Kenneth Turan recommends Taxi! by Roy Del Ruth
James Cagney speaks Yiddish in this wonderful movie recommended by LA Times and NPR film critic, Kenneth Turan.
Roy Del Ruth, 1932
Film historians call them simply "pre-Code." They're the unexpected movies made in Hollywood in the too-brief period between 1930 and 1934, between the birth of sound and the introduction of the suffocatingly moral Production Code. "More unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards," writes Thomas Doherty in his book Pre-Code Hollywood. "They look like Hollywood cinema but the moral terrain is so off-kilter they seem imported from a parallel universe." It's an upside-down world where, as shown in 1932's Taxi!, tough Irish street kid James Cagney speaks excellent Yiddish.
Cagney knew the language because it was the lingua franca of the streets he grew up on in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan. Cagney told biographer John McCabe that he especially liked Yiddish because "it's the one great language of vituperation . . . We Irish and German and other ethnic kids always envied our Jewish buddies their ability to insult." Cagney, playing cabdriver Matt Nolan, used Yiddish in conversations with Jack Warner and, according to McCabe, enjoyed referring to the studio head, in a particularly choice epithet, as a schvontz.
Knowing of the actor's gift for Yiddish, screenwriter John Bright crafted a scene in which Nolan, ordinarily feisty enough to start a fight, takes a few minutes off to help a desperate Jewish man who needs directions to Ellis Island so that he can meet his arriving wife. Cagney asks him, in excellent Yiddish, where he wants to go. When the astonished man asks if he is in fact Jewish, Cagney responds with a playful affirmative, "Vu den, a shaygetz?" ("What else, a Gentile?"). All done in the kind of fluent Yiddish even Jewish actors of today would have trouble matching.
Kenneth Turan
Film critic, Los Angeles Times
