Darker than Amber (1970)

Florida boat-dwelling beach buds Travis McGee (Rod Taylor) and Meyer (Theodore Bikel) are managing to save a mysterious woman (Suzy Kendall), tied to an anchor, who has been dropped down the bridge they were fishing under.

As readers of the novels this is based on know, Travis really doesn’t like that going to the police or the hospital stuff normal people do in reaction in this sort of situation, so he and Meyer take care of the woman - who will eventually disclose her name to be “Vangie” - and her wounds. She’s not going to tell them anything about why someone tried to murder her, and so it’s clear to Travis early on that she was involved in something illegal.

Of course, Travis’s sensitive macho ways and Vangie’s lost girl number fit each other perfectly, romantically seen, and the inevitable happens once they’ve gotten to know each other. Alas, Vangie decides to return to her old haunts to fetch some money (living off Travis’s seemingly endless supply of cash forever isn’t really her thing) and is killed by the charming personality responsible for the whole anchor business, Terry (William Smith with the fakest blond dye job imaginable, which is actually a plot point).

Again, Travis doesn’t do police, so he starts investigating his lover’s death and the nature of the trouble she was involved in on his own, eventually getting even with Terry and his partners with a needlessly complicated – and therefore perfectly awesome - plan.

This is one of only two movie adaptations of the much-loved Travis McGee series by John D. Macdonald. I’ve never been as fond of the books as many readers seem to be, mostly because I find the author’s inability to see that his hero, with his habit of murdering a book’s bad guy and ritually dumping his victim’s corpse in the ocean, is at least bordering on being a serial killer, and because McGee generally comes over as a self-righteous prick, 70s macho version, again without his author seeming to recognize this. Which rather puts a damper on the novels’ effective – if often overwrought – plotting and period mood for me.

On the movie side of this affair, I’ve also never had much time for Darker then Amber’s director Robert Clouse, whose movies I’d generally describe as bland at best, usually badly paced, dubiously edited and staged with disinterest. So it comes as a bit of a surprise that I have rather a lot of time for Darker than Amber. It’s not that Clouse reveals himself as a great director here, but he is certainly working competently enough inside of the idiom of early 70s crime cinema, never doing anything clever with clichés, but realizing them well enough, I’m perfectly okay with the lack of trying to reinvent the wheel.

Pacing still wasn’t Clouse’s strong point even here at his best, so a viewer has to expect some dragging of feet and some needless reiteration of things you already got the first two times. On the other hand, there are a couple of cracking, grim and brutal action scenes here. Particularly the final fistfight between Travis and Terry comes to mind there, which looks so brutal, Taylor and Smith have told in various interviews they were having an actual fight and weren’t laughed off by anyone. Actors, of course, have no tendency of using a good in for a bit of self-mythologizing whatsoever, so the story must be true.

Taylor is a curious choice for the sensitive thug role of McGee, mostly because he’s not exactly great at selling the first part of the description, but he also embodies a particular kind of machismo that’s part and parcel for the character type perfectly; never in a way that’ll question any of the assumptions of being a 70s macho man, obviously, but as a human time capsule of the type, he’s pretty perfect. Particularly when contrasted with Smith, who simply turns up Taylor’s ten and a half up to eleven, finding the place where “man of his time” turns into “outright violent psychopath” and really getting his teeth in.

Seen from today, a lot of this very un-questioned macho posturing will look uncomfortable to some (and understandably so), but as a pulp fantasy of this particular kind of violent machismo, I find Darker than Amber rather hard to beat.