The Yellow Cab Man

Tonight's final night of TCM's Star of the Month salute to Red Skelton includes a pair of movies that are already on my DVR, although I'm only doing a post on one of them today. That movie is The Yellow Cab Man, which you can see at 9:45 PM.

The opening credits are done somewhat differently, with the names of the cast printed on, well, plaster casts. Those casts are worn by a character named Red Pirdy (Red Skelton) who, as you might guess, is accident-prone, to the point that insurance companies don't want to insure him. After the credits, he's trying to carry an oversized cuckoo clock down the sidewalks, when he accidentally starts crossing the street when the traffic has the right of way, not the pedestrians. This causes him to get hit by a taxicab from the Yellow Cab Co.

Now, Red is an honest, and inconceivably stupid man, so he's open about the accident being entirely his fault. Ellen Goodrich (Gloria De Haven) works for the cab company's insurer, an she tries to get Red to sign a waiver. Also showing up is a lawyer, Martin Creavy (Edward Arnold), who seems to have a way of committing insurance fraud and realizes he can use Red to make a ton of money, or so he thinks. Well, he will have that chance, but in a completely different way.

As part of Red's seeing Ellen and Creavy, Red reveals that not only is he one of those tinkering inventors who nowadays would be the target of those scammy commercials about getting a patent for your invention. But because of Red's stupidity, he also mentions that he's invented, but not yet patented, something called Elastiglass, which I suppose isn't that much of an invention since things like Plexiglas/Perspex and Lucite had been invented a good decade before the movie was released. Elastiglass is, like those other acrylics, shatter-proof and therefore much safer than traditional glass.

Ellen, and the executives at Yellow Cab, think that installing safer glass would be a good thing for the cab company's insurance bills, and hiring Red wouldn't be a bad PR move either. Martin, for his part, sees dollar signs if he can get the formula out of Red's mind. To that end, Martin hires a quack psychiatrist named Dokstedder (Walter Slezak) who uses drugs and hypnosis to try to obtain the formula. Murder is also involved, leading to a madcap climax.

I'm guessing that The Yellow Cab Man was conceived as a way for MGM to use Red Skelton's brand of physical comedy and sight gags. There's certainly a lot of that in the movie. Unfortunately, they didn't bother to come up with an intelligent enough script. Red is just way too stupid, to the point that you wonder how he's been able to live independently as an adult, never mind the concussions. The bad guys are cartoonishly bad, although I suppose that befits the cartoonish nature of the whole film. But to me it often came across more as grating than as working well.