Hey, guys. Quint here, a little late as usual, but I couldn't let Rod Taylor's passing go without some comment.
Obituaries aren't the most fun things in the world to write for movie fans. It's nice look back at a career, but there's also a weight of responsibility attached. You want to do right by the dearly deceased and you want to try to illuminate something about them or their work. I can't speak for the other AICNers, but nothing makes me face the sheer number of movies I haven't seen than writing one of these things. So you feel a little like a fraud pretending to be an expert.
Especially when you look at a career like Rod Taylor's. I mean, I've seen the biggies like Giant, The Time Machine, Zabriskie Point and The Birds and even some smaller, awesome flicks like Darker than Amber and Dark of the Sun, but when I look at his filmography I realize that I've seen maybe 10% of Taylor's filmography.
So, I feel a bit like a fake trying to act like an expert on anybody I write about in this manner and I can only really do these things from a personal angle and try to express what impact the departed person had on me.
In Rod Taylor's case his career hit me differently at different points of my life. As a young child I of course saw 101 Dalmatians, but honestly I didn't remember that he voiced Pogo until I pulled up his IMDB page for this article. No, it was all about The Time Machine at that age.
George Pal's Time Machine is the perfect combination of adventure and horror, so it's natural that I gravitated towards it as a kid. Taylor's in full good guy mode as HG Wells and Pal's crazy world is so chock full of iconic design that you only need to watch this movie once and you'll have it permanently etched into your brain.
HG Wells sitting behind the controls of his time machine is the image that first pops into my mind when I think back on Taylor's career, although I think I may pick his turn as Travis McGee in Darker Than Amber as my favorite performance, but we'll get to that one in a minute.
As a kid it was Time Machine, but as I approached my teen years I started getting into Hitchcock and The Birds was my gateway drug there. The simple concept of all birds in the world going crazy and attacking humans appealed to young me and I watched it a ton. Not quite as much as Jaws, but a lot. I guess I just dug nature striking back at man flicks.
Taylor doesn't have a flashy role in that film. Like with most Hitchcock movies of that era The Birds all about two things: the tension and the blonde. Taylor still manages to make an impression, though, which is much more a testament to his natural charm than it is to how well the character was scripted.
The next stage that hit me was his two “Dark” films: Darker than Amber and Dark of the Sun. Darker Than Amber is a crazy 1970 adaptation of John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novel about the off-beat PI tracking down a murderous bodybuilder. Darker Than Amber isn't really well known, but Taylor is so damn good in this flick, especially when he gets in one of the craziest shirt-ripping knock down drag out fist fight with William Smith. It really is a precursor to the Roddy Piper/Keith David fight in They Live.
Dark of the Sun (aka The Mercenaries) was a popular title brought to Austin by Quentin Tarantino for one of his film fests. Brilliant Cinematographer Jack Cardiff (Black Narcissus, Red Shoes, African Queen) directed this dirty men on a mission flick about mercenaries fighting their way through the Congo, protecting a train carrying $25 million worth of uncut diamonds. It's a sweaty, brutal kickass flick and Rod Taylor is spectacular as the leader of the mercs.
Speaking of Tarantino, he was such a big fan of Taylor's that he aggressively pursued him for a small part in Inglourious Basterds. Taylor plays Winston Churchill for one scene and even though it's a tiny role you can tell just by the way Tarantino frames him that he worshipped Taylor.
There are a few Taylor movies I have on my DVD shelf that I will probably dive into soon, including one called 36 Hours, which is a WW2 thriller about a German attempt to convince an American major the war has ended so he'll accidentally release troop movements to them.
I keep eyeballing that one, originally bought for a planned continuation of my A Movie A Day series that never really came of anything. So perhaps now's a good time to attack that.
As you can see, I don't know nearly as much about Taylor's career as I want to, but I can say that the man oozed charisma and had that special something about him that all real deal movie stars did that made you sure he'd be the coolest dude in the world to hang out with.
My thoughts are with Mr. Taylor's friends, family and fans.
-Eric Vespe
”Quint”
quint@aintitcool.com
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