Please click here to go to part one of The View in the Rear View Mirror

According to the late comedian George Burns, it was “too bad all the people who know how to run the country are busy driving taxi cabs and cutting hair”.

I’ll have to leave the tonsorial study of the movies to others, but, as movies proved repeatedly, these drivers for hire, in true democratic fashion, often forgot their place, and offered unsolicited opinions on just about everything to those in the passenger seat–especially when the roles gave a character actor a chance to shine. The sometimes snap judgments the cabbies made about their clients almost always seemed to reinforce a movie convention: Want to know what to do with your life? Ask a taxi driver. Come to think of it, you often didn’t have to ask, especially in the 1940s as taxis became even more of a fixture in American movies.

Deadline at Dawn (1946) is a brief, 83 minute movie that follows six hours of a sailor’s leave after he has awakened in a New York cold water flat next to the body of a dead woman. This RKO production is the only film ever directed by the Group Theater’s driving force, Harold Clurman, whose influence on acting and the theater are still felt today. Despite the fact that Clurman dismissed the movie as inconsequential, there is a haunting quality to this beautifully photographed vision of a big city that threatens to swallow up the people in its labyrinthian darkness. Those same people, as we witness during the course of the film, find something comforting in the anonymity of the  shadows and light framed so well by cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca. This aspect of the film is captured in the comment that a character makes: “Golly, the misery that walks around in this pretty, quiet night.”

The sailor (Bill Williams, then a callow, blonde youth, best remembered today as a cowboy in the movies and for a long marriage to actress Barbara Hale), cannot remember what may have occurred that led to the death of this woman (Lola Lane), a b-girl–and a very tough customer. All he dimly recalls is that she invited him to her place to fix the radio after learning that he was a radio man on board ship. In an effort to retrace his steps, the sailor is assisted by a very young Susan Hayward, giving one of her best, early performances as a surprisingly vibrant if brittle dance hall girl and a humane Paul Lukas as Cabbie Gus Hoffman, a watchful, philosophical soul with a touch of the poet. Lukas, an actor whose European mien usually led to his casting in somewhat aristocratic parts such as a polished gigolo in Dodsworth (1936) and as Errol Flynn’s French conscience in Uncertain Glory (1944) brings a mixture of understanding,  nobility and despair to his role in this small movie.

Lukas, a Hungarian by birth, had been in the movies from the teens, and experienced the range of an actor’s life, playing the youthful lead, comic roles, roués and resistance fighters. Best remembered today for his Academy Award winning role in Lillian Hellman’s Watch on the Rhine (1943) and his appearance as the voice of scientific reason in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (1953), this film, in which he created such a memorable character, helped to remind me of his exceptional range throughout his career. Perhaps a bit of the perspective that he brought to the unglamorous part of the exiled European professor turned cabbie whose patter includes a line of wise aphorisms, commenting and reflecting on the character and this veteran actor’s depth of understanding about fate. The script is a ripe, (and occasionally over-ripe) blend of a Cornell Woolrich story, (writing under his pseudonym of William Irish), and playwright Clifford Odets‘ extravagant turn of phrase. Each of the actors often sound alike in their appealing, if  sometimes too colorful speech, yet Lukas, when musing aloud, made me believe in this man’s world-weariness and his almost brooding humility, giving an edge to such aphorisms as “speech was given to man to hide his thoughts” and “put nothing in writing…that’s the first rule of life”.

It would be difficult to say if the taxi-driver Gus Hoffman is a tragic figure in a brief genre picture of this type. However, Paul Lukas‘ performance, as well as the entire supporting cast, (which also includes Joseph Calliea as the dead woman’s brother and Steven Geray as a hopelessly smitten suitor, both of whom are seen in the accompanying photo) helps to lift it above the conventions of its time. Lukas makes his self-awareness particularly poignant in his obvious loneliness and his growing protectiveness toward the two younger people (Williams and Hayward) as the story develops in this largely forgotten film noir.

Though occasionally shown on TCM and available in a pricey vhs recording, (if you can find it), Deadline at Dawn (1946) deserves to be one of the many films from this period to be issued on dvd. Though the director was never comfortable with the trappings of Hollywood, it is also unfortunate that Clurman did not have the opportunity to make more movies, since there is not a false performance anywhere on view in this picture, despite some of the plot’s unlikely twists.  This movie, which was a hit at the time of its initial release, was filmed entirely on the RKO lot, and uses the studio sets to create a desolate nighttime urban landscape that is illuminated by only flashes of hope–and a rolling sanctuary called the taxi.

