Electra Glide in Blue (1973)

(On Cable TV, January 2022) If I was to take all of the reasons why I generally dislike the New Hollywood of the 1970s and package them up in a single film, I’m not sure I could do better than Electra Glide in Blue. Coming from one of the darkest periods in film history, it’s a dirty, dispiriting film that finds no heroes in either police or hippies and manages to pull a tragedy out of a murder mystery in its last thirty seconds. Much of the film’s plot has to do with a murder investigation, with an ambitious patrolman looking to be transferred over to homicide and working with a partner to investigate a shotgun death. But this isn’t your usual police thriller, and soon enough the defeats accumulate more quickly than progress in identifying the killer. Everyone is morally dirty here, and there are no refuges. Splendid Arizona exterior cinematography is met with 1970s-dark-and-ugly interior shots, with the characters not coming across as timeless. While Robert Blake does quite well as a short-statured good cop punching above his height, the rest of the film isn’t always as interesting, and the gut-punch of a conclusion is an undeniable downer. But those were the early 1970s in cinema—no wonder Hollywood war roaring to go back to popular crowd-pleasers before the end of the decade.