Electra Glide in Blue (1973)

This indoctrination of vocal harassment was compiled by our own Juvenile Division in preparation for the concert this weekend.

By 1973, twenty-eight-year-old James William Guercio had already established himself as a Grammy-winning producer and had been instrumental in guiding Illinois-based band The Big Thing into becoming first Chicago Transit Authority and then (thanks to a threat of legal action by the actual CTA) a little band by the name of Chicago.¹ Oh, and he’d also produced two Moondog albums for Columbia.² But Guercio wasn’t about to sit on his laurels. He was, after all, the son of a projectionist (who was also the son of a projectionist) and spent his early years enthralled by John Ford movies, so when David Picker – then head of United Artists – asked Guercio if he wanted to make a movie, Guercio jumped at the chance.

He happened upon a sophomore script from Robert Boris titled Pig, the story of a diminutive Arizona motorcycle cop and based (very) loosely on real events: Officer Albert Bluhm, former Marine, was gunned down by the fugitive occupants of a stolen truck in 1970. “I thought it was important,” said Guercio, “because at that time law enforcement, policemen, police officers, and the institution in terms of Vietnam, were under severe attack.” For the director, Pig (which would swiftly ditch the title for the less incendiary Electra Glide in Blue) would act as a principled riposte to the counterculture emboldened by Easy Rider four years earlier, or at least a gentle reminder that hey, cops are people too, man.³

“Big John” Wintergreen (Robert Blake) is a shortarse, by-the-book motorcycle cop who cruises the highways of Arizona with his dimwitted partner Zipper (Billy Green Bush⁴) when he isn’t dreaming of working homicide. As Zipper puts it, John’s “just hungry to be one of them glamour boys,” headed up by the shit-kicking Titan Harve Poole (Mitchell Ryan⁵), who believes that law enforcement is currently facing “a conspiracy of police genocide” and whose hard-nosed tactics usually involve beating information out of dirty hippies. When John stumbles across an old man’s apparent suicide, he smells a rat – who shoots themselves in the chest when there’s a perfectly good head to blow off? – and sees a ticket to the big time. Harve agrees, taking on John as his driver,⁶ but John is about to discover that his hero has feet of clay, his institution is riddled with banal corruption, and there’s only so far you can get on principles alone.

Electra Glide in Blue is the kind of movie that could only come out of the 1970s, with an emphasis on cinematography (courtesy of Conrad Hall) and mood, a disjointed storytelling approach, limited characterisation, and – naturally for a music guy – a weirdly esoteric soundtrack that comprises everything from “Gentle Annie” (a direct reference to John Ford⁷) and doo-wop from The Marcels, to an extended and rather noisy live performance of “Free From The Devil” by Guercio-produced jazz-rock trio Madura. And while the cinematography is undoubtedly excellent, alternating Vistavision-like landscapes with murky, texture-rich interiors, the rest of the movie feels like a jumble of performances and incidents with no obvious point, and Guercio’s directorial style leaves much to be desired. When the film works, it’s usually in spite of Guercio than because of it, with Hall’s work stymied by odd framing and the cast clearly left to their own devices when it comes to performance.

The film isn’t helped by the wisp of a screenplay, in which characters like Zipper and Crazy Willie (Elisha Cook Jr) are given little to do but act intellectually challenged and gibber away⁸, and which turns what could have been a major dramatic scene with John, Harve and their mutual fuck-buddy Joelene into a painful audition piece, with an otherwise game Jeannine Riley trying to make the best of a monologue so poorly written it’s amazing Riley makes it out with any dignity. The murder mystery, such as it is, would struggle to fill a twenty-minute half-hour TV slot, and John’s epiphany towards the end has even less logic than the motive behind the murder. And that’s not even mentioning the bizarre ending – easily the most visually interesting part of the movie, a ten-minute-plus shot that goes on way too long, but delivers for a third of that time – which aims for profundity and ends up feeling like a direct rip-off of Easy Rider, even down to the sub-Dylan stylings of “Tell Me” by Terry Kath (who also plays the guy with the gun).

As much as it pains me to say this, the only reason Electra Glide works at all is because of Robert Blake. Blake, a singularly unpleasant human being even when he wasn’t being tried for murder,⁹ manages to make John into the most charming character in the movie, even when that movie is doing its best to undermine him – usually through framing that highlights his short stature. Blake’s characterisation of John as a fundamentally decent human being who wants to make a real difference never becomes too much of a cliché – his befuddlement at being threatened by a speeding Los Angeles detective is pretty amusing, and his unerring politeness to everyone he meets is refreshing, especially when Zipper and Harve are playing variations on the redneck cop. There’s a feeling that if John ever did make detective, he’d be good at it, and it’s only a rotten society that keeps him from that goal. His disappointment in both the sticky-fingered Zipper and the impotent blowhard Harve is palpable, and his final demise at the trigger finger of Chicago’s Terry Kath is almost tragic, this principled cop now reduced to little more than a bloodied uniform in the middle of the road.

