Track 29 (1988)

Track 29 is a 1988 Nicolas Roeg movie. I approached this one with some trepidation since it was written by Dennis Potter, whom I’d always thought of as my least favourite writer of all time. And it stars Gary Oldman. I either like Oldman a lot or I dislike him a lot and mostly I dislike him.

Most British and American directors are not overly comfortable venturing outside the realms of realism. There have been exceptions, Ken Russell being an obvious one. Nic Roeg was not a bit uncomfortable about exploring non-realist modes of film-making. And of course David Lynch was another.

Track 29 belongs to my favourite category of movies - those in which the line between reality on the one hand and the unconscious, the world of dreams and fantasies and the world of delusions becomes hopelessly blurred. And the category of movies open to multiple contradictory interpretations any of which might be true and in fact they might all be true even though they’re contradictory. 

Lots of Roeg’s movies qualify on both counts but Track 29 is where he really pushes the edge of the envelope.

The conventional view of Roeg’s career is that he peaked early, with a string of great movies in the 70s - Performance, Walkabout, Don’t Look Now, The Man Who Fell to Earth - and that the movies he made after the box office failure of Bad Timing in 1980 were lesser works. That isn’t really accurate. Roeg made mind-twisting weird movies throughout his career. By the 80s the British film industry was on life support. Roeg had to get financing as and where he could and his later movies did not get the distribution promotional support that Don’t Look Now had enjoyed. He was still making great movies but they just weren’t being seen to the same extent.

I mentioned Lynch earlier because early on Track 29 reminds me just a tiny bit of Blue Velvet. In Blue Velvet we feel right from the start that although the town seem normal there’s something not quite right. It’s so normal it’s abnormal. We’re in a world that is like reality but subtly exaggerated and subtly distorted.

The opening of Track 29 strikes me the same way. First we see Dr Henry’s model railway layout. Then we see the town, a small American town (in North Carolina), and it has the same artificial feel as the model railway layout. It’s a very subtle thing, but it’s there.

Linda (Theresa Russell) is married to Dr Henry Henry (Christopher Lloyd). Relations between them are uneasy. Linda likes to play with her dolls. Henry likes to play with his model trains. One of the things this movie deals with is growing up and the way our childhood is always with us. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it can cause a person to be the subject of the derision of others. Henry is a doctor but it’s obvious that being a doctor does not make him happy. Playing with his model trains makes him happy. If people would just leave him alone with his train layout he would be content and fulfilled.

Linda seems to be a little unstable. Linda’s longing for a baby is crucially important but it’s more complicated than it seems.

Then Martin (Gary Oldman) show up. He’s just suddenly there. He tells Linda something important about herself and this is a key early indicator that something weird is going on.

We can see immediately that what he tells her cannot be possible but why does she believe it? Linda’s memories of her past are important but we cannot be sure how real or how accurate those memories are. Of course in this movie we can’t be sure how real anything is.

Martin is very interested in Linda in a way that is disturbing if what he told her is true. But there are all kinds of reasons for us to doubt everything he says.

While the audio commentary by Jim Hemphil is generally very good I strongly disagree with his claim that Martin is androgynous. Martin is ambiguous but the ambiguity lies in the fact that he is an adult in some ways but still a child in many ways. And that’s true of all three of the central characters. It’s a central theme of the movie.

Things get weird between Linda and Martin but meanwhile we’re given a clue that makes us even more reluctant to take anything in this film at face value.

Theresa Russell is in my view the single most interesting female star of her era. She was terrific playing weird oddball characters in weird oddball movies (such as Ken Russell’s Whore). She was married to Nic Roeg and gave a series of superb performances for him (perhaps most notably in his best movie Bad Timing). She’s dazzling here. Christopher Lloyd is very good in a nicely off-kilter way. Gary Oldman always tends to push things too far and often weakens excellent movies with his excessive goofiness. His performance here is fairly effective but for my liking it’s just a bit too over-the-top.

The cinematography is very bright and cheerful which to me reinforces the air of artificiality - the feeling that the actual town and the town in Henry’s railway layout are the same.

One thing to watch for is the very significant change to Theresa Russell’s wardrobe and hairstyle in her final scene. These are characters whose identities are not stable and perhaps her identity has now changed radically.

Far from being lesser Roeg Track 29 is one of his most brilliant movies. Very highly recommended.

