Rod Taylor in Darker Than Amber

(This post is part of the Favorite Stars in B Movies Blogathon hosted by Films From Beyond)

Between 1964 and 1985, John MacDonald wrote 21 novels in the Travis McGee series. Not a private detective, but a “salvage consultant” – if he recovered what a client lost, McGee received half its worth, allowing him to live an idyllic life on a houseboat in Florida taking his retirement, as he put it “in installments.”

They were noir fiction elevated by McGee’s asides about modern life – gun control, race relations, preserving Florida’s environment and people who use their brakes too much when driving. McGee was cynical, with a strong moral compass and built like a linebacker. He hung out with Meyer, an erudite economist given to wry observations and philosophizing.

Darker Than Amber (1970) stars Rod Taylor and is the only big-screen adaptation of a McGee book. The Australian-born Taylor began his Hollywood career in 1951 and while he’s mostly remembered today for action roles, he was versatile enough to make his mark in science fiction (The Time Machine), horror (The Birds), romantic comedy (Do Not Disturb), westerns (The Bank Robbers), drama (Hotel) and the uncategorizable (Zabriskie Point).

In Darker Than Amber, McGee and Meyer (Theodore Bikel) are fishing near a bridge when psychopathic weightlifter Terry (William Smith) drops Vangie (Suzy Kendall), tied to a barbell, into the water. McGee rescues her and as she recovers on his boat learns of her participation, working with Terry, to lure lonely guys on cruise ships into an onboard relationship, conning them out of their money then dumping them overboard.

Terry eventually catches up with Vangie and kills her, leading McGee and Meyer to embark on a plan to retrieve cash that Vangie has hidden from Terry and to trap him.

Much of what you’ll find online about Darker Than Amber is centered on the film’s climax, a violent fight between McGee and Terry in the close quarters of a cruise ship cabin, reminiscent of the Sean Connery-Robert Shaw’s train compartment bout in From Russia with Love. Apparently, the fight turned real. “We didn't use any stunt doubles at all. [Taylor] broke three of my ribs and I busted his nose ... I couldn't even breath and he was still hitting me,” said Smith.  

These guys mean it

Smith, here with bleached blonde hair, had a prolific career in television and the movies, establishing cult star status in a number of 1960s biker movies. In Darker Than Amber he’s all bulging biceps and penetrating stare, violence always bubbling just under the surface.

Taylor is solid as ever, shifting between vulnerable and invincible, and the movie chugs along at a good pace. The resolution, built on a sort of Mission: Impossible-type stunt feels, as it did in the novel, a bit contrived.

Upon meeting Taylor, John MacDonald said, “I like the guy. He has a face that looks lived in. But what matters to me is that he understands what McGee is all about – the anti-hero, tender and tough with many chinks in the armor. I trust Rod's wit, irony and understanding to make the whole greater than the parts.”  

MacDonald, however, felt the original script made McGee buffoonish and provided uncredited writing assistance. He didn’t, however, give the film a glowing endorsement. "I was so convinced it would be utterly rotten, that I was pleased to find it only semi-rotten,” he later wrote.

There are several versions of Darker Than Amber floating around. At one point the film was withdrawn and re-edited to remove its R rating. An unedited version, with the fight scene intact, seems to be currently on Tubi, although the print looks and sounds like it got the worst of the Rod Taylor-William Smith battle. Regardless, it’s worth watching.

The Complete Rod Taylor Site was a valuable resource in writing this post. 

Mayberry RFD: New Couple in Town

(This is part of the 11th Annual Favourite TV Show Episode Blogathon hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts)

It’s a big deal when a new couple moves to Mayberry. And word gets around fast.

Howard Sprague (Jack Dodson) learns about it through a friend who works at the gas company. Goober (George Lindsey) gets the word from the milkman (they’ve ordered a daily quart of milk and half-pint of cottage cheese) and the local realtor (it’s a three-month rental).

Turns out Frank and Audrey Wylie (Richard Erdman and Emmaline Henry) have moved to Mayberry from New York City for the artistic inspiration a change of scenery may bring. Frank Wylie is a writer.

Making Mayberry to Frank Wylie what Walden Pond was to Thoreau.