It's no wonder that when Electra Glide debuted at Cannes in 1973, it was met with derision and accusations of fascism: the camera fetishises the creaking leather of John’s uniform and high-polish chrome of the bike, lingering over gunmetal and thick zippers, just as it makes a meal of John’s brown suit and cowboy boots when he becomes Harve’s driver. As it turns out, Electra Glide isn’t a fascist movie, merely an old-fashioned conservative one. A fascist movie would have made a hero out of Harve, who fits the traditional suspect-molesting maverick cop mould, instead of elevating John, who is essentially the kind of stalwart white hat who could have been played by John Wayne. The emphasis on the accoutrements of the police uniform feels more like Guercio focusing on the signifiers of the job as hamfisted metaphor rather than a full-throated apologia for the institution, and there’s no evidence to suggest that John believes any of the hippie-cop warfare nonsense espoused by Harve, even if he ultimately falls victim to it.

Critics were middling in their appreciation, with many addressing the accusations of fascism and fetishisation while praising Hall’s work and dismissing Guercio with rumours (mostly spread by Blake) that the director did little to no actual directing. Boris’s script was similarly dismissed by Janet Maslin as “hopeless banal,” and while I’m inclined to agree based on the final film, I have the feeling that its shortcomings were either ignored by Guercio or – in one particular case – exacerbated by his work: apparently there was originally a love story between John and a girl at the commune¹⁰, which was cut (according to Guercio) because they were behind schedule or else (according to Boris) because Guercio “decided that he wanted to have more action, more chases in it.” It’s arguable that this wouldn’t have saved the movie – the more overtly romantic scenes in the film tend to fall flat – but it might have helped turn Electra Glide into more of a character piece than the grab-bag of scenes it ends up being. While Boris would go on to enjoy an unremarkable but consistent career with films like Some Kind of Hero (1982) and Oxford Blues (1984), Guercio was neither as fortunate nor as interested in his film career: he would have one more credit as one of the many directors involved in (and fired from) Steve McQueen’s penultimate film Tom Horn (1980) before branching out into fossil fuels and television as one of the early owners of the CMTV (later to become CMT) channel.

All that said, Electra Glide still enjoys cult classic status today, thanks in no small part to the work of Hall and Blake, and its obvious connection to that counterculture milestone Easy Rider. For me, it never quite becomes much more than a decent central performance and some lovely shots, but Electra Glide in Blue is never less than interesting even when it’s unsuccessful, and while I’m never likely to actively seek it out, it is one of those movies that somehow still manages to find itself in front of me on a semi-regular basis, mostly because I hold out hope that this time it’s going to be better than I remember it …

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Next Up: “A gun in his sock, an iron bar in his belt, and no badge. The story of Eddie. The best ex-cop in the business.”

1. Which would make Guercio stinking rich and Chicago hopping mad. Apparently Guercio’s contract entitled him to a whopping 51% of the band’s profits. Guercio and the boys would part ways in 1977: If you leave me now / I think we’ll finally see some roy-al-ties / Ooh-ooh-OOH-ooh-oh etc.

2. Your not-so-regular reminder to listen to Moondog.

3. At one point, John blows holes in a picture of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper, in case you hadn’t picked up on the hint. That’s what they get for selling a petrol tank full of cocaine to Phil Spector.

4. Credited as Billy “Green” Bush. I have no idea why. Best known in this house as “that guy from Critters.”

5. An actor known for his authoritarian shithead roles, not least as Edward Montgomery in the strangely long-running sitcom Dharma & Greg.

6. I think it’s worth noting that John never truly becomes a detective, just a driver for one.

7. “Gentle Annie,” which plays over the opening, features in Ford’s Stagecoach (1939). Guercio apparently told Conrad Hall that he wanted the movie to look like The Searchers (1956), which led to some friction.

8. For the record, I like Elisha Cook Jr in this, even though he gets a bit of stick for his drooling, eye-rolling performance. It’s certainly a turn that belongs in a different (possibly better) movie, but it’s also one I’d happily watch all day long. Not mentioned here is the great Royal Dano as an irascible coroner.

9. For those two of you who might not be aware: Robert Blake was arrested (and ultimately acquitted) for the murder of his second wife, Bonny Lee Bakley. He was ultimately found liable for wrongful death in a civil suit, went bankrupt, and apparently provided inspiration for Cliff Booth in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). Blake would consistently bitch about Electra Glide in Blue, not least because he only got $20k for the gig.

10. Also at the commune is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it appearance by Nick Nolte. I’d like to have seen Mitchell Ryan try to square off against that guy.