Other movies exploring the boundaries between reality and non-reality that share some DNA with this movie are Jess Fanco’s Necronomicon - Geträumte Sünden (AKA Succubus, 1968), Jean Rollin’s Lost in New York (1989), Luis Buñuel's Belle de Jour (1967), Alain Robbe-Grillet’s La Belle Captive (1983) and L’immortelle (1963) and Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut (1999).

Coma (1978)

Coma was written and directed by Michael Crichton, based on a novel by his good friend Robin Cook.

Although it was a major hit critics were not overly impressed. In 1978 the idea of doctors and hospitals being involved in evil conspiracies may have seemed far-fetched. Today such an idea seems all too plausible.

Dr Susan Wheeler (Geneviève Bujold) and her boyfriend Dr Mark Bellows (Michael Douglas) are fast-rising surgeons at a major Boston Hospital. Their relationship is turbulent and this will become important later.

Susan’s best friend Nancy Greenly (Lois Chiles) is having a minor operation but something goes wrong. She doesn’t come out of the anaesthetic. She is in a coma, with no prospect of ever regaining consciousness. Soon afterwards Nancy suffers a fatal cardiac arrest.

Susan naturally takes a close look at Nancy’s case notes. It seems to have been just one of those tragic things. There is always a risk with anaesthesia. There is always the small chance that the patient will be left permanently comatose.

There is however one very minor item in the case notes that puzzles Susan.

Susan is extraordinarily stubborn. She investigates further, and discovers an odd unexpected pattern. A surprising number of young healthy patients have ended up in comas. More than one would expect.

She keeps digging. A throwaway comment by a pathologist gets her thinking. As does the curiously defensive reaction of the chief anaesthesiologist. Gradually she works things out but it’s absurd. Such things could never happen.

But she keeps finding more evidence.

Her digging into the case lands her in trouble but the kindly hospital chief Dr George Harris (Richard Widmark) assures her that he’ll do his best to protect her job.

I like the fact that while Susan is definitely the heroine she’s not a kickass action heroine. She’s just pig-headed and resourceful and she has a strong personal motivation. Heroines who rely on their wits are always more interesting. And having a woman in peril (and pretty soon she’s well and truly in peril) is always a winning formula in a thriller.

This is a science fiction horror movie but it’s also a typical Crichton techno-thriller with a present day setting and technology which could plausibly exist in the very near future.

And while Crichton is as always clever and inventive with the tech stuff he also handles the suspense thriller elements very skilfully indeed.

Geneviève Bujold makes a fine heroine. Susan is a prickly character who is not easy to get along with but that makes her dogged persistence more convincing and we come to admire courage. Michael Douglas gives fine support as Mark, also a not obviously overly likeable character but with a nice touch of ambiguity. Widmark is good - all bullying bluster and oiliness.

Look out for Tom Selleck in a very small role.

Despite the importance of surgery to the plot there are no grisly operating table scenes but there are some very very creepy visual moments that make this a genuine horror film. The Jefferson Institute is a wonderful piece of soulless brutalist architecture.

Coma is a well-executed exciting thriller with cool reasonably intelligent ideas and genuine chills. Highly recommended.

The all-region Blu-Ray is barebones but looks great.

I’m a major Michael Crichton fan, both as a novelist and filmmaker. I’ve reviewed his earlier Westworld (1973) and his later underrated Runaway (1984) as well as his wonderful The First Great Train Robbery (1978).

The Dolly Sisters (1945)

The Dolly Sisters is a 1945 20th Century-Fox musical starring Betty Grable.

The movie is based, very loosely, on the career of the real-life Dolly Sisters, a very successful musical comedy act.

It begins in 1904. Uncle Latsie S.Z. Sakall (S.Z. Sakall) has just arrived in New York with his two nieces, identical twins Jenny and Rosie. (As adults Jenny is played by Betty Grable and Rosie is played by June Haver). After many vicissitudes they establish themselves on the vaudeville circuit.

They encounter a struggling singer-songwriter, Harry Fox (John Payne). Harry and Jenny fall in love but while the Dolly Sisters are going from success to success Harry’s career is going nowhere. Harry won’t marry her until he has become a success himself.

The sisters are soon the toast not just of Broadway but of Paris.

Harry’s career seems set to take off but then comes the war and he enlists.

The romance between Jenny and Harry just keeps on encountering obstacles.

