Carry on Cabby (1963) - film review

Charlie Hawkins is the owner of a successful taxi firm, Speedee Cabs.  His job has become the main passion in his life and, understandably, his wife Peggy feels neglected.  On their wedding anniversary, Charlie promises to take Peggy out for a night on the town, but once again he gets distracted and he spends most of the evening ferrying a pregnant woman and her neurotic husband to and from hospital.  This is the last straw.  Determined to teach Charlie a lesson, Peggy decides to starts up her own rival taxi business, Glamcabs.   With money she had put aside for a dream cottage, she buys a fleet of brand new cabs and hires the most glamorous women drivers she can find.  Glamcabs proves to be an instant hit.  In no time at all, the enterprising Peggy has stolen all of her husband’s customers.  Unaware who is behind Glamcabs, Charlie makes a last-ditch attempt to sabotage his competitor’s cabs, but even this fails.  How will he react when he learns that he has been ruined by his own beloved wife...?

The seventh of the Carry On films marked a significant departure from what preceded it, dispensing with the episodic format and anti-authoritarian subtext that defined the early films.  The first film in the series to have what may legitimately be called a plot, Carry On Cabby was, like its immediate successor Carry On Jack (1963), not conceived as a Carry On film at all.  Originally entitled Call Me A Cab, the title was changed at the last minute when the distributor Anglo Amalgamated suggested it would be easier to market the film under the Carry On umbrella.

This is where the legendary screenwriter Talbot Rothwell joined the team, bringing structure and fresh ideas which the Carry On films badly needed, as well as a seemingly inexhaustible supply of gags.  Rothwell would script twenty of the original twenty-nine Carry On films, including some of the most highly regarded entries in the series.  It is no coincidence that after his final film, Carry On Dick (1974), the series would take a sudden turn for the worse.    

Another notable new arrival was composer Eric Rogers.  Although he had worked on the previous three Carry Ons as an assistant to Bruce Montgomery, this is Rogers’ first significant input.  His score for this film is one of the most memorable in the series and includes the eminently hummable Call Me a Cab theme.

What most distinguishes this Carry On film from the others is its down-to-Earth realism.  The characters are well-drawn and believable, not the thinly sketched caricatures that tend to predominate in most of the other Carry Ons.  This is partly down to Rothwell’s script, but just as much credit should be given to the lead performers, Sid James and Hattie Jacques, who bring an authenticity to their characters and a genuine poignancy to their on-screen relationship, things which are far less evident in their subsequent films.  

Interestingly, James and Jacques give almost straight performances here; the comedy comes from the madness that is dished out by the supporting artistes.  These include: Charles Hawtrey (hilarious as the bungling Pintpot), Kenneth Connor (please avert your gaze when he gets into drag), Esma Cannon (a delight in the last of her five magnificent Carry On turns) and Jim Dale (making a terrific Carry On debut).  Kenneth Williams was originally offered a part in the film (the role that went to Norman Chappell) but declined because he was unimpressed by the script (yes, this is the same Kenneth Williams that agreed to appear in Carry On Emmannuelle...).

Carry On Cabby is widely considered the best of the black-and-white Carry Ons.  Gerald Thomas’s direction is at its most inspired, particularly in the final sequence where the cab drivers round up the bad guys, a whimsical homage to the old John Ford westerns.  The film’s popularity led the BBC to make a television series named Taxi! (consisting of twenty-six 45 minute episodes, first broadcast in 1963), with Sid James reprising the role of the likeable cabby.

Perhaps the main appeal of Carry On Cabby is that it takes real situations, which most audiences could relate to, and gives these a humorous slant (and a few dollops of overt slapstick).   This is the "kitchen sink" of the Carry Ons, embracing real themes such as marital breakdown, the failure of a small business and the conflict between the sexes (highly topical as feminism had begun to take off).  Likewise, the sequence in which Hattie and Liz Fraser are hi-jacked has a hard edge to it and could almost be slotted into a contemporary British crime thriller.  This is assuredly one of the few Carry Ons that would have stood the test of time had it not belonged to the series.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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