by Glenn Lovell
Sad to say another face from our misspent youth at the movies has passed.
Taylor in “Dark of the Sun”
Sydney’s own Rodney Sturt Taylor — who went from beefcake hero to legendary boozer to, in his later years, wonderfully crusty character actor — died at age 84 in Los Angeles on Wednesday.
You know him as the mama’s boy who sustains some nasty pecks in Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and as the Victorian-era scientist with his eye on the future in George Pal’s Oscar-winning “The Time Machine.”
These titles, plus a couple of lame romantic comedies with Doris Day (they had zero chemistry), were mentioned in the obits. Mostly overlooked: Taylor’s mercenary in the brawny, Congo-set “Dark of the Sun” and his desperately overextended Aussie businessman in “The V.I.P.’s,” which co-starred Maggie Smith, a favorite among his leading ladies.
Well before he was hired by Hitchcock, John Ford (“Young Cassidy”), Michelangelo Antonioni (“Zabriskie Point,” which he later decided was “viciously anti-American”), and Quentin Tarantino (as a jowly Winston Churchill in “Inglourious Basterds”), Taylor had walk-ons opposite James Dean (“Giant”) and Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor (“Raintree County”).
Cast more for his physique than his acting chops — think of him as the Down Under Rock Hudson — Taylor found himself playing second fiddle to the leading man in films like “A Gathering of Eagles” (starring Hudson), “Fate Is the Hunter” (Glenn Ford), and “36 Hours” (as a German officer determined to break James Garner).
Later typed as an “active leading man” in Westerns and war pictures, Taylor said he felt like a phony. “(That) kind of embarrassed me sometimes because I really wasn’t big enough to be a really tough guy,” he recalled in a TCM interview. “I could fight in a way, I guess, (but) I really wasn’t good-looking enough to pull some of the roles that I was put into. So I was a little bit, I don’t know, insecure …”
When he did muscle his way to the front it was all too often in low-budget, testosterone-fueled imports, such as Italy’s title-tells-all “Colossus and the Amazon Queen.”
All in all, the sandy-haired calendar boy who apprenticed in radio (as Tarzan, no less) enjoyed a good-to-middling career, plowing the path for a later wave of Aussies, which would include Russell Crowe and Huge Jackman.
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