I must have been one of the few who actually saw Darker Than
Amber in a movie theater (The Wheaton Plaza, 1970). Rod
Taylor was not my idea of McGee. Taylor seems like a genuine
tough guy, but he's on the small side and was a bit long in
the tooth, even back then, for the role (I always thought
that a young Nick Nolte would have made a hell of a Travis
McGee.) Theodore Bikel played Meyer, and physically he fit
the part. Suzy Kendall measured up in the physical department
as well. The film is memorable only for the climatic fight
between McGee and the villain, played by William Smith, a
bodybuilder and veteran heavy of biker pictures and other Bs.
This was a protracted, bloody contest that was excitingly
staged, and very violent--in the absence of nudity or extreme
sexuality, it alone earned the film its R-rating. The ad
campaign was several frames of the fight scene, laid out
across the body of the one-sheet, which compelled me to see
the film. (At 13, I had not yet been introduced to
MacDonald's books; to be truthful, I had not been introduced
to many books at all.) The fight sequence is also notable in
that I'm pretty certain it earned the director, Robert
Clouse, his most famous assignment, and a piece of
immortality, three years later: Enter the Dragon.
Pelecanos
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