The Birds Actor Rod Taylor Has Died at 84
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Maddyclassicfilms — 11 years ago(January 09, 2015 05:54 AM)
I'm really, really sad to hear this news. Rod is a great favourite of mine and many of his films are my favourites. He was a brilliant actor and one of the sexiest men of the 1960's.
R.I.P Rod and all sympathies to his family and friends. I will really miss him.
I think I will watch
The Birds
,
Sunday In New York
and
The V.I.P.s
over the weekend in his memory.
It is my business to protect your majesty. against all things. -
ecarle — 11 years ago(January 09, 2015 05:59 AM)
Rod Taylor was a "second tier" movie star whose movie stardom seemed to last exactly one decade: the sixties. But he was important to that decade and remembered long after it.
Taylor's sixties career had "The Time Machine" in 1960 to launch it(though Taylor had a TV show on the air the same year called "Hong Kong") and "Darker in Amber" to pretty much finish it in 1970(a Travis McGee detective story with a great final duke-out between Taylor and scary William Smith.) By 1971, Taylor had moved back to TV with the so-so Wild Wild West shadow, "Bearcats." A few more movie roles followed, but it was really the sixties that made Rod.
And the sixties RE-made Rod Taylor in the 90's, when Turner Classic movies came into being in the US and an older Rod Taylor found a younger generation turned on by his younger self from the sixties.
Even "second tier" stars seem to land their classics, and Rod Taylor always had the same two mentioned: The Time Machine and The Birds. Though the1c84 first one was "for kids" and the second "adult horror," they were really BOTH fantasy films that played across all age groups, which is one of the reasons I think they are classics and I say that knowing that, for me, "The Birds" will always be rather flawed in the script and acting department versus lesser known Hitchockc greats.
Taylor got a lucky break near the end of his career: his final film was for Quentin Tarantino. Inglorious Basterds. Taylor plays Winston Churchill , and he's in the back of the frame for the longest time(with Mike Myers and Michael Fassbender in the foreground action) before he talks briefly, and though he was old and wrinkled and "gnome-like"(said one critic), once he talked and made his classic facial expression you KNEW"Hey, that IS Rod Taylor!"
But perhaps better to remember the young and brawny and handsome Rod Taylor of the sixties. I know he drove my mother's generation wild in those years(they were 30 to 40 somethings) and he was known even as he kept missing out on the "big roles": James Bond, Dr. Zhivago, Heston's part in Planet of the Apes. Second tier guys often lose the parts to first tier guys.
I've spoken before of my great love for "Hotel," 1967, in which Taylor has the "pivots around him" lead. I always figured that probably Paul Newman, Rock Hudson and Sean Connery turned the role down and Taylor ended up with it. He's a dashing hotel manager and I guess hotel manager isn't a great "action role." But its a smooth sophisticated film and Rod Taylor is almost Cary Grant in it.
(And he DOES get an action scene a cliffhanger involving an elevator dangling by a thread and killing somebody, with Rod barely surviving by a "Vertigo" hang.)
Rod did two movies with Doris Day and the second one is a 1966 time capsule - "The Glass Bottom Boat," a SoCal based spy spoof with Doris and Rod surrounded by such comic talent as Paul Lynde and Dom DeLuise and Dick Martin(with no Rowan.) Hardly a great movie, but it was fun then.
QT loves "Dark of the Sun" the OTHER movie with a great Rod Taylor fight; this one to the death as Rod beats the living hell out of an evil modern day German mercenary. Very satisfying fight. (Rod also did a "start as haters, end as buddies" fight with Ernest Borgnine in the little-seen "Chuka," also of 1967. I guess you could say that Rod was Muy Mas Macho.)
Hitchcock considered Rod Taylor to play Sam Loomis in Psycho, but went with Stuart Whitman and then shifted to John Gavin. Hitch remembered Rod for "The Birds," and the rest is history. There are news clippings of Hitchcock signing Rod Taylor to a long-term contract in the sixties(after Sean Connery said "no") but nothing came of it. Rumored: Taylor would have been the male star of "Mary Rose" had Hitchcock made it.
As a "second tier" guy, perhaps Rod Taylor was very lucky to land The Birds. Hitch's budget attention was on the birds and his discovery, Tippi Hedren. Taylor was almost an afterthought but his "Mitch Brenner" really holds the production together, as the beleaguered male trapped in a house with females of all ages. (He had it coming, though; in the first half hour he's a real jerk smart ass.)
"The Time Machine" has always haunted me with its basic futuristic conceit: an "above ground" population of peaceful but wimpy and fey types who ignore one of their member drowning, don't read anymore(their books are crumbling into dust)and are occasionally raided by monstrous " Morlocks" from the underground who eat some of them, again without the rest of them caring at all. They are like human cattle.
The movie had SOME anti-war themes(nuclear war devastates the world) but also said that a totally meek "turn the other cheek" comportment versus savagery can lead to a lot of death for the "nice innocents". Food for thought through the ages.
Anyway, Rod Taylor. I know a lot of older ladies who were big fans of him for THAT reason, but me, I like him because he had macho style and because he's in Hotel, The Time Machine, The Birds, Dar -
Nexus71 — 11 years ago(January 09, 2015 07:49 AM)
R.I.P. Rod Taylor thank you for all the hours of enjoyment with your no-n111consense style of acting wich was refreshing in those days.And thank you QT for giving this great but underrated actor a final moment of glory wich Rod so deservedly earned.You will be missed Rod!
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Akzidenz_Grotesk — 11 years ago(January 09, 2015 09:45 AM)
RIP- what a fine actor. I'll always remember his starring role in
Dark of the Sun (1968) aka: "The Mercenaries".
He has some fantastic scenes in that one.
"Man was meant to grow, not stop!" -Robert Browning -