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.