Robert Taylor

The Bribe

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Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner

In Casablanca “everybody comes to Rick’s”, in The Bribe it’s Pedro’s, a sweaty canteen somewhere in venal Central America, around which this messy mix of thriller, romance, exotic adventure and detective story plays out. Robert Taylor and Ava Gardner are the stars, but Charles Laughton is the standout, taking it upon himself – probably not for selfless reasons – to save this odd mishmash from itself with a performance that lifts everything up several rungs. The story centres on a racket dealing in hooky war surplus, which FBI agent Rigby – no first name – has been sent in to sort out. Instantly suspicious characters include alcoholic ex-pilot Tug Hintten (John Hodiak) and … Read more

High Wall

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Steven Kenet and Dr Lorison in the asylum

One for lovers of noirish movies with twisty plots, High Wall doesn’t in the end quite add up emotionally, but its serpentine bends make it an enjoyable crime thriller asking us to reconsider an open-and-shut case once any number of impediments have been thrown in the way. The opening scene – a man is driving his car with his wife in the passenger seat. She’s dead, it seems, and in a few seconds he’ll be dead too, if his plan to crash his car off a bridge succeeds. That seems to be the story anyway. His plan doesn’t quite succeed. He survives the crash and has soon been arrested. He admits to killing … Read more

Westward the Women

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Fifi and Buck in a clinch

No “bundling” – that’s the law as laid down by Buck Wyatt (Robert Taylor). Female-centric western Westward the Women is not only a clear influence on Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff but a great demonstration of the talents of director William Wellman, who’d been doing westerns for 30 years by the time he got round to shooting this 1951 movie, so knew exactly what it was all about. The story is about a convoy of women making the arduous journey out West, where there’s a chronic shortage of men. Sign up and choose your husband is the big idea – it’s the women who do the choosing, picking out the man they fancy from … Read more

Devil’s Doorway

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Orrie and Lance in a clinch

The revisionist western par excellence, Devil’s Doorway is the story of the despicable white man stealing the land off the noble American Indian and then getting nasty when the Indian objects. It stars Robert Taylor as Broken Lance, a Shoshone Indian known as Lance Powell while serving in the US Army, where he won a Congressional Medal of Honor for bravery in the Civil War. Now the war is over Lane is back in the Medicine Bow area where he grew up, to raise cattle on land that’s been in his family for generations. In an early speech in the local saloon Lance expresses the hope that, now the hostilities are over, everyone … Read more

Party Girl

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Robert Taylor as crooked lawyer Tommy Farrell

Party Girl reminds us that director Nicholas Ray wasn’t just a master of noir. Alongside the stark monochrome of great dramas like In a Lonely Place and They Live by Night, there’s this insanely lush, ridiculously colourful offering, often bracketed with Ray’s other colour movies of the era – Johnny Guitar or Rebel without a Cause, for instance – but quite apart from them in tone. It’s still very noirish, a gangster movie in colour, really, with Cyd Charisse the titular star but the movie very much focused on the character Robert Taylor plays, Tommy Farrell. They’re both not-quite people: she’s a fan dancer (which really means stripper at the very least) at … Read more