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In Taxi, Cagney's impudent Irish face is first seen sticking out from behind a steering wheel, spouting Yiddish at a customer. Leader of an insurgent group of cabdrivers who resent the methods of a racketeering corporation, Cagney has ample chance to perform his specialty—a short right-hand punch to the side of the jaw. He threatens his girl (Loretta Young) almost every time he sees her, takes a poke at the clerk from whom they get a marriage license. Right after the marriage, Cagney sets out to avenge a murder committed by the head racketeer of the taxi corporation. Despite his wife's protests, he chases the murderer into a closet and is prepared to shoot him through the door when policemen find him. Like Smart Money and Blonde Crazy, Taxi is a sordid but amusing observation on minor metropolitan endeavors. Good shot: Cagney riding home from Coney Island on a subway and listening, with his hat over his eyes and an expression of dangerous boredom, to the fuzzy comments of his girl's girl friend.
Screen writers are much less often publicized than playwrights. Kubec Glasmon and John Bright have been sufficiently able, original and influential to make themselves noteworthy. They arrived in Hollywood less than a year ago with the unfinished manuscript for The Public Enemy, then called Blood & Beer, which they had already tried to sell to Manhattan theatrical producers. Glasmon, a onetime druggist who says he used to own stores in Chicago, is short, soft-voiced, stocky. He has a wide knowledge of Chicago's underworld, admits that "Glasmon" is a nom-de-plumc, saves newspaper clippings of criminal happenings, like the hero of Blonde Crazy. Bright is younger, larger. He says he used to work for a Chicago newspaper. Glasmon, who recently applied for citizenship, is single, Bright is married. Both are known, in what Hollywood calls its "social circles," as "party hounds."
Girl of the Rio (RKO-Radio) is a passable little border romance made from a play called The Dove, in which the late Holbrook Blinn distinguished himself eight years ago. It is about a Mexican millionaire (Leo Carrillo) who, to facilitate his abduction of a cabaret girl (Dolores Del Rio) has her sweetheart (Norman Foster) jailed and removed from the country. All this is done with a superfluity of Mexican accent by Carrillo and Del Rio, and reiterations of clean young Americanisms by Foster, who encourages Del Rio by saying "Be game, kid." In the play these exaggerations made the action partly a parody of border romance. Because the cinema takes itself more seriously, the climax, where the millionaire lets the girl go in order to increase his selfesteem, seems out of character instead of gay and suitable. Del Rio chants, in almost Gregorian tones, such bits of pidgin slang as "You betcha my life." She photographs as beautifully as ever.
Stepping Sisters (Fox) is a frantic little farce, derived from the comic strips via Broadway, where a play by the same name enjoyed an almost surreptitious run a year ago. The fun in Stepping Sisters largely at the expense of a chorus girl turned socialite (Louise Dresser), is of the "Bringing up Father" variety. Two of the socialite's onetime confreres—one of them (Jobyna Howland) turned tragedienne the other (Minna Gombell) still a blowzy trouper who swaggers with her hips-help stage an allegory at