Review of Electra Glide in Blue (1973) by Shane S — 27 Nov 2009

People hate this movie for two reasons: James William Guercio (that producer commonly associated with Chicago) and Robert Blake (suffers from Woody Allen Syndrome, where his career suffers due to people assuming that everybody he plays is a killer). I love the movie for those two reasons...why? Robert does a good job playing the common man who slowly sees the corruption in society while exploiting his "luck" in the detective field while James captures that desolation and the inability to move out of his place using some very iconic camera shots that even John Ford would be proud of.

I'm also kind of glad that the Chicago members who starred in the film were not outright playing Chicago, but playing hippies stuck to their caste, forced to sell drugs and cheerfully lie to detectives about the whereabouts of potential killers. Terry Kath also stays to the caste, being just another hippie who happens to take the life of Robert Blake out of paranoia and typecasting.

The ending is also very shocking for a film, coming from the same New Hollywood ethic of "Norse endings" but with a twist: don't make the film end on the individual but rather transform it into an allegory at the final moment, revealing that the cops, Zemko, Terry's character, the hippies, the waitress, and the mental patients are all just stuck to life, unable to change the way they live. It's kind of like a Hindu film made by Christians.