Working the Vein

By JAY COCKS

A few words should be said in praise of a tough little movie called Darker Than Amber. It represents a kind of film making that is currently unfashionable: the straightforward, uncluttered private-eye melodrama that was so much a part of the American cinema of the '40s. It is a tradition to which Godard payed homage in Breathless, and out of which came some first-rate film makers like John Huston.

Darker Than Amber is not the best of the genre, but it provides some neat jolts of violent entertainment. The plot is the usual thing: Private Detective Travis McGee* (Rod Taylor) rescues lady-in-distress (Suzy Kendall); their affair is pleasant enough, but she skips out on him and is murdered; McGee seeks revenge on the killers. There is no absurd jigsaw plot to unravel. Stories--and movies--like this rely mostly on atmosphere and characterization, two elements in reasonably plentiful supply in Darker Than Amber. Rod Taylor plays McGee as something a little bit more than the usual ham-fisted hero.

Like Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, McGee is a man of honor and some sentiment who can be gentle or brutal, angry or mellow as the occasion demands. Taylor, an enormously skillful actor, seems to have a special understanding of parts like this, and Suzy Kendall brings to her role exactly the right look of soiled innocence. The two villains of the piece, freaky faggots named Griff (Robert Phillips) and Terry (William Smith), provide some of the nastiest screen violence so far this year. There's a brawl toward the end of the picture between McGee and one of the freaks that has not been matched, for pure furniture-smashing gusto, since Frank Sinatra took out after that Korean guy in The Manchurian Candidate.

Darker Than Amber is hardly elegant, but like other stray examples of the type that have appeared over the past couple of years (Blake Edwards' Gunn and Paul Bogart's Marlowe), it proves that the tough-private-eye tradition is hard to kill.

* McGee is the creation of John D. MacDonald, author of over 50 novels as well as the twelve-volume Travis McGee series, who is one of the last--and best--practitioners of what used to be called the hard-boiled school of crime fiction.

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