American music producer James William Guercio's one-off dalliance with filmmaking, ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE is made when he is only 28-year-old. It stars Robert Blake as a motorcycle cop Johnny Wintergreen who patrols rural Arizona highways and aspires to be a homicidal officer.The movie opens with a promising panache hardly betrays that Guercio is a greenhorn, conjecturing through its voyeuristic close-ups, audience would soon realize a face-unshown man prepares to kill himself, yet, Guercio's camera also cunningly suggests that he is cooking beef streaks at the same time. Then, boom! He blows himself dead through a shotgun, which unusually aims to his chest rather than the usual easy target, the head, it compellingly sets a paradoxical situation that one immediately knows there is something fishy about the whole act.Also, before the title card, Guercio takes a tongue-in-cheek tack to introduce our unlikely hero, big Johnny, the camera lurks and swirls in the apartment where Johnny expertly gratifies Jolene (Riley) in bed, before revealing that Johnny is small in stature. When a man's masculinity is stunted by his appearances, it gives audience an idea why he is so eager to achieve something, to compensate the ingrained inferiority complex is a shoo-in. So the apparent-suicidal case becomes his stepping stone to be recruited by detective Harve Poole (Ryan) for his astute observation that it is indeed a murder underneath the hatched facade.But the ensuing police procedural dampens Johnny's driving enthusiasm, especially after witnessing Harve hectors physically abuses and a group of hippies to milk information about their prime suspect, a drug dealer Bob Zembo (a cameo of Peter Cetera, one of the four CHICAGO members who take on acting roles here apart from their contribution to the picture's soundtrack), and the final straw is an awkward confrontation between him, Harve and Jolene, the latter turns out to be Harve's lover, and spitefully lambastes Harve's incompetence to make her contented and laments her ill-fated destiny, working in a barrelhouse after a dashed Hollywood dream, Johnny and Harv fall out afterwards.Unambiguously Guercio conducts a half-hearted approach to solve the murder mystery, after trifling with a biker-chasing set piece to keep the action moving, the movie falls back on Johnny's "inner voice" for an expedient epiphany to realize who is the murderer at the end of a MADURA concert, with reasons unexplained, but that is not enough, ultimately there would be another revelation later, to further muddle the water and leave the opening scene ever so ambivalent when one retraces back, before reaching its chilling coda, completely hits viewers like a cold shower, willful but symbolic, overall, it is a loner's world against the canvas of a vast Arizona landscape, everyone in the story is either indolent, disillusioned or corrupt, only the hippies' community stands in as a getaway from the unpleasant reality, but their guarded world is defiant towards the mainstream values, Johnny represents a tragic hero who is doomed because of what he represents, an authority figure, cannot be saved by his amiable personality and all-too-well intentions.Performance-wise, everyone on board is on a par with excellence, Elisha Cook Jr. is heart-rending to watch in his committed lunacy, Mitchell Ryan expertly imbues a certain degree of passing diffidence in his bombast mannerism and Billy Green Bush is so organic as Johnny's shade- hogging partner and nails his big scene with a flourish, so is Jeannine Riley, manages to steal some limelight even with a role riddled with platitudes. And our leading man Robert Blake, ever so self- reliant as a pipsqueak trying rather hard to chase his dream, only to get short-changed by a cynical world.ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE, also bolstered by a symphonic soundtrack produced by Guercio himself and its striking wide-screen landscape sensation shot by DP Conrad L. Hall, is an astonishing debut feature, if it intends to be more of a zeitgeist-capturer than a gripping detective story, then I must give my whole-hearted congratulations to the crew, mission grandly accomplished!

This once rare slice of the 70's is now thankfully released at last, and available for a wider audience. It concerns diminutive traffic cop John Wintergreen and his quest to reach his dream- a detective. In his eyes the detectives wear their smart suits, smoke their cigars and get to work on REAL cases. After stumbling across a homicide and coming up against those trying to write it off as a suicide- John achieves his dream of riding with a bona fide detective however discovers it wasn't all he hoped for. Whilst this sounds pretty standard fare it is elevated beyond that through an endearing and heartbreaking performance by Robert Blake as our protagonist. Looked down upon (sorry, couldn't resist) by his peers for having a dream which isn't purely materialistic, watching his dream suddenly crushed as his friends and his ideal are exposed as being as corrupt as the supposed criminals they're trying to catch. This film is undoubtedly very much of its time- target practise on Captain America and Billy case in point- and many of the characters we encounter are morally ambiguous, neither black nor white. The stark Arizona highways are themselves neither beautiful nor ugly- the pleasure at recognising landscapes from countless Westerns countered by the realisation that John Wintergreeen- with all his morals and ideals of what a cop should be- is as doomed as the dream he hopes to encapsulate.

