A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Featuring:
Bobby Ray, Oliver Hardy, Marjorie Beebe
Directed by:
Ted Burnsten
Release Date:
April 1, 1925
Original Title:
Hey, Taxi!
Genres:
Comedy
Production Companies:
Cumberland Productions
Production Countries:
United States of America
Ratings / Certifications:
N/A
I find that movies with exclamation points in the title usually don't call for many in my reviews. I think the companies add them to make the movie goer think there's something exciting going on when there isn't. So when I checked out today's program for the Museum of Modern Art's Cruel & Unusual Comedy program and saw this, I decided the only real reason to see it was to check it off my list.True, Oliver Hardy was in it, paired with Bobby Ray. Before he teamed up with Stan Laurel, Mr. Hardy had been in a few other comedy teams. He played the heavy in Billy West's Chaplin imitations in the 1910s and Mr. West produced this comedy.Hardy plays the comic heavy in this one, going mad and attacking the ingenue for no reason that is clear to me. Mr. Ray is the small, wily comic hero... Chaplinesque, if you like, but while there are some good gags, there's little particularly memorable about this one.Mr. Hardy does offer us some of the gestures he would exploit with Mr. Laurel, the sense of self-consciousness. No tie-twiddling, though.
Director:
Ted Burnsten
Producer:
Billy West
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Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.