Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

Electra Glide in Blue

I have loved movies for as long as I can remember. One of my earliest memories — I must have been about six years old — is of being so terrified by The Wizard of Oz that I covered my eyes for most of the film. Another is of a bizarre Disney film called The Three Caballeros, a mixture of animation and live action, which I saw in a cinema in Accra, Ghana, in the late 1950s, and of being bafflingly but erotically stirred by a sultry flamenco dancer who was flirting with the cartoon characters. These moments are the start of a long catalogue of subconscious influences that the cinema has had on my imagination and, no doubt, my personality. When I was at school I was a member of the film society and was profoundly affected (for some reason) by Juliet of the Spirits. In 1971 I lived in France for a year and went to the movies three or four times a week. I recall vividly oddities like Le Voyou, Bof, Le Beau Monstre — films I will probably never see again — as well as modern classics like The Conformist and Little Big Man. But none of these films, although they left indelible imprints on my mind, can really be described as crucially influential. The first film that had this effect on me, that for ever altered the way I responded to film, was Electra Glide in Blue.

There is a moment in every writer’s life when he or she consciously starts to think of himself or herself as a writer. It can happen early or late but as soon as that moment has arrived everything changes. That self-consciousness then mediates all experience. Electra Glide provided something similar for me which is why I select it as important. Up until I saw Electra Glide (in 1973) I had gone to the cinema as, if you like, a simple consumer, happy to be amused, thrilled, shocked or whatever. But when I saw Electra Glide I was no longer content with these unreflecting emotional responses. It was the first film I saw where I began actually to analyse how it worked; the first film I saw where I became excited by the process of movie-making, the manipulation of image and mood, rather than responding to it as a straightforward intellectual and sensual stimulant.

The film itself is an odd amalgam of thriller and road movie, of nihilism and wry humour, of action-adventure and morality tale. It tells the story of a motorcycle cop who wants to be a detective, who becomes one and, in the process of investigating a murder, discovers his ideals and standards are corrupted or misguided. It was written by Robert Boris and directed by James William Guercio, a former record producer, and as far as I know it is the only film he ever made. But for a debut it is extraordinary. There is a tremendous central performance by Robert Blake as the diminutive but tough motorcycle cop and the photography, by Conrad Hall, is audacious as well as sensational. I think it is the look of the film that is initially haunting — Monument Valley and the Arizona desert have always made great cinema — and on the wide screen the vast landscape with its lonely ribbon of road becomes a potent symbol. In fact I think that there lies the explanation of Electra Glide’s special allure: as the story unfolds the film subtly plays with key metaphors and icons of Americana and American film and refashions them for a modern audience. You have the elemental and essential loneliness of the American West; the one brave man; violent death and raw carnality (there is a bravura performance of white-trash sexuality from Jeannine Riley); you have the eternal appeal of the road movie — the transitoriness of experience, the possibilities of freedom — and an ending of shocking and absurd tragedy.

Electra Glide in Blue is not a great movie but it understands, I think, what movies can do best (and other art forms can’t) at a visceral and unconscious level, and exploits these particular strengths with seductive skill and brio. It certainly changed — irrevocably — the way I went to the cinema and it is a measure of how much it affected me that I still find myself thinking about it over twenty years later.

1998