MovieChat Forums > Electra Glide in Blue (1973) Discussion > Thoughts on the ending, and the film as ...

Thoughts on the ending, and the film as a whole...

posted 18 years ago by JimLoneWolf
7 replies | jump to latest

I loved this film, and can even forgive the ending for its trappings of unfair cynicism against the hippie counterculture. I agree that the setup and payoff are brilliant and emotionally affecting, and even strangely believable. I give Guercio credit for recognizing that the hippie pulled over earlier in the film would never have killed anyone...which is why I feel it was a brilliant decision to introduce the much more menacing "passenger," which absolved the ending of anti-hippie bias for me and other discerning viewers.

Still, the ingredients ARE present for those who wish to see this film as an anti-hippie, pro-law enforcement screed to do exactly that. They would be wrong, but who will point that out to them? This film is unique in the way it says one thing to intellignet viewers and another thing entirely for those who come into the film with preconceived notions that it is a "pro-Fascist" work. I speak here not only of those who would praise the film on such shallow grounds, but also those (like the critics who saw the film at the 1973 Cannes Film Festival) who would condemn it for the same reason.

For this reason, I sincerely hope that law enforcement officers don't take this film's depiction of violent hippies as anything close to reality...because it isn't. The reason hippies were even featured in this context (besides this film's intention to "turn the tables" on Easy Rider), is because the film is in many ways an homage to John Ford Westerns...with hippies (with their comparable dress and long hair) standing in for "Indians". I would consider the treatment of hippies in this film as akin to Ford's treatment of Indians...as a noble, unjustly persecuted race with SOME ignoble members.

In conclusion, I find this film (like Ford's work) as brilliant a piece of cinema as an be found anywhere. It is when the film is interpreted in a political context (as I fear the film's advocates, as well as its detractors, have emphasized), that the film fails. John Ford's films were never meant to be taken as diatres against the Native Americans, and viewing them from this perspective is to misunderstand their essence and insult the genius of their director. So too with James William Guercio and Electra Glide in Blue

Here's hoping the film's status as a poignant, mythologizing depiction of the futility of heroism in the modern age overtakes its weakness as a social, political, and historic document.

It was never intended that way to begin with.

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[–] IceboxMovies 18 years ago

I just finished watching the film (after taping it two weeks ago off TCM) and the ending is still bothering me. I can't see what elements in the movie made Wintergreen deserving of that violent death. Besides having an affair with his future partner's girlfriend and pursuing the murder case simply to be promoted, Wintergreen did not seem to me like an antihero of any kind. Why did the ending have to be so tragic for him? There just isn't enough stuff in the film to prove to me why Wintergreen needed to be killed off at the end. It doesn't make any sense. It might have seemed logical if Wintergreen were a more corrupt cop, but not here.

Sure, innocent heroes in movies are killed all the time, but how is it that heroes like John Wintergreen die horrible deaths while Travis Bickle and Alex De Large get away with murder???

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One Word: Plastics

[–] dawnfairy 18 years ago

I was 21 when that movie came out and saw it. He died because he went back to the dangers of the street.

Back in that day, you were either Republican or Democrat and both those meant very specific things and very implied things. You were also either pro war or anti war, hawk, dove, for the police and what they had to do or you were not. Alice's Restaurant spoke to all those ideas and instituions. It was a time of shaking up all the social institutions. It was a good period. WE needed to be rattled. I wish we still had the polar opposites. Now we are totally splintered and nothing means anything anymore.

Wintergreen wanted to promote because that is what civil servants do - it is more than the prestige. It is the $$. It is also the hours/OT. He hated his bike - the big fat elephant under his ass (funny considering how much the actor liked bikes himself). Cops die on the streeet. Thy don't die behind a desk and they don't necessarily go down being detectives. Street cops do more often.

He got sent back to what he considered hell; a fallen cowboy out on the road/range and falling victim to the modern-day Native American. Their territory.

What a spectacular ending shot. That guy, Robert, has been in some really wonderful movies, been the fortunate person who could catch such a shot and I just wish the little effer would have done more or would get his tail in gear and do a couple more before he checks out.

Runswithabeer should get hitwithahammer.

[–] IceboxMovies 18 years ago

dawnfairy wrote:

"I just wish the little effer would have done more or would get his tail in gear and do a couple more before he checks out."

I wish he could too, but now that everyone knows that Robert Blake murdered his wife, I doubt that he'll be accepted back into the acting world. Plus, he is currently working on a FARM!

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One Word: Plastics

[–] JimLoneWolf 18 years ago

donzzan,
I taped the movie off TCM myself.

You were right to be bothered by the ending, it is MEANT to be an unfair fate for Wintergreen, that is the tragedy of the film.

The irony is that he was trying to HELP the people in the van by returning the guy's driver's license...the hippies mistook his signalling them as meaning he was gonna pull them over and search the van (they must have had drugs in it).

So the fact that the ending bothered you the way it did was totally intentional, Wintergreen IS shown to be a sympathetic character. I was bothered more by the depiction of the hippies as shotgun-bearing killers myself...I haven't met a single hippie in my entire life (and I've know a few of them) who conforms to that stereotype.

I must say that as much as I enjoyed this film, Easy Rider is a much truer depiction of "the way things go" in society. Hippies are by their very nature victims rather than victimizers, and the ending of this fim (despite the film itself being fair towards the manner in which law enforcement persecutes them) is misleading in that sense.
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[–] dawnfairy 18 years ago

People use images to be hip or to cover up what they really are. I know one guy I went to junior college with back then who was so hippie LOOKING, but used it as a hipos statment. Turned right around and went all captialist ( he claimed vehemntly to NOT be) and make a bundle in real estate right as we went into the 80s.

Runswithabeer should get hitwithahammer.

[–] 18 years ago

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[–] 18 years ago

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