A major obstacle is that Jenny has to choose between her career and marriage. Of course today’s audience would be outraged that this is even presented as a serious choice - what woman would choose family, a home, love and happiness when she could have a career?

It’s actually a bit more complicated than that. If she gives up her career then Jenny will be ruining Rosie’s career as well. As Uncle Latsie keeps saying, you can’t have a sister act without sisters. And the sisters are very loyal to each other.

That choice keeps coming up again and again for Jenny.

I’m not a fan of biopics. This one loses a bit of steam halfway through with too much focus on the never-ending romantic complications. Their courtship takes years and years and years. There’s not enough focus on the singing and dancing which is what musicals are all about.

There’s just a slight touch of self-pity to Harry which grated on me a little.

With their hair done the same way and wearing identical clothes Betty Grable and June Haver really are convincing as twin sisters. I liked their performances.

There is one truly superb musical number - the Makeup Kit number. Very clever, very witty and very cute.

The movie’s biggest asset is Orry-Kelly’s stupendously amazing costumes.

Fox spent big money on this production, shot in Technicolor. It paid off. It was a major hit.

I’ve only recently started to delve into the world of 1940 Hollywood musicals and this one is not destined to be counted among my favourites. This is only my second Betty Grable movie and I have to say that I enjoyed Pin Up Girl (1944) more but The Dolly Sisters is reasonably enjoyable and it’s worth a look.

As far as I know this film has not had a Blu-Ray release. The old DVD release is now a bit hard to find.

Betty Blue (1986)

Betty Blue (the original French title is 37°2 le matin), released in 1986, is one of the handful of feature films directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix.

Beineix was one of the directors spoken of at the time as an exponent of Cinéma du look, a movement supposedly emphasising style over substance. Like most movements in cinema the label doesn’t really mean all that much. Luc Besson also attracted this label. In fact while they did make stylish movies (which damned them in the eyes of French critics) there’s a lot more substance in their best movies than you’ll find in the films of the earlier Nouvelle Vague.

Zorg lives in a rundown shack in a strange seaside resort composed entirely of equally rundown shacks. He seems to be a kind of handyman.

He has met the most amazing girl, Betty. She’s nineteen and super-cute and super-hot and seems fun and bubbly and she’s great in bed.

Almost all the plot turns result from dramas manufactured by Betty. In this case it’s a pretty spectacular drama.

Zorg and Betty then decamp to Paris where they share a house with Betty’s friend Lisa, a young widow.

Lisa has a new rich boyfriend, Eddy. He gets Zorg and Betty jobs in his upscale pizza restaurant. It soon becomes clear that there is no-one in the world less suited to a career in hospitality than Betty.

They end up running a piano store previously run by Eddy’s late mother in a small town.

Betty has discovered Zorg’s shameful well-concealed secret. He has written a novel. He has never submitted it for publication. Betty reads it and decides that Zorg is a literary genius. There are two things that make her judgment suspect. Firstly, she loves Zorg so naturally she thinks he’s a genius. And it is desperately important to Betty that Zorg should be a success.

The problem is that Betty is very unstable, she has a hair-trigger temper and when she loses her temper she becomes uncontrollable and her capacity for indulgence in self-pity is colossal. A particularly extravagant self-pity episode is triggered by what is in truth a minor setback. Betty treats minor setbacks like full-scale disasters. Betty’s instability has the potential to destroy her and destroy Zorg. But they are madly in love. Can that love save her? You’ll have to watch the movie to find out.

This movie hits me a bit close to home since I actually had a long-term girlfriend very much like Betty. Just as cute, just as hot, just as unstable, just as crazy. By the 80s such women were being diagnosed as having borderline personality disorder. Whether you buy such psychiatric diagnoses or not such women do exist and Betty certainly fits that mould.

It’s interesting given the movie’s 1986 release date is that any attempt to frame Betty as a feminist heroine is doomed to failure. Betty truly wants just one thing - to be a devoted wife (and she hopes one day to be a devoted mother). She is not a feminist rebel girl and she has zero interest in being a strong, fierce independent woman. For Betty nothing matters except her love for her man.

Betty is a monster, the kind of woman capable of destroying herself and everyone around her. She is a ticking time bomb. Poor Zorg is the kind of guy who meets a psycho chick like Betty and immediately thinks - I can fix her. I can save her. The sensible thing to do is to run away as fast as possible.