The local literary club is atwitter about having a writer in their midst and Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier) suggests inviting Wylie to join them as a guest speaker, adding “I think we’ll call on him tomorrow, around five o’clock – I understand that’s when writers have cocktails.” Or in Wylie’s case, milk and cottage cheese.

Meet the Wylies

With a real author coming for a talk, the membership committee is bombarded with requests. “We still must remain selective; if we just take in anybody, it’ll threaten the foundation of the club,” sniffs one member. Of course, “anybody” means Goober, whose request is rejected.

“It’s nothing personal, but I don’t think Goober’s ever read anything but a comic book in his whole life,” says Howard. “And when somebody just reads comic books, well, then he just doesn’t belong with us!”

(Hey Howard, maybe if we call them graphic novels, you’d feel different?)

Aunt Bee invites Goober anyway. Her rationale: “Any kind of reading is elevating.”

An endorsement from America’s favorite aunt aside, movies and television usually ghettoized comic book reading to the realm of little kids, reprobates and village idiots. On behalf of all of us who read comic books behind closed bedroom doors throughout our high school years, right on, Aunt Bee.

Simpleton Satch of the Bowery Boys

Unbeknownst to the townsfolk, Frank Wylie is a comic book writer/artist. Here’s what he’s currently working on:

Based on what’s on his drawing board, he sure isn’t working for Marvel or DC. Maybe the cut-rate competition, like Dell. Or worse, MF Enterprises.

But Wylie isn’t pleased with this latest effort and goes out for a drive, winding up at Goober’s gas station.

GOOBER: How’re your stories coming?

WYLIE: Nothing.

GOOBER: I ain’t no writer but I think of a lot of stories while I’m sittin’ around here waitin’ for customers, mostly like the stuff I read in comic books; ever notice how they make the monster out to be a bad guy? Something I thought of, the monster would be a hero.

WYLIE (suddenly bathed in a golden light from heaven): The monster was a hero? The creature who saved a city.

The snobbier literary club members turn up their noses when Goober shows up for Wylie’s address, who says that sometimes new surroundings provide inspiration, praising the contributions of a new collaborator he’s discovered in Mayberry — Goober, who’s receiving a 50/50 cut in the action.

Goober?

Goober and Wylie were clearly ahead of the curve. When this episode of Mayberry RFD ran in January 1969, the only monster-as-hero comic book on the newsstands was The Incredible Hulk. Within the next few years, once the Comics Code lessened its stranglehold on four-color content, the monster/hero floodgates opened for Swamp Thing, The Tomb of Dracula, Man-Thing, Blade, Morbius and Frankenstein, among many others. Television series and movie franchises awaited.

Looking a little deeper, there are other underlying themes, like the dangers of making snap judgements about people and the value of diverse perspectives, but that’s for another day. And with Goober now a member in good standing of the Mayberry literary club, will they turn next to Huckleberry Finn or Moby Dick – the Classics Illustrated versions, of course.

Across the Great Divide

Atomic Rooster

Death Walks Behind You was the best-known song by the British prog rock band Atomic Rooster. It had an epic yet ominous vibe when it was released in September 1970. It was also a case of bad timing. Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin each died that month. Jim Morrison had less than a year left.

Hendrix’ death kicked off what has been a long, slow slide of rock bands whose members, today, are all dead. It was a list once easy to keep in your head, although suddenly it's getting more difficult. After Hendrix, Noel Redding died in 2003, and Mitch Mitchell five years later. Farewell Jimi Hendrix Experience.

The next band to lose all its members were the Ramones, all of them gone by 2014, average age 55, one lymphoma, two cancers and a heroin overdose.

Last year, the final member of Iron Butterfly, Doug Ingle, died. His Spinal Tap moment came when he wrote the band’s hypnotic signature song, then sang it for the band while drunk, slurring his words so badly that what was supposed to be "in the Garden of Eden" came off as in-a-gadda-da-vida.

The last living members of the MC5, Wayne Kramer and Dennis Thompson, kicked out their final jam in 2024. The Band’s final holdout, Garth Hudson, left us earlier this year, and this past weekend, two more groups were added to the list: the New York Dolls (David Johansen) and Badfinger (Joey Molland).

