I Watch Films: Adventures Of A Taxi Driver

 

Adventures Of A Taxi Driver

The film opens with a voiceover of how London black cab drivers are professional and efficient while ironically showing them otherwise. Black cab driver Joe North* addresses the audience about the job and his problems. His problems include that he lives with his mother, as well as his criminal younger brother and even younger annoying brother. His job keeps ending up in strange escapades, often ending up naked or having sex with women.

He moves out, to stay in the flat above the garage of his friend where inevitably he’s caught in a compromising position by his fiancé. Some people take him hostage only for that to turn out to be a prank. When inevitably his brother and flatmate get caught up in crime, he doesn’t believe it when they take a hostage and hijack his cab.

This is better when it is a sequence of sketches than when a plot emerges, but even then it’s not great. Joe carries boxes from shopping to the door, only to discover his fare has locked herself out, thus having to climb a ladder to an open window, that being a room in the middle of being decorated so he's covered in paint, so she invites him to have a bath to clean himself up, her joining him only for her husband to return unexpectedly and Joe having to hide under water as the husband talks on at length, then escaping bare from the waist down, only to be flagged down by a nun and having to carry her luggage to the door of the nunnery; it has a couple of entertaining jokes but as it goes on it just feels exhausting.

1970s sex comedies generally weren’t good; when they stumble onto something funny or interesting it’s more by luck than judgment. This starts as a lazy satire of taxi drivers, then basically loses interest in actual taxi driving, instead focusing on the poorly characterised criminals.

Watch This: Fairly representative of this era of British sex comedy
Don’t Watch This: Unfunny, ludicrous, confused in what it’s doing

* Adventures Of A Private Eye had Bob West; Adventures Of A Plumber’s Mate Sid South. As we were spared a fourth Adventures film we never found out what (presumably) Jack West was up to.