Darker Than Amber (1970)

Touches You

How sad is this?

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

Or how about 'More Chocolaty than Orange'? Perhaps even 'Paler Than Hazelnut'? The title of this film makes no sense at all. I have subsequently read that this film is about a detective who has been written about frequently and so I assume a series was intended. Knowing this, the film makes sense as this is what it feels like – a pilot for a TV series. However, that is all that makes sense. The story doesn't. It has plot holes aplenty and is way too complicated as nothing is properly explained and the audience is just left thinking 'what is happening now'? It has cool music, though.Jane Russell pops up on a boat – why? What a complete waste of time. She shouts "Hi" from a boat and that's it. Could have done without paying that fee, I suspect, especially as this film made a loss. The film has some violent moments so fans of violence will be pleased. At the end of the day a fight is a fight. One bloke hits another, etc. It's not a winning recipe for normal people to satisfyingly digest and score the film 10/10. Bunch of lunatics!

Taylor is likable as McGee, but neither imposing (he's 5' 11", not a 6' 4" ex-defensive-linebacker) nor gentle enough. Bikel never displays Meyer's formidable intelligence, nor his astonishing personal magnetism; he's just a sidekick, who also looks wrong (Meyer is described in the books as having the pelt of a black bear). The Flush is...well, a houseboat, nothing special. Miss Agnes probably is, but we never get a really good look at her. The Alabama Tigress...a great excuse for Jane Russell to come out of retirement, for a few seconds on the screen. Kendall is beautiful, but not right at all for Vangie, who was Hawaiian and a hard-as-nails totally self-absorbed hooker from a pretty grim background. The music score is also distracting and inappropriate—a mix of badly done late-cool jazz and TV-movie clichés.The plot is closer to the book than Hollywood usually allowed its writers to adhere. But a couple of significant changes are senseless. The bad guys trace clues to a friend of McGee's and kill him, to no point whatsoever. (They're smart enough to get that far, but too stupid to keep the guy alive so they can get further...) McGee goes back to the fishing hole and dives to pull up...a barbell. (Replacing the novel's cinder-block, why? Would a bodybuilder ever be so stupid? Or did he just have an extra lying around that he wanted to throw out?)Most annoying was the rewrite on McGee's relationship with Vangie, I guess so that he could look as much as possible like Bond (i.e. have sex with every woman who wanders through the script). Given who McGee is (and how well readers of the book know his principles and his habits of self-reflection) and what he thinks of Vangie, any devotee of the books will look at this strange Taylor-inhabited character, and wonder who it really is. Certainly not the Travis McGee that we wanted to see in a decent film.

I had the privliage of being in this picture. I was a 20 year old college kid going to Miami-Dade Jr. College. I was majoring in theater and one of my teachers was also a working actor. He got auditions for a bunch of his students and we went to the Ivan Tors studio on the appointed day and I was lucky enough to get cast as an extra. I'm on the dock at the end of the picture for the end of the fight scene. I was reading John D. MacDonald at the time and was a big fan of Travis McGee. Not many people know that Chuck Conners had bought the rights to the character after this picture came out.In 2000 I had cast William Smith in my picture STAGE GHOST and we discussed DARKER THAN AMBER. He said that it is absolutely true that he and Rod went at it in the fight scene and did some damage to each other! However, they were and are great friends and I hope some how this picture is transfered to DVD. There is a DVD copy available off the internet but it won't play very well. This a cult classic that deserves to be seen by a wider audience, re-mastered in DVD.

I saw Darker Than Amber 34 years ago, and it made an indelible impression on me. Perhaps it was because the realistic fast paced action and suspense, which is commonplace today, was a breakthrough at the time. I would compare it with some of the action scenes in Steve McQueen's Bullitt. I was reading John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee novels long before this movie came out, and being a Rod Taylor fan, this was the icing on the cake for me. Taylor brought McGee to life, a no nonsense, tough as nails guy, a Bond without the gadgets and gimmicks. I certainly wish the Production Company/Distributors would put it out on DVD, so everyone else could enjoy it. It could most assuredly become a cult classic.