Themes and plot devices in Hitchcock films Clift at a dinner party around the filming of "I Confess" (1953) to swallow a carafe of brandy, which caused the actor to pass out almost immediately. In "Torn Curtain" and "Topaz", brandy is defined more closely as cognac. Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren) is offered a brandy by Annie Hayworth (Suzanne Pleshette), and after being attacked by the birds, drinks the brandy offered by Mitch (Rod Taylor). In "Rear Window", Lisa Fremont (Grace Kelly) is "just warming some brandy". In "Frenzy", Richard Blaney is sacked for supposedly stealing brandy, and can be seen in several sequences to be drinking brandy.
Rod Taylor Man" (1977) and a paid killer in "On the Run" (1983). In the black comedy "Welcome to Woop Woop" (1997), he played the foul-mouthed redneck Daddy-O. By the late 1990s, Taylor had moved into semi-retirement. In 2007, he appeared in the horror telemovie "Kaw", which revisits the idea of marauding birds turning on their human tormentors. In this film, however, the cause of the disturbance was discovered by Taylor who plays the town doctor. He appeared in Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds" in 2009, portraying Winston Churchill in a cameo. In 2017, a documentary on Taylor's life, "Pulling No Punches", was