Electra Glide In Blue

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I had never heard of this movie, but it turns out that "Electra Glide in Blue" is the flip-side of "Easy Rider." Instead of hippies on hogs searching for the real America, it's biker cops patrolling the American wilderness looking for anyone who steps out of line. And that includes people who choose to grow their hair long and paint their vans to look like billboards for flower power. In fact, there's an astonishing scene where Arizona Motor Officer "Big John" Wintergreen (Robert Blake) is practicing his handgun skills at a target range by shooting at a picture of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper in their "Easy Rider" duds. And there's another memorable shot where a helmeted police officer has his bike squad at full military attention so that he can "train" them by calling them every name they're likely to hear from people attending at a rock concert that's coming to the area. No wonder "Electra Glide in Blue" was perceived as a fascist film making a fascist statement when it was shown at the Cannes Film Festival.

If you rent or buy "Electra Glide in Blue," be sure to choose the option to watch the film with director James William Guercio's introduction, in which he talks about his surprise at the "fascist" comparisons. His remarks are so lengthy that clips from the film are cut into shots of Guercio talking on camera. Pay attention. One of those clips shows the first movie footage in which Nick Nolte appears. Don't look for him in the credits. He's not there. But you will find singer Peter Cetera, who plays Bob Zemko, a long-haired suspect that Wintergreen is seeking. Chicago guitarist Terry Kath plays his gun-toting sidekick, while fellow band members Lee Loughnane and Walter Parazaider also have small parts as scruffy motorcycle riders. It turns out that Guercio used to manage Chicago in the days when they were known as Chicago Transit Authority—the name of the city's bus and elevated train system.

The diminutive Blake did such a good job in his role as a motorcycle cop yearning to become a detective that TV granted him his wish several years later. He was rewarded for his Golden Globe-nominated performance with the promise of a detective show, on deck to take over as plain clothes cop Toma. And when that show was dropped, ABC gave him the role of Baretta—an unconventional cop with a cockatoo and a cheery motto: "Don't do the crime if you can't do the time," or something to that effect.

In terms of structure and plot, there are plenty of similarities to "Easy Rider." Instead of a pair of hippies, it's Wintergreen and his bike-riding cop partner "Zipper" Davis (Billy Green Bush), who happens to be a bit more sadistic and corrupt. Instead of smoking dope, Zipper plants it on a hippie they've stopped because he doesn't like the guy's attitude, and he's not above grabbing evidence for himself as an on-the-job perk. After we watch the pair stop just about every car that tries to traverse this desolate wilderness, Wintergreen finally gets the shot he's looking for. He finds an apparent suicide in an isolated cabin and gets into a shouting match with the coroner, who wants to declare the case open and shut. But Wintergreen's remarks are overheard by the force's lead plain clothes Stetson-wearing detective, Harve Poole (Mitch Ryan), who instantly recruits Wintergreen for his team. As he takes off on his own, like a lone Texas ranger, he finds more than he bargained for.

Even if Guercio hadn't explained in the commentary and introduction how he had wanted to pay tribute to legendary filmmaker John Ford, the average film-lover would have noticed the homage. "Electra Glide in Blue" was shot in Monument Valley in Panavision, and it's exceptionally cool to see the same shots John Ford included in such films as "The Searchers" with a single highway running through it. Guercio plays it like a modern western, with the lawman on bike instead of horse. And he can't resist a few scene-homages to a film he says he watched 200 times as a youth. When Wintergreen interviews the half-crazed local hermit Willie on a porch, it's framed almost exactly like a scene from "The Searchers" where John Wayne as Ethan Edwards talks with the mentally challenged Mose (Hank Worden). In the commentary and intro Guercio talks about how he got veteran cinematographer Conrad Hall to come onboard (basically giving him his director's salary) with one interesting condition: Hall could do anything he wanted with the interior shots (and he does so many unusual things that "Electra Glide" has the feel of an art-house or foreign film), but the exteriors were all Guercio's. He wanted to make a western John Ford style, and the exteriors are indeed reminiscent of Ford's style.

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