Plastic Man

By JAY COCKS

ELECTRA GLIDE IN BLUE

Directed by JAMES WILLIAM GUERCIO

Screenplay by ROBERT BORIS

Everything about this movie seems carefully calculated for effect. Even the director. The ubiquitous advertisements for Electro Glide in Blue feature the 27-year-old James William Guercio in aviator shades and high-lace boots, looking like Bogdanovich from the neck up and DeMille from the knees down. It would not matter, of course, what the ads or the director looked like if the movie deserved either of the adjectives often associated with first features --"interesting" or "promising." In its slick pomposity, though, the publicity campaign has neatly captured the essence of the film.

Guercio, who is also a record producer (Chicago; the third Blood, Sweat and Tears album), plunders other movies for ideas the way he might round up a group for a recording session. "I laid out the movie like an album," he tells interviewers. "Fast scene, slow scene, funny scene." What results is an eclectic, impersonal exercise, a market research report on fads, trends, styles.

Heading the list of Blue's unacknowledged credits is Easy Rider, with all its patchwork imitations. The script concerns a sawed-off Arizona motorcycle cop named John Wintergreen (Robert Blake) who yearns to achieve style and respect by becoming a detective like Marve Poole (Mitchell Ryan). His goonish partner Zipper (Billy Green Bush) laughs at his aspirations, but their discovery of the body of a desert old-timer who may have been associated with some drug traffic gives Winter-green the chance to prove his stuff.

To no one's surprise but his own, Wintergreen discovers that advancement means compromise and corruption, and that the world is mean, arbitrary and crazy. At the end, trying to off the seat of his motorcycle and dies, dazed and upright, sitting in the middle of a wilderness highway like a discarded puppet.

This tinny reworking of the end of Easy Rider is given almost Wagnerian overtones. It is staged in Monument Valley, whose landscapes of eerie majesty have graced many a John Ford film. The camera tracks slowly back along the white divider line of the highway for minute upon minute, while a rock group intones a suitable overorchestrated threnody. Here and throughout, Conrad Hall's photography is resourceful but a little fancy. Like Guercio, he seems more concerned with embellishing a scene than getting at its essence.

Blake's performance is blunt and highly charged; Mitchell Ryan is tensely controlled except for a regrettable mad scene. But everyone else in the cast has apparently confused energy with volume, intensity with hysteria. The result might most kindly be described as dissonant. Even a record producer should have been able to spot do that. a longhair a favor, he gets blasted

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