Taxi (1931)

Taxi
Directed by Roy Del Ruth
Written by Kubic Glasmon and John Bright from a play by Kenyon Nicholson
1931/US
Warner Bros.
IMDb Page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental

Matt Nolan: Come out and take it, you dirty, yellow-bellied rat, or I’ll give it to you through the door!

Warner cashes in on Cagney’s success in “The Public Enemy” with another tough-guy role, this time as an embattled taxi driver.

A New York City crime syndicate wants to take over the taxi business currently conducted by independent cabbies.  Matt Nolan (Cagney) is one of these.  Pop Riley (Guy Kibee)is another.  Pop defends himself against  the syndicate with force and winds up in jail where he dies.  His daughter Sue (Loretta Young) tells a group of independent taxi drivers that violence is not the answer.  Matt strongly disagrees but Sue soon becomes his steady girl.

Despite his hot temper, Sue loves Matt and they marry.  At their marriage dinner, Matt spots the syndicate boss responsible for the attacks on independents.  He prepares to fight him despite Sue’s pleading.  In the uproar, the syndicate boss stabs and kills Matt’s brother.  Matt won’t tell the cops who did it because he wants to take revenge.  The rest of the movie is devoted to Matt’s revenge plans and Sue’s efforts to stop him from landing in jail like her father.

Cagney seems to spend more time playfully pushing around Loretta Young than he does fighting the bad guys. The most fun to be had in this movie is seeing Cagney speak Yiddish and do his first movie dancing in a fox trot contest with an uncredited George Raft. I liked this much better the second time I saw it.