‘Taxi!’ The tough James Cagney movie with a warm heart

James Cagney, that “most American of actors” with an Irish-Catholic heart, whose 125th birthday we celebrated earlier this month, was in the estimation of Orson Welles “the number one screen-filler in movie history.”

One of Cagney’s early films, Taxi! (1932) co-starring Loretta Young, shows why. When comparing Young’s other co-stars at the time, including, for instance, Norman Foster in Week-End Marriage (1932), and George Brent in They Call It Sin (1932), Cagney is luminous.

To wit, when a Jewish immigrant approaches a cop and keeps referring to “Ellis Island,” Cagney’s character, who like Cagney, speaks Yiddish, is sitting in his cab, smiling broadly, and bridges the linguistic divide, prompting the cop to ask, “Nolan, what part of Ireland did your folks come from?” “Delancey Street, thank you,” he says as only Cagney can. Then, two cabs try to pin him in, and he punches them out, drawing cheers from his Yiddish passenger.

It’s a rough-and-tumble world of taxi-cab drivers right after America entered World War I. Competition for fares was stiff, regulation lax and fleet operators often crooked, trying to edge out the independents through various criminal schemes like rigging an independent’s wheels so the tires fall off when cabs crash into it on either side. Many of those independent cabbies were Irish Catholics like Matt Nolan (Cagney) and Mike O’Riley (Guy Kibbee), the father of Susie (Young),

Mike “Pop” O’Riley has had enough, and when operators try to bar him from the corner he’s dominated for years, he kills the crook who crashes into his taxi. Though old and ailing, he is sentenced to 10 years in prison. Matt wants to crush the crooks and invites lovely Susie, whom he has eyes for, to speak at the union meeting. When she calls for peace, he is enraged. But her father has just died that morning and she has had enough of the violence. Her pleas work and calm soon returns to the streets through arbitration.

After Matt accepts this turn of events, their romance takes off. But his hot Irish temper keeps getting the best of him and almost derails their romance. They are too in love, however, and patch things up with a heartwarming scene when he tosses his hat inside her apartment. On their wedding night as they celebrate at the nightclub, Matt passes Buck Girard, who framed Susie’s father. He incenses Matt, who takes a swing at him. Buck ends up killing Matt’s good-hearted but naïve brother, Danny.

As Matt is buying a tombstone for his brother accompanied by his priest, who has kept a close eye on Matt, the drama intensifies with Buck on the lam. In the end, Matt almost kills Buck (just after enunciating that famous “dirty [yellow-bellied] rat” line), and his marriage almost implodes. But, as with Cagney in real life, Providence is smiling down on young Matt Nolan and the film, though “pre-code,” turns out to be a tender story in which marriage is endearingly upheld.

At the time, Hollywood did have a code of sorts, instituted in the wake of major scandals -- notably the murder of director William Desmond Taylor, who was involved in a sordid love triangle, in 1922. Other immoral behaviors were also exhibited by Hollywood players. Their dissolute lives hardly inspired tender love stories. 

After loud calls for censorship, rather than having to deal with a patchwork quilt of censorship laws, Hollywood enlisted Will H. Hayes, Postmaster General under President Warren G. Harding and a Presbyterian elder, to clean up Hollywood’s act. He was paid handsomely to establish the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America. Hayes served as president of the MPPDA for 25 years.

On June 29, 1927, MPPDA passed a resolution codifying the “don’ts” and “be carefuls.” With the onset of the Great Depression, however, there was a quest to ring up box office sales with films like Baby Face (1933), starring Barbara Stanwyck as a ruthless woman who uses sex to get what she wants, and Tarzan the Ape Man (1932), co-starring Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan, which featured nudity. Social critics decided it was time to get serious about ensuring films did not offend audiences’ sense of decency or encourage immorality.

Enter Joseph Breen, who had come to the attention of Hollywood as publicity director of the 28th International Eucharistic Congress in Chicago in 1926. Breen took the 1927 rules and developed a “production code.” Yet as Taxi! shows, Hollywood already knew how to make uplifting films, and did not need a new code, if only they could have resisted the temptation to appeal to baser instincts in the quest for box office gold.

Taxi! is available to stream on AppleTV, Amazon Prime, or Fandango at Home. It is also available for purchase on DVD.

Mary Claire Kendall’s latest book, Oasis of Faith: The Souls Behind the Billboard, has just been published.