I’m inordinately fond of Dark Passage (1947), directed by Delmer Daves from a novel by pulp writer David Goodis, and the last of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall‘s four appearances on film together. Most critics then and now seem to regard this outing of the Bogarts with mixed feelings. Filmed in part on location with a caring eye for detail by cinematographer Sid Hickox in photogenic San Francisco, Dark Passage has a surfeit of atmosphere, and several holes in the plot that you could drive a fleet of yellow taxis through, if you stopped long enough to see them. A few too many improbable strokes of luck as well as the alleged cooling of the on-screen Bogie-Bacall chemistry now that they were an “old married couple” and some awkward plot points combined to put some off. Several cited the subjective camera work used by the filmmakers as “too unsettling” for the average viewer. This technique, which attempted to take advantage of the evolving use of hand-held movie cameras, showing the the protagonist’s reality as he experienced it–had previously been tried in Robert Montgomery‘s version of Raymond Chandler’s Lady in the Lake, released in January of ’47.

In a September, 1947 review of Dark Passage, Bosley Crowther of The New York Times felt it was a mistake to “withhold… Mr. Bogart from the audience’s observation for some time—until a fast job of plastic surgery has supposedly been performed on his face. When he finally does come before the camera, he seems uncommonly chastened and reserved, a state in which Mr. Bogart does not appear at his theatrical best.”

Crowther further lamented, only half-facetiously, the lack of a gun in Bogie’s hand during this movie.”  Sure, the coincidences pile up fast in this one, allowing the unjustly imprisoned Vincent Parry (Bogart) to escape from San Quentin, and he just happens to be picked up by a fetching and sympathetic young artist out for a juant, (played by Lauren Bacall). What artistically minded young woman who lives alone in a splendidly appointed apartment wouldn’t take in an escaped con–especially if she believed he’d been railroaded? Concerned that the well off Bacall might be implicated in his escape and wary of her acquaintances, (whom he knows as well…I didn’t think that San Francisco was that small a city, but hey, movies aren’t meant to be reality, right?), the fugitive ventures out into the city. Soon Bogie tries to make his way to a friend’s house, where he hopes to hole up in peace, just a taxi ride away. Before you can say “deus ex machina”, who should appear randomly out of the fog behind the wheel of a hack, but a sympathetic Tom D’Andrea in the brief, but vivid performance of the character actor’s life.

For, in addition to the storied couple at the center of the proceedings, the movie boasts some highly charged character work from Clifton Young as a man on the make who probably regrets picking up a hitchhiker, Agnes Moorehead as a chicly dressed harridan, and Houseley Stevenson as an unlicensed plastic surgeon who probably has dirty fingernails along with a ghoulish sense of humor. But it is not not really the candle power of the big or little stars that has lured me into watching this movie, but the man who played the cabbie, who turns out to be some kind of film noir guardian angel–an unlikely figure, but an entertaining one.

Chicago-born Tom D’Andrea, who first arrived in Hollywood in 1934 while working as a publicist for Betty Grable, Gene Autry, Jackie Coogan and Mae Clarke, later became a radio performer and a comedy writer  for Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor and the comedy team of Olsen and Johnson. While entertaining the troops during his stint in the Army during WWII, he caught the attention of a Warner Brothers executive who signed him for a contract, which lasted from 1945 to 1952. This job led to the distinctive actor’s many memorable appearances in such films as Humoresque (as John Garfield’s funny, working stiff brother), Pride of the Marines (as Garfield’s fellow wounded vet), and as the perennial stage manager in the Cole Porter biopic, Night and Day (who eventually wins Cary Grant’s old girlfriend, Jane Wyman). While none of these roles were complex or challenging, Tom D’Andrea, who would go on to a certain immortality as the best pal of William Bendix on the television show “The Life of Riley” brought his streetwise decency, and a realistic manner and speech patttern to the movies.

