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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, and science fiction films
often require their heroes to outwit, and not merely outslug, their
adversaries. So it is that in The Time Machine, Taylor is far from
convincing in the opening scenes, as his glib explanations of the mechanics of
time travel are visibly unpersuasive, and once arrived in the future, he can't
quite muster the proper aura of pain and anguish when his casual gesture causes
a shelf of ancient books to turn into dust. But when it comes time to save the
Eloi from the Morlocks by inspiring them to become fighting machines, Taylor comes to life in the ensuing battle scenes, oblivious to the sacrilege being
perpetrated in the name of H. G. WELLS's
classic novel. Clearly, if fight scenes are your forté,
your best bet would indeed appear to be 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 hero that he wishes to be. In the Twilight Zone episode
"And When the Sky Was Opened," he is quite moving as one of the 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 was all right in the mediocre World Without End,
described by people who haven't seen it as an anticipation of Planet of the
Apes (actually, it was more an anticipation of Teenage Cavemen);
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
doesn't really seem like it is where you belong.
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