Electra Glide in Blue (1973) on Netflix
John Wintergreen patrols the Arizona highways on a motorcycle and wants a transfer to homicide. Crazy Willie tells him of an apparent suicide by shotgun, which Wintergreen reads as murder.
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- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb7.0/107,242 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes69%
Trailer
Plot summary
Zipper would rather park off the road with a comic book than work the highway, while his partner John Wintergreen, a Native American patrolman, is conscientious and friendly and has his eye on the homicide unit. Zipper and Wintergreen find an elderly man in the desert, confused and far from any road, and what he can say sends them to a shack nearby, where a man lies dead of a shotgun blast. Wintergreen argues the death is murder rather than suicide, since the shot went into the chest and not the head. The coroner wants no part of it. Detective Harve Poole comes around once a .22 bullet turns up among the pellets during the autopsy and $5,000 is reported missing from the man's home, and he takes Wintergreen on to help with the case.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Electra Glide in Blue (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- First-time director James William Guercio took a salary of one dollar so the production would have budget available to hire Conrad Hall as the cinematographer.
- According to Guercio in the DVD commentary, most of the film was shot without permits because the Arizona Highway Patrol did not cooperate with the production.
- Guercio and cinematographer Conrad Hall disagreed on how the film should look, so they compromised: Guercio shot the exteriors in a style reminiscent of John Ford, while Hall shot all the interiors however he saw fit.
- Robert Blake wrote in his 2012 autobiography Tales From a Rascal that the film was a very tough shoot and that he essentially co-directed it with Conrad Hall while James William Guercio "stood around".
- Robert Blake complained about production woes, lamented his $20,000 fee for a starring role and spoke badly of the film on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, yet his performance caught the attention of television executives and led to the police drama series Baretta.