New York Dolls

There's no detectable pattern here, although most of these bands played rock that was both hard and loose, and maybe there’s a lifestyle that goes along with the brand, one that inevitably exacerbates the things that can kill you. Although not in every case. Depression led two members of Badfinger to take their own lives, same as the Band’s Richard Manuel.

With the possible exception of Hendrix, I wasn't a big fan of any of these bands, so it's not like I'm getting all misty-eyed about the passing of time. Nor is it a celebrity death watch. This roll call is yet another way of reminding oneself of boomer mortality. 

And Atomic Rooster? The three-man lineup that recorded Death Walks Behind You are all gone as well. 

Empire of the Ants

(This post is part of the Seventh So Bad It’s Good Blogathon hosted by Taking Up Room)

As a kid, I wanted an ant farm, those see-through plastic dioramas where you sent away for the actual ants, but my mother put her foot down, no doubt envisioning the industrious little critters breaking free, multiplying by the hour, running amok in the kitchen, capsizing the sugar bowl and carrying off cookies.

In Empire of the Ants (1977), Joan Collins is Marilyn, a haughty, dishonest land developer taking prospective buyers on a boat trip to Dreamland Shores, a work-in-progress beachfront community, plying them with free booze to soften the hard sell of purchasing a plot of nowheresville Florida scrubland.

When we meet her, she’s belittling the boat’s grouchy skipper Dan (Robert Lansing) and working the dupes who’ve signed on for the trip: seniors Harry and Velma (there for the free lunch), the Lawsons (not well defined, therefore making them the first victims), the Grahams  (marital problems galore), Joe (recovering from a divorce), Coreen (recovering from an affair with a married man) and Margaret (fired from her job).

The boat barely docked, Larry Graham has cornered Coreen and begun unbuttoning her blouse (she knees him in the nuts), Joe and Coreen confess their sordid life stories to each other, Mr. Lawson discovers that pipes sticking out of the ground aren’t connected to anything, all while Harry and Velma are likely shoving sandwiches in her pocketbook for later.

Amidst everyone’s backstories, a barrel of radioactive waste dumped offshore have come up on the beach, leaking a silvery gunk that mutates ants coming into contact with it into giants.

Intent on ruining this picnic, the ants destroy the boat and start picking off members of the party as they run through the woods heading for a nearby river where a rowboat is moored, the trek made more treacherous by the ants following them along the banks. “They’re herding us like cattle,” Coreen realizes. Hey, at least the ants aren’t trying to milk them as they do with aphids.

The plucky survivors – Marilyn, Dan, Joe, Coreen and Margaret – reach a small town and apparent safety, only to learn its citizens are being sprayed with the queen’s pheromones, mind-controlling them into zombies dedicated to providing her colony with sugar from a local refinery.

Marilyn gets the pheromone treatment and possibly, in her final lucid moments, wonders why she never thought of using her own pheromones to convince people to buy into Dreamland Shores.

Dan defeats the queen using some road flares, and the refinery explodes, destroying the colony and snapping the sleepwalking townspeople awake.

The special effects (courtesy of director Bert I. Gordon, who lived up to his initials with such drive-in fare as giant grasshoppers in Beginning of the End (1957), oversized rats and wasps in The Food of the Gods (1975) and an army officer exposed to radiation who grows ten feet a day in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957)) are cheap and unconvincing, the worst offense being the live ants placed on a still photograph and filmed as they crawl around. If one ant seems to be inching off into the sky don’t worry, nobody will notice.

But where the special effects fail, the acting, along with the change-of-pace when the movie unexpectedly shifts into a “rural town with a secret” film (only with giant ants), moves things along briskly. The movie never bores.

“It seemed a certainty that this film would guarantee none of us would ever get a job again – such was the quality of the story, script and direction,” Joan Collins wrote in her autobiography. “But in November 1976 (when filming began in Florida) we considered ourselves lucky to be working at all.”

Like a prehistoric ant trapped forever in amber, Empire of the Ants captures a moment in time, one of leisure suits, puka shell necklaces, safari jackets, a police car chase that ends with one car sailing in slow motion into a pond, a nature-gone-wrong theme and the campiness that comes with pre-Dynasty Joan Collins movies.

In the hierarchy of cinematic ants, THEM! (1954), the first big bug movie, is arguably still the best. Empire of the Ants, meanwhile, is the most entertaining.

