of the stars of long ago.

lge-946-225487 Other reviewers have covered main topics like plot, cast, etc. I'd just like to comment on some incidentals I enjoyed.Cagney always uses such colorful language, as he does in this movie. When a fat man stands on Cagney's foot in an elevator (and I mean STANDS on it for several seconds) Cagney gets mad. Loretta Young tries to calm him down, and Cagney bursts out, "Over nothing?!? What do you expect me to do -- let a big hippo like that plant his clod-hoppers all over me?"Incidentally, the elevator scene showed a good lesson for all would-be hat-wearers today. Young has to remind Cagney to take his hat off in the elevator -- a necessity of etiquette then, as was taking your hat off indoors, when you got where you were going. People who wear hats today, should wear hats like people who know HOW to wear hats.Leila Bennett -- some people don't appreciate her flavor of humor, but I get a big kick out of her. She drones on and on in that adenoidal, nasal monotone, completely oblivious to whether anyone's listening or not. In fact, Cagney asks her at one point to button her lip, and Bennett just drawls, "Oh, I ain't said much," and goes on with her story. She's just droll and comical because of her personality. (In the restaurant, she says, "Well, the fish died an unnatural death. It isn't fit to eat -- even in a restaurant.")And say -- isn't Buck Gerard a nasty, low-life villain! He's abominable! On Cagney's wedding night, he says, "I bet you HAD to marry the bim" (i.e., bimbo).Little touches enliven this movie throughout -- like Cagney throwing his hat into Young's apartment when she's mad at him, to see if she'll leave it in or throw it back out. Charming incidentals add to the richness of the mosaic. (How poetical!)

lugonian TAXI (Warner Brothers, 1932), directed by Roy Del Ruth, is not so much a tribute on the day in the life of taxi drivers and the involvement with their passengers, but solely on an individual cabbie out to avenge his brother's killer. While the story does start out with a taxi war, Gramercy vs. Consolidated Cabs, it shifts gears during its second half where the theme switches from "fare game" to "revenge is sweet." The cabbie in question is James Cagney, resident tough guy of Warners, still in the driver's seat after his triumph in THE PUBLIC ENEMY (1931). He's not a gangster this time around but a guy on the side of the law, his law in fact, coping with hostility from others which cause his temper to constantly reach its boiling point. Loretta Young, very early in her career, plays the girl he marries who tries every which way to break him out of his quick-temper habit.TAXI immediately gets underway as Buck Gerard (David Landau) an organizer who leads his men to create "accidents" for other taxi drivers in order to do away with his competition. He orders "Pop" Reilly (Guy Kibbee) to leave his corner, but when he refuses, has his hired truck driver (Nat Pendleton) smash into his taxi. Reilly shoots the driver, but because he took the law into his own hands, the old man is sentenced to serve ten years in the state penitentiary in Ossining. After Reilly dies, Sue (Loretta Young), his daughter, goes against Matt Nolan (James Cagney), a taxi driver forming a staff meeting in getting the other drivers to unite by fighting back. In spite of their differences, Matt and Sue eventually marry. While in a night club celebrating their union, the Nolans encounter the drunken Buck Gerard with his girlfriend, Marie Costa (Dorothy Burgess). After Buck speaks out of turn, sort to speak, by insulting Sue, a fight ensues causing Gerard to take out his knife aimed at Matt, but accidentally stabbing his brother, Danny (Ray Cooke), in his attempt to save Matt. While Sue feels it best for the police to handle the situation, Matt wants nothing more than to avenge Danny's killer. Their marriage nearly comes at wits end when Matt learns Skeets (George E. Stone), one of his taxi driver pals, that Gerard's girl was seen visiting Sue in his apartment, asking her for $100, leading Matt to believe Sue has betrayed him, unaware of her true reason in doing this.A forgotten 67 minute programmer with fast-pace action is notable mostly for a couple of memorable scenes: Cagney speaking Yiddish to a policeman, and a dance contest at the Rainbow Gardens involving Cagney and Young with another dancing couple, the male partner being the up and coming George Raft. With this being a Cagney picture, it is Leila Bennett as Young's best girlfriend who not only stands out with her comedy relief and witty dialog, but gets the final fadeout. Look fast for Donald Cook (Cagney's brother in THE PUBLIC ENEMY) and Evalyn Knapp in the movie theater sequence playing leading players of "Her Hour of Love." As with many movies of the early 1930s, TAXI has gone through the remaking process by the end of the decade under the new title and locale as WATERFRONT (WB, 1939) with Gloria Dickson and Dennis Morgan, both films that have never been distributed on video or DVD. For a quick joy ride, be sure to watch TAXI next the time this and WATERFRONT shows again on Turner Classic Movies. (***)

Bolesroor This of course is not the classic sitcom Taxi (Tankyouveddymuch) or the Jimmy Fallon turkey-burger of 2004 but an early Warner Bros crime-romance-action-drama, the kind of sprawling but contained movie that packs a ton into a short period. James Cagney is a cabdriver on the streets of New York during the taxi wars, a real-life battle for business that led to almost as much violence and strong-arming as shown in the picture.First I have to take a moment to praise Cagney... he was a screen star in every sense of the word, and held a physicality that has never been matched since... whether fighting, dancing, or romancing, (all three of which he does in the movie) he's got a presence like no other. It becomes almost comically enjoyable in this movie to see him lose his temper and beat the living daylights out of anyone who looks at him funny. Not even Loretta Young- as his love interest and later wife- is spared the big fist.This movie was made in the years before Hollywood had such strict rules about language and implications, and not only is violence a way of life but sex is openly and repeatedly referenced. It's not perfect... Loretta Young's character of Sue crosses the line about two-thirds into the movie and goes too far in preventing her husband from becoming a murderer. (She's willing to rat him out and have him locked up for attempted murder while protecting the man who killed his brother AND her father?) My only other question about the film was why Cagney's character Nolan never told Sue that Buck Gerard was the man who set up her father and had his cab destroyed... it would seem an obvious revelation in explaining his motivations and might have made her back off just a bit in her efforts to stop him.Otherwise the movie is great... Young's monotone friend- whiny and horse-faced- is hilarious, and I'm amazed at the real New York vibe they got in a movie obviously made in Hollywood. Cagney and Young share a great chemistry, and the movie is definitely worth a look as an early-era Hollywood lost classic.