I'd read good stuff about this film, and it just wasn't very good. There was way too much overacting, and the main character was a friggin' dork. Why am I supposed to root for some highway patrol cop with a Napoleon complex? The ending was the only slightly satisfying aspect of it, and even then the blood looked fake. It was kinda funny seeing Peter Cetera as a hippie, though. For that I give it an extra star.
Motorcycle Cops, Friends, and Honesty Above All
As a 10 yr veteran cop in the 70's and 80's, this classic was an inspiration for all motor-cops. It sets the pace of law enforcement. Slow days combined with mystery, love, and deadly action. It shows why cops are so clickish, and about how friendship cop bonding is the most important ... except honesty. When your partner dies it's bad enough, but when it's you who does it ..... it's the end of the world. Then when you are finally on your way out of the rut and do a nice thing for someone .... it's your turn .... five stars for storyline, beauty, truth about the "job", and the love/hate we all experience.
Uneasy Riders
Don't look for the likes of this to play your local cineplex soon. It's a murder mystery about troubled Arizona cops directed as a film noir thriller in gorgeous color by a successful rock music promoter who never made a movie before or after it.
James William Guercio produced on a tiny budget and two-week schedule, hand-picked the cast, composed the music and gave up his salary to get legendary cinemaphotographer Conrad Hall to shoot it in the Monument Valley that John Ford used in his westerns, which this film stangely resembles. Indeed, Guercio grew up watching "The Searchers" and other Ford classics. He and Hall pay full homage to the great director here in a film that Ford surely would have hated.
This miracle of a movie is a metaphor for post-Vietnam America, when the last hippies were colliding with the first Ronald Reaganites. Seen on DVD today, "Electra Glide in Blue" is as far distant from "The Deer Hunter" as it is uncomfortably close to "Easy Rider." Don't be surprised when those two movies flash to mind, although they are quite different in tone and temperament from this less notorious imitation. It's as if Stanley Kubrick had shot it delirious on speed. Some called the film facist after it opened; now it's a minor cult classic.
Robert Blake's overlooked performance as the good but disenchanted motorcycle cop is certainly equal to his later work in "Tell Them Willie Boy Is Here" (also photographed by Hall) and his Oscar-nominated role as the mass murderer of "In Cold Blood." The cop's steadfast attempt to solve the murder of an old recluse is frustrated by his colleagues, the very ideals he upholds and the life goals he has set.
Musicians from the rock band "Chicago" appear in a concert sequence and bit parts, as does the very young Nick Nolte (glimpses of him, really) who years later chided the director for not using him more. Elisha Cook Jr. as a mind-blown old coot, Mitch Ryan as an overbearing detective, and Royal Dano as a cranky coroner stand out in the outstanding supporting cast.
"Electra Glide in Blue" ends with a predictable act of violence followed by an extremely long tracking shot that forces us to listen to a faux patriotic song and contemplate what we have seen. It's a bitter thematic closure that leaves us becalmed and bewildered by all the ironies..
Sam Peckinpah knew he couldn't call a movie Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia and get away with it. That's why he did it. When he undertook this nakedly personal project, in self-exile in Mexico, the director was a deeply bitter man out of favor with critics, the media, and the Hollywood establishment, which had just released his Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid in a mutilated version. "Bring Me the Head..." sounded like the parody title of an ultraviolent Sam Peckinpah movie, and he flung it in our faces just as his onscreen surrogate tosses the titular object at the camera.
Thing is, the movie is a masterpiece--raw, shocking, beautiful, and brave--in which Peckinpah confronts his enemies and his own demons. Warren Oates plays a gringo piano-player stuck in Mexico who... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Warren Oates - Isela Vega Director(s): Sam Peckinpah DVD Release Date: Released the 22 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Walker (Lee Marvin) strides through Los Angeles with the steel-eyed stare of a stone-cold killer, or perhaps a ghost. Betrayed by his wife and best friend, who gun him down point-blank and leave him for dead after a successful heist, Walker blasts his way up the criminal food chain in a quest for revenge. Did he survive the shooting or return from the grave, or is it all a dying dream? The question is left in the air in John Boorman's modern film noir, a brutal revenge thriller based on Richard Stark's novel The Hunter (remade by Brian Helgeland as Payback), set in the impersonal concrete and steel canyons of Los Angeles and eerily empty cells of Alcatraz. Walker kills without remorse, guided by shadowy "informant" Keenan Wynn, whose own agenda is carefully concealed, and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lee Marvin - Angie Dickinson Director(s): John Boorman DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Susan George (Straw Dogs) is ex-groupie Mary and Peter Fonda (Easy Rider) is wannabe-NASCAR driver Larry. They're thieves on the run from sheriff Vic Morrow (The Blackboard Jungle), who carries neither gun nor badge. According to director John Hough (The Legend of Hell House), his white trash cult classic was "an action picture with a lot of stunts." That about sums it up. The Tarantino favorite is slim on character development, but overstuffed with automobile-oriented action (most revolving around a 1969 Dodge Charger). Notable stunts include a game of chicken with a couple of 18-wheelers, a low-flying helicopter chase, and a death-defying leap over a moving bridge (Speed would up the ante with a bus). Adapted from the novel The Chase, Dirty... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Peter Fonda - Susan George Director(s): John Hough DVD Release Date: Released the 28 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Prime Cut is a strangely likeable if decidedly oddball thriller from 1972. A happy collision of gangster genre grit (validated by Lee Marvin's granite-faced lead performance) with a strain of shameless (though shrewd) exploitation not unfamiliar to screenwriter Robert Dillon (X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes), plus the kinetic, semi-documentary wit of director Michael Ritchie (The Candidate) makes Prime Cut both a straightforward noir and a satire of itself. Marvin plays Nick, an aging enforcer for the Chicago mob, sent to Kansas City to deal with a ruthless cattle baron (Gene Hackman) who owes a half-million to Windy City racketeers. Hackman's character (inexplicably named Mary Ann), dismissive of old-guard crime chieftains, has set up his own heartland empire... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Lee Marvin - Gene Hackman - Sissy Spacek Director(s): Michael Ritchie DVD Release Date: Released the 14 June 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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This vastly underrated Arthur Penn film from the mid-1970s ranks as one of the era's nastiest and most fascinating pieces of business, a detective story that shuttles back and forth between Hollywood and the Florida Keys, with a plot nearly as complex as Chinatown. Gene Hackman stars as a tired, aging private eye who, as a favor to a friend, agrees to track down a runaway teen. But the case turns out to be something much larger: a smuggling ring of Mayan antiquities. The human impulses get darker and darker and Hackman's character gets pulled in deeper and deeper, even as his own life is falling apart. Ultimately, in one of his best and most unsung performances, Hackman winds up hurting the people he is trying to help. A great cast includes Susan Clark, Jennifer Warren, a young... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Hackman - Jennifer Warren Director(s): Arthur Penn DVD Release Date: Released the 12 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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