Tubi's secret history of film

There was a time when storefront video stores popped up, some seemingly overnight, across America. Beverly Hills Cop, Back to the Future and Top Gun brought in the traffic, but it was the weird stuff among their VHS inventory that often made these stores unique. We frequented a video store that included the 1975 Nazi-exploitation flick Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS, and the barely remembered, and barely animated, Spunky and Tadpole cartoons. Their sun-faded boxes indicated they’d been sitting near the front window for a while and would remain there for some time to come.

Tubi is the ultimate mom-and-pop video store with endless shelves (more than 250,000 titles) of weather-worn B-movies, public domain television shows and drive-in fodder. Sometimes the prints are terrible – you almost expect the virtual projector to begin sputtering and the film to burst on fire – but there’s immediate, incredible variety and even if they don’t currently offer Ilsa or Spunky, a chance to finally view movies that for decades seemed to only be rumors (Candy, Chatterbox, Wonderwall).

Here are a few highlights from some recent Tubi viewing.

A joke that made the rounds in third grade concerned the first encounter between Tarzan and Jane. I’ll cut right to the punchline: “If I stick my plug in your socket, will your headlights turn on?” The level of humor in Carry On Camping (1969) isn’t quite that low, but it’s close.

Essentially a 90-minute Benny Hill skit of double entendres, sight gags, horny husbands and giggling virgins, it was the U.K.’s most popular box office movie in 1969, the seventeenth entry in the Carry On series, which ran from 1958 to 1992. The actors seem mostly unknown outside of the U.K., including the effete, reptilian Charles Hawtrey, the subject of a John Lennon ad lib on the Let It Be album (“I Dig a Pygmy by Charles Hawtrey and the Deaf-Aids”).

Charles Hawtrey 

Carry On Camping includes a sub-plot about a nudist camp, triggering an algorithm recommending Hideout in the Sun (1960). Brothers Duke and Steve Martin rob a bank, take Dorothy as a hostage, then hide in the “country club” where she works. Turns out it’s a nudist camp. While Duke sweats and smokes endless cigarettes, Steve and Dorothy swim, play volleyball and archery naked as the other campers (mostly women) innocently frolic and strike poses. Steve remarks that he’s never felt healthier.

Filmed in Miami, Duke eventually dies from a cobra bite at a roadside snake farm and Steve gives himself up, promising Dorothy to return for a shared lifetime of nude volleyball.

Somehow James Guercio, who’d produced Blood, Sweat and Tears, and Chicago, landed a gig directing Electra Glide in Blue (1973) starring Robert Blake as a motorcycle cop, a film with the same flaws of posturing and self-importance that made Chicago so hard to stomach. Blake aside, the acting is overblown, given to long, embarrassing scenes that recall high school drama class exercises. The finale, in which Blake is shot off his motorcycle by two hippies in some sort of reverse reference to the end of Easy Rider, stretches out forever as the camera ever-so-slowly pans down the highway.

It’s the sort of excess you’d expect from someone who allowed Chicago to make three of its first four records double albums.

Jerzy Kosinski’s Cockpit

Once upon a time American fiction writers were celebrities.

Throughout the 1970s, Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal and Truman Capote turned up regularly on late-night television, and you could count on each to be outspoken and opinionated, and to meet America’s vision of a public intellectual.

Then there was Jerzy Kosinski. Charming and witty, with his Polish accent and full head of hair, he wasn’t gruff like Mailer, sniffingly condescending like Vidal or weird as Capote. Kosinski made 14 appearances between 1971 and 1980 on The Tonight Show, making him recognizable enough that when Bantam Books reprinted several of his novels in the early 1980s, his portrait was prominent on each front cover.

Born in Poland in 1933, Kosinski and his family survived the Holocaust thanks to local villagers who aided Polish Jews. After the war, his father aligned with Poland’s newfound Communist regime and Kosinski, forging official documentation, migrated to the U.S.

Nearly all his books were best sellers; he’s best known for Being There (1971) and The Painted Bird (1965), novels that won him accolades, literary awards and were later adapted as films.

