Whether reactionary, like Walking Tall , or liberal like the Virgil Tibbs series, all these films eulogized their police heroes. But this love affair with the cops was only one side of Hollywood's treatment, In other genres, the police appeared noticeably less favorable. The counter-culture films of the mid-Sixties, such as Easy Rider or The Strawberry Statement, conveyed the boys in blue as nothing more than kill-joy malcontents, an image that would later be echoed in contemporary-cowboy, driver and trucker movies, such as Vanishing Point and J.W. Coop (both 1971) and later in Sam Peckinpah's Convoy (1978).
A handful of films with cop heroes did not employ the use of conventional crime-story framework. Sidney Lumet's Serpico (1973) told of the hero's hounding by colleagues and bosses as he attempts to expose corruption within the police force. Serpico was based on the real-life cop whose revelations stimulated the Knapp Commission, reporting in 1972 on the wholesale corruption of the New York City Police Department. Al Pacino gave the central role a thoroughly convincing quality of stubborn idealism.
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| Been through the desert on a bike with no name. (Electra Glide In Blue ,1973) |
SPOILER ALERT:
Electra Glide in Blue (1973) was a probing exploration of the psychological roots of police machismo,. Robert Blake portrays John Wintergreen, a short motorcycle cop who boasts of being the same height as Alan Ladd. Shown lovingly donning his boots and gun, Wintergreen dreams of becoming a stetsoned detective, much in the vein of his idol Harve Pool (Mitchell Ryan). Temporarily assigned to assist the star investigator on a murder case, Wintergreen discovers his hero's impotence as both detective and lover. Back on motorcycle patrol, Wintergreen is gratuitously murdered by hippies - an inversion of the Easy Rider ending.