But Betty is not a mere monster. For very long stretches she really is sweet and adorable and lots of fun. She is fiercely loyal to Zorg. She has made her choice. He is her man. She would never even consider looking at another man. And while her belief in Zorg’s genius is motivated by her strong belief that she cannot truly love a man unless she can admire him and look up to him that’s not such a bad thing. She really does believe in him, she really will do everything in her power to make him a success, she really will inspire him to believe in himself. There are a lot of things to like about her.

There’s a lot of sex (and it’s reasonably explicit) but their relationship is not based entirely on sex. They have a very healthy very normal sex life. This is a movie that is entirely positive about sex. There’s a lot of nudity, both male and female. Oddly enough it’s the male nudity that is gratuitous!

There are some charming quirky moments and some very romantic moments. This is very much a love story.

Beineix insisted on having Betty played by an unknown and Béatrice Dalle delivers the goods for him.

The director’s cut is very long (a shade over three hours) but the length can be justified since we need to see that for very long stretches of time the relationship is successful and happy and Betty is likeable, cheerful and functional with her psychotic moments gradually having more serious consequences.

Betty Blue is a wonderful movie. Very highly recommended.

I've also reviewed Beineix's Diva (1981).

Insignificance (1985)

Nicolas Roeg’s Insignificance was released in 1985 and it has plenty of the Roeg trademarks.

Roeg’s 1980s movies did not achieve the mainstream commercial success that Don’t Look Now had enjoyed but I don’t think it ever occurred to Roeg to compromise. He just kept making Nic Roeg movies and Insignificance is a very very Nic Roeg movie.

In general I dislike movies about real historical figures but in this case the bizarre juxtaposition of people who in real life never met means that you’re not really going to be tempted to assume that there’s any intention to offer realistic portrayals of events in the lives of these people. And the characters are not given actual names in the film.

The basic premise is that The Senator (obviously based on Senator Joe McCarthy) is trying to force The Professor (clearly supposed to be Albert Einstein) to testify at a hearing. In reality the paths of McCarthy and Einstein never crossed. Meanwhile The Actress (obviously Marilyn Monroe) has talked her way into The Professor’s hotel room because she wants to explain the Special Theory of Relativity to him. Marilyn Monroe and Einstein never met in real life. Then The Ballplayer (based on Monroe’s real-life husband Joe DiMaggio) shows up. In reality he never met Einstein.

The Professor of course already knows how the Special Theory of Relativity works but it’s important to The Actress to demonstrate that she understands it as well.

The Professor tells The Senator that he won’t testify.

The Ballplayer is just trying to save his marriage to The Actress.

And the Actress has decided that she’d very much like to sleep with The Professor. Having thought about it The Professor decides that it’s an idea that has much to recommend it.

I don’t think the parts of the movie dealing with The Senator work all that well. They seem out of place and they seem like a misguided attempt to inject a political subtext.

But the scenes between The Professor, The Ballplayer and the Actress work extremely well. They’re all trying to figure something out. The Professor is trying to describe the shape of the universe mathematically. The Ballplayer is trying to figure out how to regain his wife’s love. The Actress is trying to work out why neither her marriage nor her career have made her happy.

Tony Curtis is OK as The Senator and Michael Emil is reasonably good as The Professor. Gary Busey is excellent. He does something here that he did extremely well in other movies (notably Carny) - take a character who could easily have been pathetic and give him dignity and substance and make the audience care about him.

Theresa Russell is great. She’s in full flight here. The two directors who really knew how to get great performances from her were Ken Russell (in Crimes of Passion) and Nic Roeg.

It’s a Nic Roeg movie so of course there’s an obsession with time and some narrative games. Roeg also loved intercutting sex scenes with other scenes and in this case he intercuts two different sex scenes with a scene of The Ballplayer in a bar.

Asking exactly what it all means is a bit pointless. If you can describe what a movie is about in words there’d be no need to make the movie. There’s stuff about time and death and the A-bomb and fame and sex and love. And this is absurdist comedy. If you can explain an absurdist comedy then it has failed.

The Actress is able to explain how Special Relativity works but she admits that she doesn’t understand why it works. The Professor knows what the shape of the universe is but it cannot be described. He has spent years trying to develop a unified theory, without success (just as Einstein spent years trying to unify quantum mechanics and relativity without success).

