Great story and great cast.. realistic dialogue and situations. But the movie was very poorly made. It was not directed well... as if the director lacked experience.,A high school drama student could have done just as well. Very poor editing. Very cheesy feel... not even on par with most tv dramas. It's really a shame because it had such potential. You can practically see the actors' frustration that they were not making a quality film. The fight between Rod Taylor and William Smith quickly turned into a real slugfest after Taylor purposefully punched Smith in the jaw after he was body slammed very hard against the wall. Smith retaliated by breaking Taylor's nose with a punch that sent him bouncing off another wall. Now we are all lucky that the director kept the cameras rolling. Any other director, I am sure, would have yelled, "Cut!" And put a stop to it. We see Taylor delivering blows to the chest that actually broke three of Smith's ribs.,Smith threw Taylor across the room, shattering a mirror and Taylor breaks a lamp on him. Smith actually broke a wine bottle on Taylor's head. There was real blood everywhere. These were two very tough men. Smith was a boxer and world arm wrestling champ in real life and Taylor was, well, Australian... This scene alone qualifies this otherwise lame film as a classic. Most of the fight was edited out, but the unedited version is on YouTube.

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.

Not having known of this movie's existence until reading about John D. MacDonald when IMDb'ing "Cape Fear", I was delighted to find out that there was a movie made from his Travis McGee series. It was hard to find (had to procure from one of those "hard-to-find video" businesses), but, like the others here who have seen it, was glad to have seen a cinematic portrayal of Trav. I too think Rod Taylor did a good job in portraying Trav, as well as Theodore Bikel in portraying Meyer. I was mildly disappointed in some of the changes made from the book to the movie. It seems as if some screenwriters think that they MUST make some changes, JUST for the sake of making changes. Some I can understand: for example,the book's "Ans Terry" to the movie's "Terry Bartlett" is easier to hear. But WHY the "Alabama Tigress"? Why couldn't they left the book's "Alabama Tiger"? Also, Vangie shouldn't have been portrayed as a blonde, because her ethnic heritage is where the title "Darker than Amber" came from; it was Trav's comment on the color of her eyes. There was no tie in the movie to the title at all. However, all that being said, as a big fan of the Travis McGee series, who re-reads them every few years, I would recommend this to all other McGee fans.

I saw this movie 30 years and the memory of the Climatic fight is still in my memory banks. Probably because I went back to see it with my friends. Nowadays fights scene like this are commonplace, but back then this fights only close comparison was Bond's fight in From russia with love. I rented it about five years ago and was disappointed to find that it was an edited tv version with the best scenes cut. A restored version of this movie is a time capsule of Florida, fighting and Females in the late 60's. And a darn good yarn.