Don Taylor spent his acting years playing young men a father could not object to and could not warm to either, then found his real work behind the camera: an efficient, unshowy director whose best film is a talking-ape sequel.
Fi1m perspective
Watch Don Taylor in Father of the Bride (1950) and you see what MGM hired him for. His Buckley Dunstan stands in the Banks living room in a good suit, says the right things to Spencer Tracy and gives Tracy nothing to push against. He is pleasant, he is presentable and he is a little blank, and the film knows it; Minnelli uses him as the one thing a jealous father cannot argue with. It is a clever use of a limited instrument.
That was the persona for a decade: clean-cut, all-American, often in uniform. In Battleground (1949) he is one of Wellman's grumbling squad in the studio snow, and the film is the better for not asking him to be more than that. He kept at it in supporting parts through the mid-1950s, and then, from the late 1950s, he stopped and started directing. He made features and more than four hundred television episodes and television films before he finished in the late 1980s, and he said he "would have died not directing". We believe him. Nobody plays Buckley Dunstan for pleasure.
The directing is where he earns his page. Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) was his first major feature and it is his best: he turns the series inside out, lands two talking chimpanzees in present-day California and lets Roddy McDowall and Kim Hunter be funny for an hour before he lets them be sad. We went in expecting a cash-in and came out unexpectedly low, because the second half turns, in a way we will not describe, and Taylor does not signal it coming. The budget shows in every frame and the film is warmer for it.
The habits that limit him are visible in the same film. Gags run past their laugh and he does not stop them. The awkward business of how the apes got there is dealt with in one speech and then politely forgotten. Critics then and since found him efficient and tactful rather than bold, and Tom Sawyer (1973), Damien - Omen II (1978) and The Final Countdown (1980) were assignments handled competently, the last of them a film whose premise is better than what he does with it. He was a studio man who took the job and delivered it, across science fiction, musicals, Westerns and thrillers, without leaving much of a thumbprint on any of them.
Watch him as the bridegroom to see what the studios thought a young man should look like, then watch the apes to see what he thought a film should do. The second is the better evening, and it is the one he would have chosen.
Biography
Don Taylor (born Donald Ritchie Taylor) was an American actor and film director. Born in Freeport, Pennsylvania, on 13 December 1920, he began his career as an actor in the 1940s, appearing in films including The Naked City (1948), Battleground (1949), Father of the Bride (1950), Father's Little Dividend (1951) and Stalag 17 (1953).
From the late 1950s he worked primarily as a director of feature films and television. His credits include episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Night Gallery, and the films Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Tom Sawyer (1973), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977), Damien: Omen II (1978) and The Final Countdown (1980). He died in Los Angeles on 29 December 1998.