His book Cockpit, published 50 years ago in 1975, although superficially about a former operative in a security agency called "the Service," isn’t a spy novel. Novel may not be the right word to describe it either. Like his Steps (1968), the book is constructed of random vignettes written in the first person. Cockpit’s protagonist (a cold and clinical word, but this shoe fits) is a Class A sociopath, ticking every box: a lack of conscience; patterns of antisocial behaviors and attitudes; controlling with threats or aggression; manipulating others using intelligence, charm or charisma.

Most of the pieces in Cockpit revolve around violence or sex, sometimes both; the sexual content is often reminiscent of those “erotic” ghost-written letters used to run in Penthouse Forum. Sometimes it’s English-as-a-second-language awkward (“I induced her orgasm”).

It’s a claustrophobic read not helped by the lack of chapters, points where you can catch your breath. The copy just flows on and after a while, the cumulative examples of animal cruelty, mimicking bureaucrats to frighten people, stealing mail, scaring children, retracting one’s penis to make women believe it was amputated, and just the overall creepiness is wearying. At one point the narrator, speaking of the hours spent secretly photographing, developing and enlarging photos of his sexual activities, says, “I am overcome by its pointlessness.”

Understood.

Since most of the narrator’s antics – secret surveillance, trolling, photographing (not even filming) sex – seem almost mainstream these days, Cockpit is creepy, but almost quaint.

Plagued by allegation of plagiarism and deteriorating health, Kosinski died by suicide in 1991, ingesting lethal amounts of drugs and alcohol, then sealing the deal with a plastic bag around his head. 

Unless there’s some sort of Kosinski revival, like a biopic -- and he's probably worthy of such treatment -- I'm not sure if anybody is still reading him. As with many other celebrity authors, the guys who dominated The New York Times best-seller lists for decades, he seems to have dropped out of public consciousness.

Turn on, tune in, turn your eyes around 

With the sun having set over the Summer of Love several months before, a few rays of psychedelic sunshine were still beaming down on the Top 40 charts in January 1968.

Driven by its Hammond organ and fuzz guitar -- and the cowbell, the Strawberry Alarm Clock’s Incense and Peppermints was slipping down the charts after holding the number one spot for one week in November. It was easy to question the band’s Haight-Ashbury Street creds, always neatly attired for television in kaftans, paisley pants and beads as if they had a key to the costume closet of a theatrical company, plus their contributions to the soundtrack of Dick Clark’s hippie exploit flick Psych-Out. Nonetheless, still groovy after all these years.

Strawberry Alarm Clock

According to Eric Burdon, what broke up the Animals was that he got turned on to acid and pot, while the rest of the band preferred Guinness. The reinvented Burdon found a new band of like-minded musicians and together they wrote Monterey, which may help explain the obvious lyrics and production.

Referring to their fellow musicians who played the Monterey Pop Festival in June 1967 as "young gods" and "religion was being born" was pure hippie drivel, calling Brian Jones “his majesty Prince Jones” is just embarrassing. Hey Eric, you may have forgotten that you and Jones are peers.

The clumsiness continues by namechecking musicians followed by their corresponding instrument: Ravi Shankar by a sitar, The Who with power chords, Hugh Masekela by a trumpet. I will admit to really digging this record when I first heard it as age 13. Monterey went to #15 on the Billboard Hot 100.

The experimentation of Sgt. Pepper (and Revolver) likely gave producer James Guercio permission to drop a snippet of Avant-garde music into the middle of the pop ballad Susan by the innocuous Buckinghams (without the band's knowledge). The sample (Central Park in the Dark written for chamber orchestra by Charles Ives in 1906) made Susan the scariest thing on Top 40 radio, monster movie music crashing out of nowhere, a thunderstorm in the middle of a sunny afternoon. Most radio stations played the edited version without the noise. It peaked on the charts at #11.

Unassuming and pretty aren’t words very often used to describe Rolling Stones songs, yet She’s A Rainbow is both (which may explain why it only got as far as #25). The lyrics are pure acid trip (“She shoots colors all around, like a sunset going down”), although the strings (arranged by future Led Zeppelin John Paul Jones) can border on what used to be known as elevator music.

By the end of the month, Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In) by the First Edition was beginning to move up the charts, as good a satire of psych music as there ever was (although I always doubted whether the band was in on the joke), signaling an end to Top 40’s brief flirtation with psychedelia.