It is Tom D’Andrea‘s “salt of the earth” cabbie, who forms an alliance with his taciturn, sarcastic passenger, whether the fugitive likes it or not. With only his rather tired face lit by the dashboard, D’Andrea strikes up a conversation with his silent passenger, asking if his preoccupied client knows how lonely it gets when you spend your days steering people around all night, dropping them off and picking them up at places where they are apparently having fun. As the viewer is trying to decide if this guy is a threat or an ally, the cabbie, who is apparently a lightning read of character, comments that Bogart looks like “a guy with plenty of trouble.” While the fugitive, draped in shadow, claims flatly that he doesn’t “have a trouble in the world”,  he is soon anxiously offering the cabbie money to forget he saw him. D’Andrea knows better and refuses his cash, empathizing with his troubles, telling him : “Don’t tell me buddy, I know.”  Recognizing his passenger from the photos that are plastered across the newspapers, the taxi driver warns him not to jump out in traffic or conk him on the back of the head, calmly explaining that there are simply too many cops around for that–besides, he says, he’s a good judge of faces, and he just “knows” that Parry is innocent. In a wildly unlikely gesture of magnanimity that seems remarkable yet genuine thanks to D’Andrea‘s eagerness to please and his apparent sense of justice, the cabbie decides to introduce Bogart to a back street surgeon (Houseley Stevenson) who is a friend–albeit a really eccentric friend, who seems to be able to perform facial surgery in 90 minutes. As you can probably surmise by the accompanying photo showing Stevenson and D’Andrea admiring the doc’s handiwork, this implausible story point gives the filmmakers a chance to inject some needed humor into the proceedings. We last see D’Andrea‘s “Sam the Cabby” reluctantly accepting a tip from the tired-eyed Bogie, who limps toward an uncertain fate, his bandaged face like The Invisible Man. The man is on the screen for about ten minutes, but his character is one I’ve never quite forgotten, even if I have a tough time believing he’s real.

The ability of cab drivers to try to play Mr. or Miss Fixit in the movies shows up repeatedly in the late studio era. Tom Tully, a likable character actor with a face like a boiled potato, inadvertently places himself at the scene of a crime, when he tries to solve his daughter Gene Tierney‘s complex marital problems in Otto Preminger’s Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950). Upset at his drunken son-in-law’s boorish behavior, he unwittingly pounds on the door of the bleak apartment where the husband lies dead, making himself a pretty conspicuous suspect once the body is discovered.  Tully, playing a somewhat simple-minded taxi driver so bored with his own existence and so enchanted by the violent glamour of the police (he might be described as a cop groupie, since he fawns on police detective Dana Andrews), he almost condemns himself for  a crime he didn’t commit by his blustering demeanor and ham-fisted statements.  Tully only appears on screen for a few minutes, but he manages to bring humor and a certain reality to the audience members with his  thumbnail portrait. Just as the movie examines the corrosive effect of too much power on a police detective, in Tully, we see the obverse–a man seething with his own lack of effectiveness in life, a point made clear in Ben Hecht‘s script by the condescending way that  his daughter and the police speak to him. His character, after spending frustrating years behind the wheel of a cab, is one of the more lovable losers in a downbeat story, eager to have his say, to be a central part of the action of the city life, even if he is cutting his own throat with every unnecessary word. This film, which is broadcast on cable occasionally is available on an affordable dvd. While I’ve only touched on one relatively small character, the movie is one of the best of Preminger‘s well-crafted noirs, with an outstanding performance by Dana Andrews as a seriously conflicted cop with a bad temper and a worse conscience.

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In director Henry Hathaway’s Fourteen Hours (1950), a mob of New Yorkers consider a life or death decision by a young man (Richard Basehart) threatening to jump off a ledge of a hotel to be fairly interesting street theater. Acting as a kind of informal and irreverent Greek chorus, a group of cab drivers, led by the always reliable character actor Harvey Lembeck and Ossie Davis, gather around to speculate and place bets on whether or not the man will actually jump.
While traffic is snarled and they can’t make their usual living, I particularly like the moment when the men, struggling all their lives to beat the petty pace by chasing the next yellow light before it turns red and to elude all parking tickets, discuss briefly the illegality of Richard Basehart‘s attempt to escape the concerns of the world.