Maybe that’s the key to the movie. All the characters are looking for answers but maybe there aren’t any, or maybe we could never understand the answers if we knew them. The Professor will never complete his unified theory. Maybe The Ballplayer finds out that trying to understand a woman is like trying to grasp the shape of the universe. The answers will just keep slipping away. Maybe the Actress will discover that trying to understand love is also like trying to grasp the shape of the universe. Once again, those answers just keep slipping away.

And perhaps the movie suggests that time is like that. We think we have a handle on it, but we don’t. Roeg uses flashbacks and flash forwards. There’s a calendar image of the actress fragmented into tiny pieces and the movie is a bit like that. Needless to say the movie’s ending does not wrap everything up in a tidy fashion.

The problem is that the flashbacks and flash forwards are too obvious. We’re not surprised by them. It’s as if Roeg felt obliged to live up to his reputation for doing such things but they’re not really necessary. They’re rather trite and they trivialise the characters. It’s interesting that in his next movie, Castaway, Roeg abandoned such tricks altogether and was content to rely on the acting skills of Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohoe to let us know what was going on with their characters. In Insignificance Theresa Russell, Gary Busey and Michael Emil were perfectly capable of doing that as well.

The one really visually inspired scene is The Actress demonstrating Special Relativity to The Professor with children’s toys.

I don’t think this is quite in the top rank of Nicolas Roeg moveis but even a lesser Roeg film is pretty interesting and Insignificance is eccentric enough to be highly recommended.

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1960)

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse, released in 1960, was Fritz Lang’s third Dr Mabuse movie. Lang directed and co-wrote the screenplay. It was his final movie. The movies Lang made after his return to Germany are a major departure from his Hollywood movies. In some ways they saw Lang returning to his roots. He finally got to direct a version of The Indian Tomb (Lang had written the screenplay in 1920 with his wife Thea von Harbou but that first version was directed by Joe May) and he revived Dr Mabuse, nearly 30 years after his previous Mabuse film.

But in other ways The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse is actually ahead of its time. It’s arguably the first full-blown techno-paranoia thriller, anticipating many of the paranoid themes of 1970s cinema.

This is also possibly the first movie to focus on all-pervasive technological surveillance. Everybody is being watched, and at times the watchers are being watched.

It opens with a reference to the previous Mabuse movie. At first it seems that this cannot be a Dr Mabuse movie - we are told that Dr Mabuse has been dead since 1932. But we know that being dead has not stopped Dr Mabuse in the past.

The opening sequence is the assassination of a TV reporter. It appears to be a heart attack but there never was a serious attempt to pass it off as death by natural causes. The autopsy will inevitably reveal the truth. This sets the tone for the rest of the movie. It’s a double deception. The police are being deceived but the intention is that they should discover the deception.

A young woman, Marion Menil (Dawn Addams) is about to throw herself off a ledge of te Hotel Luxor. American businessman Henry Travers (Peter van Eyck) saves her life. They are immediately attracted and he is drawn into her tangled personal life. She is trapped in an unhappy marriage. She is under treatment by psychiatrist Dr Jordan.

Travers is involved in business deals involving nuclear power and rockets.

A psychic named Cornelius (Wolfgang Preiss) has attracted the attention of Kriminalkommissar Kras (Gert Fröbe) by making predictions that come true. Kras is a hardheaded cop but his case is going nowhere and he’ll clutch at anything that might help.

The case involves a series of murder connected in a mysterious way with the Hotel Luxor.

We, the audience, know something the police don’t know. Everybody in the Hotel Luxor is under surveillance. There are cameras and microphones everywhere. We don’t know who or what is behind this.

It might be Dr Mabuse. But Dr Mabuse is long dead. Or maybe he isn’t. Maybe there is a Dr Mabuse. Maybe Cornelius is Dr Mabuse. Maybe Dr Jordan is Dr Mabuse. Or Henry Travers. Or the shady hotel detective. Or the insurance salesman Hieronymus B. Mistelzweig (Werner Peters) who seems to turn up everywhere. Or Marion’s sinister husband Roberto (Reinhard Kolldehoff). Or the clubfooted man. The assassin No 2 (Howard Vernon) is probably just a henchman but it is impossible to be sure. Anyone could be Dr Mabuse. If there is a Dr Mabuse.

