Simply A Masterpiece

Purely Joyful Movie!

Load of rubbish!!

Pretty good movie overall. First half was nothing special but it got better as it went along.

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 really wish Rod Taylor and Theodore Bikel had teamed up for a series of McGee films. John D. MacDonald was a wonderful storyteller - his bad guys are believable and really scary, and his sense of locale is perfect - but the best part is the lifestyle of his hero, a large part of which are the friendships he has with Meyer and others (the boat rental guy!), and the idea of taking retirement in chunks as you go along (because you never know...). It takes a series to fill it all in; like 21 novels, in which McGee slowly gets a little older, a little wiser. I could see Taylor and Bikel doing that. (Just as Timothy Hutton and Maury Chaykin and a good repertory company did for a few of the Nero Wolfe series by Rex Stout).So if you liked the books and want a glimpse of one of them in live-action, try to find a copy; and hopefully an unedited one. You'll be glad you did.

This is indeed a good movie--a tidy, well-acted and -directed thriller with a good "take" on Travis McGee by the rock-solid and dependable Rod Taylor. But it is a tough one to get to see in its entirety, as some of the other reviewers have noted. Even the commercial prints have a running time of 91 minutes, and they are obviously and clumsily cut (here's a clue: the background music and sound jump drastically). No doubt this is because the violence is graphic for a film of this vintage, although that doesn't explain why it almost impossible to find a complete 93-minute copy here in the 21st century. I found one through a guy who knew a guy and so on--a Dutch copy with Dutch subtitles--and after 30 years of poking around (I was doing other things, too, during these decades) I finally got to see the whole movie. And it was worth it, as it almost always is to see the entire work, as the director (Clouse's next film was "Enter the Dragon") intended it. Some might think 2 minutes out of a film is no big deal (although they might gripe if you handed them a novel with 2 or 3 percent of its pages torn out) but this is too good a movie to snip. And although there have been bigger, longer, bloodier, more you-name-it fights, no two men on screen have ever looked like they are really, desperately trying to hurt each other as much as Rod Taylor and William Smith in the climactic fight in this movie. If you can find it, watch it. Good luck.