The taxi drivers are peripheral to the action of the story, which is concentrated on the man, a sympathetic traffic cop (Paul Douglas) and his loved ones (Robert Keith, Agnes Moorehead and Barbara Bel Geddes). Yet, the callous and occasionally funny and caring comments of the cabbies as they speculate on what led to this and what might happen now help to place the events of the movie in perspective, making his plight look insignificant in the scheme of things in a metropolis, but, as the city’s life for a time focuses on him, it also could be interpreted of the importance of each individual. In the ultimate nod to the cabbies’ anonymity, none of the actors playing cabdrivers were in the film’s credits, though they were, in addition to Davis and Lembeck, David Burns, (an actor with a distinguished theatrical if not cinematic career), Leonard Bell,  Lou Polan, and Henry Slate. At the end of the film, when a certain order has been restored, the group expresses relief, and returns to their usual pattern of beefing and kvetching about one another’s lives, reabsorbed into their own patterns. Nothing changes, yet a distant tragedy touched them for just a moment. Something has happened that disrupted and even brightened that humdrum life for just a moment. This movie is available on dvd and has been broadcast on TCM recently.

While this look at cabbies as crimestoppers focused on their non-stop frustrations and brief moments of triumph, one film, Phil Karlson’s 99 River Street (1953) focuses on the frustrations of John Payne, former boxer, unhappy hubby and taxi driver. It might easily be subtitled “The Cabbie’s Revenge”, though that dish is hardly served cold here in this blistering film noir. Payne, an actor who has never received his due, plays Ernie Driscoll, who has lost his heavyweight boxing match three years ago, and was forced to retire from boxing. He now pushes a hack for a living, to the loud chagrin of his castigating, unfaithful wife, Peggie Castle. With his new dream of opening a filling station not exactly his wife’s idea of the big time, the cabbie seeks the advice of his friend and dispatcher, played by–who else?–Frank Faylen, his friend suggests to the cabbie that a box of chocolates for the wife, a night out, a few drinks, and having a baby may clear everything up, making domestic life just hunky dory, (yeah, that’s worked well all through history, hasn’t it?!).

Soon, however, Payne is witness to his wife’s complicity with a jewel thief (Brad Dexter), the dissembling games of a delusional actress (Evelyn Keyes, who is very good as an actress whose dreams are deferred a bit too long), who may be a friend after all, a theft of diamonds, and murder. Without giving a complex plot away, suffice it to say that, Payne gives a remarkably expressive performance, with a look of devastation and fury that would warm the cockles of the heart of any cab driver caught in rush hour traffic. His efforts to vent his simmering rage find ample expression, especially when he encounters Jack Lambert, one of the least well known character actor heavies in film noirs and westerns of the period, seen at right. Lambert, whose lack of fame is puzzling for an actor who brought some of the same menace as better known heavies as Charles McGraw and Neville Brand may have remained obscure in part because of his limited ability to leaven these roles with added humor. The ubiquitous Ian Wolfe and always interesting Jay Adler also brought their talents to this film’s examination of the psychological traps that people construct for themselves. Through John Payne‘s profoundly anguished, enraged character, who ultimately finds some degree of self-respect–the story has more of an affecting resolution than the earlier Kansas City Confidential (1953). Though I liked Payne‘s work in Karlson’s Kansas City Confidential, which sort of petered out as a drama despite several fine elements, in 99 River Street his sometimes stiff screen manner reinforces his character’s unhinged quality as he seeks a bleak vindication for his life behind the wheel, if not behind the eight ball. This film, which does appear to be commercially available on vhs or a dvd is one that I only saw thanks to a friend.
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At a future date, I’ll probably return once more to this topic to look at romance and comedy in the back of a cab–though I’ll try not to get as carried away with the world of taxis on film, though it gave me a great chance to look at some of my and, I hope, your favorite character actors as well. Thanks to all my tolerant readers, and I hope that you’ll continue to make suggestions for future posts.

And don’t forget to tip your cabbie!

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Sources
Biesen, Sheri Chinen, Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir, JHU Press, 2005
Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby,  Demco Media, 1995 edition.
Hodges, Graham Russell, Taxi!: A Social History of the New York City Cabdriver, JHU Press, 2007.
Lyons, Arthur, Death on the Cheap, Da Capo Press, 2000.
Taxi Dreams: A History on PBS