Officer John Wintergreen (Robert Blake) is a highway patrolman with dreams of becoming a detective.
When he stumbles on a bizarre suicide, he smells murder - and a chance to achieve his goal.
Paired with hard-nosed detective Harvey (Mitch Ryan), Wintergreen finds himself questioning the idealised image he has of the people who enforce ‘the law’...
Electra Glide in Blue is an offbeat cop thriller that is probably only now known for starring a murderer. What is depressing about the movie is that it is ultimately about a man’s rejection of (a form of) toxic masculinity.
While I was interested in the movie from a genre standpoint, the film’s themes of clashing masculinities, and the central character’s arc, gain a disturbing irony from its central casting.
Most of the film is a buddy movie between the naive, eager Wintergreen and Mitchell Ryan’s self-confident lawman Harvey.
The leading man is well cast, with his stature and slightly nasal voice offsetting his attempts at macho posturing.
Ryan is terrifying - his unflinching gaze and taciturn delivery (undermined by a slight quiver betraying the deep-set rage).
Ryan’s Harvey is the dark side of Wintergreen’s dream, a paranoid fascist who sees the police as an endangered species, beset by hippies, racial minorities and women.
He is gripped by a fear of a failure of masculinity, and uses Wintergreen as an audience for his philosophy.
Released the same year as Magnum Force, Electra Glide in Blue plays like a satire of the collective, mechanised evil of that film’s villains (a connection increased by Mitchell Ryan’s casting in both films).
Winegreen solves the central mystery when - as he puts it, he starts “listening” to himself- and apprehends the suspect by talking rather than fighting.
In its own way, Electra Glide in Blue is kind of a movie about men unable to express or be in touch with their emotions.
I say kind of because the movie as a whole seems a little unsure of what it wants to be. Not that that is a bad thing!
It is not a real action movie - it does not have the same sense of propulsion or focus on violence as a resolution. A lot of the movie feels like a digression, as characters/actors are given space to monologue. According to the trivia I read, Guercio, a debuting director, ended up splitting creative control with cinematographer Conrad Hall.
The movie even includes an extended musical sequence from the band Chicago, which director James William Guercio produced in his other career (and who also performed the score, which Guercio composed).
Considering how winding the story is, the finale is surprisingly focused.
After Wintergreen is finally forced to kill someone, the film cuts to a brief scene of our lead, backlit by the sun, watching dusk over a western landscape. It is a beautiful shot, and with the iconography of the location, symbolises the characters’ belief in a myth of western heroism dying.
Wintergreen does not even get a chance to learn from his mistakes.
He dies, not heroically, but inadvertently - he tries to return a licence to some hippies and they blow him away, thinking he is failing them for whatever they are up to.
Wintergreen’s blood splattered disappears into the distance as the camera tracks backwards into a perfectly framed shot of Monument Valley, the iconic backdrop of so many westerns.
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