Electra Glide in Blue

With its atmosphere, The Blue Electra Glide is open about its relation to Easy Rider, explicitly referring to that film in a scene. It acts as the other side of the same coin when it looks at the era of the flower children movement through the eyes of police officers, who have a significantly more conservative idea of the American dream and freedom, often closely resembling the attitudes of guard dogs. The failure of the utopian ideas of the hippies was already exposed in Easy Rider, but Hopper's piece maintained the illusion of crushing the dream with a brutal attack from the hostile environment. The Blue Electra Glide goes much further in this disillusionment: it shows the degeneration of ideals corroded by drug addiction, trafficking, passivity, and inability to face problems. Guercio's film evidently struck a chord with the 70s generation and received decent acclaim. Since I don't have, and won't have, the opportunity to follow his development as a filmmaker, I'm not completely certain about the extent of his talent, and I don't accept his film without reservations. With its aesthetic of violence, it closely resembles the approach of Sam Peckinpah, as evidenced, for example, by the scene of the wild chase by the motorcycle gang. At times, the film doesn't bother with logic, and if I wanted to dig deeper into it, I would find many flaws. However, the positive impressions still persist, and they are enough to give the film an overall impression of 70%. (07/10/2018)