American movies, 1970-1979

from James William Guercio's Electra Glide in Blue (1973)
This is the only film directed by musician/entrepreneur Guercio, who, at the time of filming, managed Chicago (the band, not the city) in its "25 or 6 to 4" heyday. A tribute to John Ford's Monument Valley westerns and an ironic reverse-Easy Rider biker cops vs. sleazoid counterculture creeps black comedy, the film contains a great Robert Blake performance and Conrad Hall's gorgeous cinematography. It is eye-poppingly bizarre and compelling in its fine first half before turning into a plot-heavy cliched thriller in its second half, though it manages to get nice and weird again in its final ten minutes. I saw part of it in a hotel in Alabama before the TV broke. When I tried to fix it, I found several empty airplane-sized liquor bottles behind the set. That is to say, the bottles were the size found on airplanes, not the size of airplanes. My god, imagine an alcoholic hotel maid trying to hide a Lufthansa Airbus-sized bottle of Jim Beam. What a sight. I caught up with the whole thing on DVD a few years later.