I saw this movie at a drive-in in Spokane, Washington in the summer of 1973--double feature with Westworld! What a great memory. Electra Glide in Blue was so cutting-edge, so modern! It had motorcycles and girls with enormous breasts (covered) and blood and cussing. It even had several members of Chicago, my favorite band at the time! Unfortunately, it lacked one important thing, something critical to make it actually . . . good--a story. I own a copy of it, and I watch it from time to time to relive the good memory of seeing a movie that had the line, "Yeah, man, I'll tell ya something. You're standing in pig dung." Robert Blake was so intense in his desire to be promoted, Mitch Ryan could do his officious buttbag-act in his sleep, Billy Green Bush was great as the wack-job motorcycle cop, and Chicago-member Lee Loughnane, sitting there with the pigs, should have stuck to his day job with Chicago--he may have been sober, but his delivery of that pig dung line was proof of the dangers of drugs. I even own a copy of the album, with all the poster stuff. The soundtrack was the best part of the movie.This movie was truly awful. It slogged and plodded and tried so hard to be deep, and all it accomplished was teach me that 15 year olds make terrible film critics.

Everybody likes to ride around on a motorcycle in the sunshine, and, what with the desert climate of southern Arizona, you get not only the wind in your hair and the scent of sagebrush but a rosy tan as well. Unfortunately, Robert Blake and his partner, Zipper (Billy Green Bush), are constrained by their police uniforms and what they call proper police procedure, or PPP. The movie is essentially about how closely the police force follows that procedure when murder is involved.Two old weirdos live in a desert trailer and when one is found murdered the other (Elisha Cook, Jr., more flamboozled than ever) is arrested. But did he do it? And, if so, why? The written story is dated. The affable and sympathetic Blake is taken under the wing of his superior, Mitch Ryan, a big blustering detective who beats up hippie informants while Blake must stand silently by. Yes, this is a movie which pits the ugly cops against the far-from-innocent but still human hippies. The hippies dress in rags, do dope, and -- hold on -- they have long hair. All they want is to be left unhassled, but Ryan is intent on cementing community relations by beating them to a pulp.Mitchell is not only a bully but, even worse, his drunken girl friend explains to Blake that he is also impotent, causing Mitchell to almost pop his cork and hate Blake, finally demoting him and putting him back in uniform on his hated police motorcycle. (He'd love to have a more colorful machine with Electraglide transmission.) I think Blake's motorcycle represents the police force, which in turn represents the society which the hippies must live in and which hates them for reasons that are "accidental" rather than "essential." Mainly, they look funny. (None of them can act, either.) In fact, I think Robert Blake's character must illustrate Edmund Burke's dictum, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." How else can we explain this good man's assassination by previously harassed hippies at the end? Why else does Blake suffer? He's guilty of no wrong doing, intelligent enough to solve a rather complicated homicide, and in the end courageous enough to tell his sadistic boss that the boss is full of horse hockey.The dialog is kind of stylized, especially Mitch Ryan's. He carries on with his rodomontade as if speaking to Jesus. It isn't exactly realistic. That's okay because at least it's an attempt to be original. The narrative, though, sometimes falls flat. After being promoted to detective by Ryan, Blake lovingly dresses himself in expensive new civilian clothes, if a modified cowboy outfit can be considered civilian, and strides outside only to look down and see that he's forgotten to put on his trousers. It's not really either credible or amusing, though it's supposed to be cute, I guess.The direction is okay. The camera is where it should be, and at the proper times, but -- can we have some kind of moratorium on slow-motion violence? Sheez! A pursued hippie on a motorcycle crashes through a cafe window and I fell asleep before he finally hit the floor.The climactic scene was shot in Monument Valley. Warning to all film makers. Lay off. That's John Ford territory.