If you get halfway through the movie and realise that you don’t have a clue what’s going on don’t panic. You’re not supposed to know what’s going on. It’s not that the narrative is non-linear, but it is deliberately deceptive. It’s deceptive on multiple levels. This is a movie about being watched and of course we, the viewers, are engaged in watching but we cannot trust anything we see or hear.

There are conspiracies within conspiracies and characters tell lies while they themselves are being lied to. We cannot be sure of the real identities of any of the characters.

This may be a crime movie but it’s also a kind of proto-eurospy movie. Dr Mabuse would appear to be more of a Bond Villain than a master criminal. Always assuming that Dr Mabuse exists.

When Lang relocated to Hollywood in the late 30s he adapted remarkably well. He learnt that Hollywood filmmaking required discipline. He couldn’t make any more four hour movies. The convention of classical Hollywood filmmaking required tightly constructed movies with strong narrative drives. Lang mastered these techniques. But he never forget that this wasn’t the only way to make movies, and occasionally (in movies like Rancho Notorious and Moonfleet) he departed just a little from strict realism.

When he returned to Germany at the end of the 50s he abandoned many of the conventions he had mastered in Hollywood. It’s easy to see why French critics adored The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse. Lang seemed to be doing what the Cahiers du Cinema crowd wanted to see - adopting simplified streamlined techniques and getting a bit experimental with narrative and playing around with ambiguity. Making a movie in which the meaning has to be teased out. They hailed the 70-year-old Lang as a cinematic rebel!

German and American critics savaged the movie but it would be a mistake to see this as Lang ending his career with a failure. It was a huge hit in Germany. It spawned five sequels. It launched an entire franchise. In commercial terms it was a triumph. And its critical reputation has grown steadily.

It’s interesting that two radically different endings were shot. The earlier DVD releases had the ending of the French release. The Eureka Blu-Ray gives us the original ending from both the German and English versions.

The 1,000 Eyes of Dr Mabuse is not just a worthy final film. This is a great Lang film, one of his best. Very highly recommended.

Electra Glide in Blue (1973)

Electra Glide in Blue was released in 1973. It was badly received at the time but seems to have developed a minor cult following. It's a very very 70s movie.

This was James William Guercio’s only film as a director. When you’ve seen this movie you’ll understand why.

Officer John Wintergreen (Robert Blake) is a motorcycle cop who dreams of becoming a detective. He thinks his chance has come when he finds the dead body of an old guy named Frank in a shack. It seems like an obvious suicide.

Wintergreen is convinced it’s murder, which could be wishful thinking.

Fortunately the detective who shows up at the scene, Harve Poole (Mitchell Ryan), is also not convinced that this is suicide. So now Wintergreen has a temporary posting to Homicide as Harve’s offsider.

Soon there are a couple of suspects. They’re hippies. Wintergreen has his doubts.

Wintergreen eventually solves the case, not through following up clues but because he just suddenly knows.

There’s also a kind of romantic triangle although it seems to be a bit out of place.

Characters undergo sudden personality changes for no reason whatsoever. The plot is not so much loosely constructed as totally incoherent. The tone is all over the place. At times it seems to be aiming for absurdist comedy, at times it tries to be dark and cynical.

There’s an obvious Easy Rider influence (always a bad thing) but Electra Glide in Blue’s attitude towards the counter-culture is more sceptical. The cops are not shown in a very favourable light, except for Wintergreen.

There is one moment which seems to be an attempt to give an ironic twist to a certain scene in Easy Rider.

It shares that movie’s obsession with motorcycles and the desert as a metaphor.

Robert Blake is extremely good.

Apart from Blake the acting is fairly bad although the script might be more to blame for that than the actors. They probably had no idea what was going on. Amazingly Guercio manages to get a bad performance from Elisha Cook Jr which isn’t easy.

The shoot was apparently quite chaotic with Guercio’s inexperience causing major problems.

There was some great music in the 70s but this film features some truly awful hippie music.

Some movies flop because they’re misunderstood, or they’re too quirky, or critics take a dislike to the director, or they’re badly promoted. But some movies flop because they’re just bad movies. Electra Glide in Blue falls into the latter category. Perhaps it might have worked better had it been a bit more trippy. With a stronger more experienced hand on the tiller and a bit more work done on the script it might have had potential. I like interesting misfires but this is a relatively uninteresting rather muddled misfire.

It’s hard to recommend this one.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray presentation is extremely good.