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(1930– ). Australian actor.
Appeared in documentaries: The Fantasy Film Worlds of
George Pal (Arnold Leibovit 1985); All About 'The Birds' (video)
Laurent Bouzereau 2000).
Why
should this be the case? One answer would be that Taylor seems to believe in
brawn, not brains, as the proper attribute of a successful hero, even though
science fiction films sometimes require their heroes to outwit, and not
outslug, their adversaries. So it must not be forgotten that Taylor first made
an impression on the film world as the muscular, sometimes shirtless hero of World
without End, ready to provide the frail men of humanity's future with
lessons in masculine toughness. Indeed, he may have had some influence in
diverting a subsequent adaptation of H.G.
WELLS's The Time Machine into similar
territory; for in the opening scenes, Taylor seems far from convincing as a
brilliant scientist explaining the mechanics of time travel to his friends, and
once arrived in the future, he cannot muster the proper aura of pain and
anguish when his casual gesture causes a shelf of ancient books to turn into
dust, a tragedy from the perspective of an educated man. But Taylor comes to
life when he recognizes that the attractive but effete Eloi need to become
fighting machines to fend off the monstrous Morlocks and proceeds to inspire
them to acts of gleeful mayhem, oblivious to the sacrilege being perpetrated in
the name of a noted pacifist's novel. Clearly, if you prefer carnage over
cerebration, your would understandably gravitate toward the Wild West, not the
far future.
Still,
Taylor can be effective if he is cleverly cast in roles which deliberately
prevent him from being the sort of brawler that he wishes to be. In the Twilight
Zone episode "And When the Sky Was Opened," he is quite moving as
one of the subdued astronauts who discover that, as an unintended effect of
their space flight, they are being erased from existence. And it was an act of
sheer genius for Alfred HITCHCOCK
to cast Tippi Hedren
and Taylor in The Birds: as an inexperienced actress who isn't quite
sure about what to do with her role, Hedren persuasively conveys the uneasiness
of a woman in an unfamiliar environment, and as an action hero who can't quite
manage to do anything genuinely heroic in response to Hitchcock's
unconventional menace, Taylor persuasively conveys the sense of frustration
that people would actually feel if suddenly attacked by legions of ferocious
birds.
What
else is there is mention? Taylor embarrassed himself in the inane Colossus
and the Amazons; competently spoke for an heroic dog in One Hundred and
One Dalmatians; and was modestly engaging as a nineteenth-century cowboy
transplanted into the present in the television movies and series Outlaws
(a rare instance where his interest in westerns and science fiction
overlapped). Of greater interest to science fiction fans would be his
appearance in Time Machine: The Journey Back, both a documentary about
and an expansion of his most famous film. More recently, he has even begun to
emulate other science fiction veterans by accepting roles in a Joe DANTE film
and a mindless Sci-Fi Channel rip-off of The Birds, suggesting that the
now-elderly Taylor may be rethinking his longstanding aversion to science
fiction films. For there is one other thing to cherish about science fiction
fans: no matter how long you ignore them or avoid them, they will always be
willing to welcome you back into the fold, even if it never was where you
really wanted to be.
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