***½/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A-
starring Robert Blake, Billy "Green" Bush, Jeannine Riley, Elisha Cook
screenplay by Robert Boris
directed by James William Guercio
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover There's a priceless scene in Albert Brooks's Lost in America where our white-collar hero David Howard (played by Brooks himself) has to deal with a motorcycle cop. About to be ticketed for a minor infraction, David informs his tormentor that he's living out the dream of Easy Rider in his Winnebago–whereupon the cop, incredibly, professes the same with regards to being a bike cop, and tears up the ticket. The joke is that a lumpy bourgeois in a camper and a policeman in anything can bend the rebellious ways of that film to their own establishment end, cancelling out both sides in a puff of semiotics. But what was a throwaway in Lost in America is the whole movie in Electra Glide in Blue, a film centred around motorcycle cops that owes a serious debt to Easy Rider while blowing its us-vs.-them dichotomy out of the water from the other side of the line.
Electra Glide in Blue spins police and bike-rebel iconography so fast and so strangely that at first, it's hard to determine the target of the film's satire. The credit sequence–in which highway patrolman John Wintergreen (Robert Blake) fetishistically drapes himself in cop regalia before exiting a garage as if emerging from the pod bay in 2001 could be seen as either a glorification of the profession or a bizarre defamiliarization with its head cocked at a 90-degree angle. And when a sergeant subjects officers arranged in a hugely formalist row before him to a torrent of abuse, only to reveal that this is what to expect from their security duty at a rock concert, you can't tell if it's bolstering or mocking their self-pity. Wintergreen himself is another puzzle: as he tickets a speeding detective or refuses to give a fellow veteran a break, we can't decide whether he's an altruistic hero or a clueless naïf unable to tell which way the wind is blowing.
As it turns out, he's the closest thing to bedrock this movie has. Wintergreen hates the highway patrol and dreams of becoming a proper detective–that is, of jumping from law enforcement's proletariat into its bourgeoisie. Beneath him is a hopelessly lumpen partner, Zipper Davis (Billy "Green" Bush), so alienated from his job that he plants contraband on hippies and wants nothing more ambitious than a souped-up ride. Above Wintergreen is detective Harve Poole (Mitch Ryan), an apparently consummate professional who is in fact such an egomaniac that he has reduced his approach to law enforcement to a speech that begins, "I believe in me…" From a shiftless victim to a ravenous victor, Wintergreen is caught between two negatives that add up to a massive disillusionment.
Yet screenwriter Robert Boris strangely refuses to issue full hero papers to the protagonist. Although Wintergreen is a terror with the ladies (an annoying '70s-ism that's too drive-in ready to fit), he's largely ineffectual–a matter intensified by his diminutive stature (in both senses of the word), which he feels the need to justify with Alan Ladd references. None of his good deeds add up to a credit: he is first bawled-out by the coroner (Royal Dano) for insisting that a corpse belongs to a murder victim and not a suicide, then too shy about his interrogation of some commune members once Poole bumps him up to his assistant. (Poole, naturally, just beats up on them.) We can see that his motives are correct, but his refusal to comprehend the dynamics of the situation makes him more than a little ridiculous, effectively complicating our identification with him in ways that even '70s movies generally refuse.
Director James William Guercio shoots the American southwest (specifically, Monument Valley) as if it were the surface of Mars, an inhospitable hallucination that wouldn't be topped until David Lynch decided to screw up suburbia in Blue Velvet. The motorcycle cops are weird, gleaming metallic insects and the sun-blasted landscape is a nowhere that doesn't want you alive; you want so badly to cling to something, but nothing looks like it would support you for long. It's the perfect metaphor for a film about people bending symbols to their will, be it a coroner inventing a suicide so as not to blow his budget or a detective who creates "a coordinated conspiracy of police genocide" to justify his reign of terror.
Electra Glide in Blue was accused of fascism when it played the Cannes festival–a strange accusation for a film that shows law enforcement to be so hopelessly corrupt. In reality, it lacks the call-and-response master/servant dichotomy: both leaders and led prove entirely unworthy of each other, with Wintergreen unsure of which side he's on and Zipper ultimately out for himself by greedily buggering up our hero's case. To be sure, there's a bit of hippie-hating and racism, but only for verisimilitude, again making it hard to have an easy response to the action. And the film's final movement, a reversal of Easy Rider's concluding murder, is only to demonstrate that believing in any surface ideology is a problem: you can trust no one–not cops, not hippies, not anyone asking you to take them on appearances alone.
This is what Albert Brooks was getting at in that pertinent encounter. Statements of purpose mean absolutely nothing in the face of behaviour that contradicts it; appeals to authority mean nothing when the ground beneath its feet constantly moves. In a way, the film it challenges most isn't Easy Rider but Chinatown, in which you were left absolutely sure of who was good and who was evil, and that evil would always triumph. Thom Andersen called that film "history, written by the winners, but in crocodile tears," and though Electra Glide in Blue is technically even more of a downer than Chinatown, it encourages intellectual self-defense instead of acceptance. It could never be construed as written by the winners, because it maps out the dynamics of corruption too complexly and refuses to say the little man is good because he's doomed. The truth is perhaps more painful, but it's also a great deal less certain.
THE DVD
MGM's DVD release of Electra Glide in Blue looks great. If the 2.35:1, 16×9-enhanced presentation is just a hair too soft, it's a minuscule problem for a transfer that prevents infinite shades of earth tones from bleeding into each other. The Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo surround audio is almost up to the level of the image, perhaps a shade less clear than it could have been but still quite potent and well articulated for a 2-channel soundtrack, not to mention admirably restrained for a remix.
Extras include an optional video intro by director James William Guercio (9 mins.): aside from reassuring fans of this one-off auteur that he did not in fact drop off the face of the earth, it also reveals his origins as the child of a John Ford-obsessed projectionist and thus where he learned his remarkable facility with cinematic form. The noted record producer comes across as a weird mix of counterculture and small-"c" conservative, someone genuinely surprised to receive the fascist tag by noting the devaluation of the police. Also mentioned are his dealings with DP Conrad Hall, whose hatred of the Ford-isms Guercio sought to include led to a bargain giving Hall domain over interiors and Guercio over exteriors. Though many have complained of its blowing of major plot points, this "introduction" is best savoured by those of us long curious to know just who this vanished director actually was.
A feature-length commentary with Guercio is at best marginally interesting in terms of aesthetics, since the director proves inarticulate describing the visuals, insisting that he wants them to speak for themselves. Still, he confirms that one can get away with a great deal in stealing shots: the film received zero support from the police department, meaning the production had to improvise like crazy, and you'll be surprised at how much was captured on the sly (especially after considering Hall's hard-sheen cinematography). Electra Glide in Blue's theatrical trailer rounds out the disc.
113 minutes; R; 2.34:1 (16×9-enhanced); English Dolby Surround, French DD 2.0 (Stereo), Spanish Dolby Surround; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; MGM
