Some Rod Taylor spy movies on TCM early Friday

Rod Taylor from the main titles of the Masquerade television series.

Friday, Aug. 18, is Rod Taylor day on TCM’s Summer Under the Stars. And some of Taylor’s spy movies will be part of the proceedings.

As an aside, TCM’s programming day starts at 6 a.m. New York time. The spy movies start early. Sorry for the late notice, but the Spy Commander just found out himself.

6 a.m.: 36 Hours, World War II espionage movie. Germans kidnap an American officer (James Garner). They make him think World War II is over to trick him out of information about the invasion of Europe. Taylor plays the German performing the deception. Based on a story by Roald Dahl.

8 a.m.: The Liquidator. Rod Taylor as John Gardner’s Boysie Oakes. Music by Lalo Schifrin and a title song performed by Shirley Bassey.

10 a.m.: The Glass Bottom Boat, a Doris Day comedy involving spies seeking secrets from a Tony Stark-like character played by Taylor. Cameo by Robert Vaughn as Napoleon Solo.

Actor Rod Taylor dies

Rod Taylor from the main titles of Masquerade.

Rod Taylor, who often had leading man parts in 1960s and ’70s films and dabbled in spy roles, has died at 84, according to an obituary in THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER.

The Australian-born Taylor actually had a varied career, including the lead role in 1960’s The Time Machine and Hitchcock’s The Birds as well as his voiceover work in 101 Dalmatians.

But spy-related entertainment was also part of his resume.

He played Boysie Oakes in 1965’s The Liquidator, based on a novel by John Gardner, who’d later write James Bond continuation novels.

In 1983, Taylor played mysterious spymaster Lavender in Masquerade, a Glen Larson-created series. In each episode, Lavender would recruit a team of “innocents” to take on the KGB and other menances. For helping out, each participant in a mission would be paid one year’s salary. The show didn’t catch on and lasted only 13 episodes on ABC.

In later years, Taylor took on character roles. His last role was Winston Churchill in 2009’s Inglourious Basterds.

1966: Doris Day makes a spy movie

By 1966, anyone who could launch a spy project did. One of the more unusal such projects was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Glass Bottom Boat, a comedy starring Doris Day.

Subtle, it wasn’t. Much of the humor was slapstick and looks like a cartoon come to life. That wasn’t surprising because the film was directed by Frank Tashlin, who years earlier had directed cartoon shorts for Warner Bros. The film’s trailer (with Hank Simms, the leading announcer for titles of Quinn Martin television shows, handling those honors here) is pretty representative of the movie itself:

Doris becomes involved with Rod Taylor, playing a Tony Stark-type playboy/inventor. Foreign powers are after Taylor’s work. The cast is full of people (Arthur Godfrey, Dick Martin, Eric Fleming, John McGiver, Edward Andrews) who were mostly seen on television by this time while still popping up in the occasional film role.

It also had a very odd, Tashlin-staged cameo. MGM’s big television property at the time was The Man From U.N.C.L.E. Paul Lynde, as a bumbling security officer, disguises himself as a woman and ends up. briefly encountering U.N.C.L.E.’s Napoleon Solo (Robert Vaughn).

Weird Man From U.N.C.L.E. cameos

In the 1960s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had one spy franchise with The Man From U.N.C.L.E. So the studio decided to use every opportunity possible for exposure, even if it meant putting it into situation comedies or comedic movies.

Take, for example, MGM’s sitcom Please Don’t Eat the Daisies. Here the young boys of the show’s featured family get an uxpected thrill:

Well, as you might imagine some misunderstandings, presumably leading to yuks occur. (We say apparently because we haven’t seen the complete episode). But by the end of the story, somebody else shows up to clear things up:

Now it’s a little unclear on what level we’re supposed to take this. In the end titles, Robert Vaughn and David McCallum are billed as their fictional characters, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin. Maybe in this fictional universe, U.N.C.L.E. has a sanctioned television show (that the boys watch) a la the 1965-74 version of The FBI?

Meanwhile, MGM also produced a spy comedy with Doris Day and Rod Taylor called The Glass Bottom Boat. The film’s director, Frank Tashlin, was known for sight gags similar to the ones he used when directing Warner Bros. cartoons. Thus, we see this scene:

1983: ABC attempts a TV spy revival

The year 1983 was a big year for spy entertainment. Two James Bond moves, Octopussy and Never Say Never Again came out, prompting an outburst of Bondmania.

ABC, looking to cash in, gave the goahead to a new series, Masquerade, in which spymaster Lavender (Rod Taylor) recruits people who’ve never done intelligence work to perform missions.

Series creator Glen A. Larson drew upon two ’60s spy shows. The episodes were often constructed like Mission: Impossible, where the audience would get intriguing glimpses of the plan but not the entire blueprint until the end of the story. William Read Woodfield, one of the ace writers of M:I ended up contributing scripts for the show. And The Man From U.N.C.L.E. had already used the “innocent” idea where ordinary people (in effect a surrogate for the audience) were recruited to assist the heroes.

Masquerade was short lived. But if you want to get a sense of the show, here’s the start of the pilot, where KGB bad guy Oliver Reed is knocking off U.S. agents, prompting Lavender to begin Operation: Masquerade. Note: the director of the pilot was Peter H. Hunt, NOT the same Peter Hunt who directed On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and a major figure in the early 007 films.