Watch Electra Glide in Blue For Free

You won't be disappointed!

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

This is a dark and sometimes deeply uncomfortable drama

"Electra Glide in Blue" plays more as a character piece than as a gritty police thriller, although there are some X-rated scenes. The opening begins with the apparent suicide of a local hermit. Robert Blake is the pint-sized traffic cop who yearns for better things in his professional life. He has aspirations to becoming a plain clothes detective. He eventually achieves this but Blake begins to feel disillusioned about his promotion. By the end of the film, he returns to being a traffic cop. The character's ultimate weakness, is his honesty. He simply believes in being a police officer of good professional conduct and of abiding by a good set of ethics. Unfortunately, all this comes back to haunt him........ This is rather talky and short on action. The story drags here and there but "Electra Glide in Blue" is always interesting. Robert Blake gives a very good performance.

With those evocative images and that emotionally charged music, the final fifteen minutes are electrifying. It's all about America, and a terrible ten years of assassinations, Viet Nam, and countless other cultural strife. The film's ending is saying ... enough is enough. Let the healing begin. And as American culture bled in the late 1960s and early 1970s, so too did the emotional lives of individuals, like the hodgepodge of aggrieved characters that come and go in this story.Seeing some of these people and listening to their individual stories of pain and suffering is John Wintergreen (Robert Blake), a by-the-book Arizona motorcycle cop, short on stature but tall on dreams. Sometimes with his partner Zipper (Billy Green Bush), "Big John" encounters these tormented souls, on the road mostly. That's his job. The film's story is an ode to the courage and nobility of ordinary Americans pained by reality with only their dreams to comfort them.The film's disjointed plot begins with a killing. And this incident keeps the plot moving. But "Electra Glide In Blue" is mostly a character study, not a crime film. Color cinematography is quite good. Interior shots have lots of close-ups, even extreme close-ups. There's a lot of diffuse lighting. Exteriors are shot like a modern-day Western. Indeed, the look and feel of the film is similar in some ways to the old John Ford Westerns, like "The Searchers".The plot is the main weakness of the film. Some parts are overplayed, like the chase scenes. There's a lack of continuity both in storyline and in visual elements. It's as if many scenes were shot impromptu, on the rush. And some of the acting is way over the top. However, Robert Blake does a fine job as America's everyday cop with his sense of principles.This film reminds me in some ways of "Zabriskie Point" (1970), a counter culture film which has a powerful ending that helps to make up for earlier plot problems.Based on a real-life event, "Electra Glide In Blue" gets off to a slow start. Even midway through, one wonders whether this film is going anywhere or has any point to it. It is, and it does. You just have to wait for that powerful ending and its cinematic message of a tormented America, from the point of view of one lonely cop, just doing his job.

Everybody likes to ride around on a motorcycle in the sunshine, and, what with the desert climate of southern Arizona, you get not only the wind in your hair and the scent of sagebrush but a rosy tan as well. Unfortunately, Robert Blake and his partner, Zipper (Billy Green Bush), are constrained by their police uniforms and what they call proper police procedure, or PPP. The movie is essentially about how closely the police force follows that procedure when murder is involved.Two old weirdos live in a desert trailer and when one is found murdered the other (Elisha Cook, Jr., more flamboozled than ever) is arrested. But did he do it? And, if so, why? The written story is dated. The affable and sympathetic Blake is taken under the wing of his superior, Mitch Ryan, a big blustering detective who beats up hippie informants while Blake must stand silently by. Yes, this is a movie which pits the ugly cops against the far-from-innocent but still human hippies. The hippies dress in rags, do dope, and -- hold on -- they have long hair. All they want is to be left unhassled, but Ryan is intent on cementing community relations by beating them to a pulp.Mitchell is not only a bully but, even worse, his drunken girl friend explains to Blake that he is also impotent, causing Mitchell to almost pop his cork and hate Blake, finally demoting him and putting him back in uniform on his hated police motorcycle. (He'd love to have a more colorful machine with Electraglide transmission.) I think Blake's motorcycle represents the police force, which in turn represents the society which the hippies must live in and which hates them for reasons that are "accidental" rather than "essential." Mainly, they look funny. (None of them can act, either.) In fact, I think Robert Blake's character must illustrate Edmund Burke's dictum, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." How else can we explain this good man's assassination by previously harassed hippies at the end? Why else does Blake suffer? He's guilty of no wrong doing, intelligent enough to solve a rather complicated homicide, and in the end courageous enough to tell his sadistic boss that the boss is full of horse hockey.The dialog is kind of stylized, especially Mitch Ryan's. He carries on with his rodomontade as if speaking to Jesus. It isn't exactly realistic. That's okay because at least it's an attempt to be original. The narrative, though, sometimes falls flat. After being promoted to detective by Ryan, Blake lovingly dresses himself in expensive new civilian clothes, if a modified cowboy outfit can be considered civilian, and strides outside only to look down and see that he's forgotten to put on his trousers. It's not really either credible or amusing, though it's supposed to be cute, I guess.The direction is okay. The camera is where it should be, and at the proper times, but -- can we have some kind of moratorium on slow-motion violence? Sheez! A pursued hippie on a motorcycle crashes through a cafe window and I fell asleep before he finally hit the floor.The climactic scene was shot in Monument Valley. Warning to all film makers. Lay off. That's John Ford territory.

This movie, like a lot of movies of that time are just way too cool...remember Vanishing Point or The Last Detail? Stuff like that...cool script...trippy music...strange characters...great locations...weird lighting...not too pretentious...very realistic while strange at the same time...you are laughing one minute, shocked the next...and usually very original...a lot of the music then was the same...let's see, Cinderella Liberty, Carnal Knowledge...I guess you could go on and on...but strange, cool little movies that you can't forget...and unlike many modern movies, not overdone...just right...usually has you walking away kinda scratching your head...Technically, I guess heavy duty film critics could find a million things wrong with them but even the flaws make the quality happen too...weird...I love movies like that...I guess because they don't spoon feed you like all too many of the movies of the last fifteen years or so do...again...just right...let's see, Serpico, The Lords of Flatbush...Midnight Cowboy ('69?)...on and on...