Observations on the Films of Elvis Presley
I hesitated before posting this review of the films of Elvis Presley and did so for many reasons. First of all, it isn't a review at all, in that I have attempted no dispassionate analysis and have done precious little research. I have merely offered a personal view, and my comments here are of no more importance than that. I have a feeling that the criticisms are overly harsh and more than a little po-faced. If Elvis had better things to be doing with his talent - he did - the films are indeed fun for the most part, and I enjoyed them a lot more than the writing here would suggest. For all the flaws of, say, Tickle Me and Kissin' Cousins, I have to confess that I enjoyed them immensely. So I guess that I will one day write further observations on the Elvis movies, this time in a more generous and light-hearted spirit. Heck, I even like Harum Scarum! It's got everything!
I will say that I am a lifelong fan of Elvis Presley and consider him a singer of the highest order, and in all kinds of music. I don't doubt that others will not share my views, interests, or concerns. But if my views on the films seem overly harsh in places, then they are not motivated by any ill-will towards Elvis, the very opposite. I will make an issue of things that those who appreciate the films may see as unimportant and irrelevant. We can let things pass and enjoy the films for their sheer entertainment value.
Many others may think that 'the Elvis film' as such is hardly worth the effort, dismissing all Elvis films as mere commercial vehicles designed to use the man's star attraction merely to empty the pockets of gullible Elvis fans desperate, through Elvis' artistic inaction as studio artist and live performer in the sixties, to see and hear Elvis do anything at all. That does indeed seem to have been the marketing strategy of Elvis' loathsome mismanager Tom Parker. That's too harsh an assessment in general, but not too far from the truth either.
I shall make clear that there are actually a few good Elvis films, and a few more beyond that number which have the merit of entertainment value in the least. I'll not mince words on the rest, though, given not merely their utter mediocrity but their underlying cynicism. Whilst I don't like to be harsh, I am clear in the view that Elvis Presley would have been better served applying his immense talents to more worthwhile projects. I have no doubt that his fans would have been better served too. Films such as Kissin' Cousins are not just execrable in themselves, but for the quality time lost on truly artistic endeavours. Such things undermine everything that was healthy and worthy in the music of Elvis Presley, the very things that drew fans to him in the first place. He was appallingly mishandled as an artist and, unfortunately, money, what his manager called 'business,' bought if not quite his complicity - he did protest, in however an ineffectual and mild a manner - then certainly his conformity. Elvis remained passive and never rebelled; he never said 'no,' and never wrought the changes he wanted and certainly needed. If that was his crime, it was also his punishment. It cost him his music, his artistic integrity, and ultimately his life.
The picture I have used to present this article is made up of images from all of Elvis' films. I did think of selecting my favourite photos only, but decided against it. Whilst some classic images have made the canvas, I have deliberately selected others to fit a certain theme I have running through my critical survey. It's a theme that runs through the Elvis films themselves. If there are a lot of scantily clad females in the picture, then that pretty much reflects a consistent thread in these films, girls throwing themselves "incontinently" before Elvis (to use the word employed by the BFI). Females were added in ever great numbers to these films as a decoration to mask the fact that the films were getting significantly worse in theme and quality. It's a desperate strategy betraying an increasing paucity of ideas, and it gets very tedious very quickly.
Many of my comments will court controversy. Many will be deemed irrelevant. It's just throwaway entertainment after all. I just thought Elvis was better than that and capable of more than that. I know for a fact that many Elvis fans will be upset, and will criticize me for being so dismissive, so contemptuous, even. There's room for a little undemanding entertainment and a little fun in a world that seems to be forever on the brink of being overrun by catastrophic forces. I agree. I like to be entertained myself, and I certainly like a little fun and even the odd frolic. I can watch any of these Elvis films and be entertained for an hour and a half. As much as I complain about Kissin' Cousins, I could happily watch it again. I've seen far worse films than Elvis films. (I'm not a great film buff and found most films painful to suffer). Job done, then. The problem with 'the Elvis film' as such, though, was that it manufactured escapism on an industrial scale, and used Elvis' talent as the means to that rather cheap and nasty end.
The films were delivered as pure factory fodder designed for mass consumption. Consumption was once a fatal disease. It still is. It consumed Elvis' talent, it preyed on the good will of the fans (and their pockets), and it corrupted the very core of Elvis' being. He died an inflated, hollow shell of the man he once was. People can call it fun. And it often is. But when I see the same damned scenes, hear the same damned gags, the same damned songs, with the same cast of bimbos and cute children, over and over again, I feel like vomiting the whole awful rubbish up over all those involved. And, believe me, I am choosing my words carefully here in order to cause least offence. I could be more blunt. I think the film commitments were not merely a waste of Elvis' time (and a waste of the fans' money), but perverted the relation between artist and audience. Elvis gave parasitic forces access to his ample fan base and allowed them to predate upon their loyalty, love, and devotion. The response back is that the fans wanted 'fun,' and for a very long time indeed the figures seemed to back that assertion up. Whenever Elvis did attempt 'serious' acting, the films were relative under-achievers. But in the end, an end which came all too soon - Elvis, despite his talent and his star attraction, did not have longevity as an actor - the fun was over and the fans were showing up in less and less numbers. The focus on numbers finished Elvis as an actor. It did from the start.
I'll not hide my contempt. I will, as I say, offer a personal view, and admit that on that basis, if you object, then your view is just as good as mine. I offer my view as a lifelong Elvis fan who has long considered that the artistic importance and legacy of Elvis Presley has fallen into serious critical neglect. There are many reasons for this, and I don't claim that the films are one of the main ones. The films themselves are symptomatic of a deeper malaise. But they did serve to create a certain public image which defined Elvis as an artist, and not a very serious one.
In 1966 Elvis recorded stellar gospel, folk, blues, and ballads in the single recording session. The non-gospel tracks were thrown away as 'bonus' songs on the “California Holiday” soundtrack album. That's an abomination. Elvis was mishandled by tasteless, tacky people, his art made to appear tasteless and tacky. Elvis' true art was judged merely secondary to the film persona, and that is how the critical and popular public came to view him. It made him wealthy but it confined and ultimately crushed him. On the whole, the film career caused immense damage. He really could and should have been making great music throughout the sixties. Instead, in the decade he had done more than anyone to create, he was largely absent, becoming the very thing that that decade had eclipsed.
So I am not dispassionate in my assessment of the Elvis film. If you enjoy the Elvis films in general, you won't like many or even most of my comments. Taken on their individual merits, many of these films are amiable and pass the time. It's better than watching the news and worrying yourself to death over the details of a world that is well on its way to Hades. Coming thick and fast, one after the other, though, these films are a form of Hell themselves. Elvis himself thought so.
I can't, in all honesty, claim to be much of a fan of Elvis films. I'm not alone in my antipathy, of course. But it goes deeper. I'm not much of a film buff, either, and musicals are among my least favourite of all film genres. So I shan't be giving a dispassionate review, merely my impression of these films, drawing attention to certain things that the three wise monkeys would close their senses to. I should probably say nothing myself. But I'm at a loose end and have nothing better to be doing with my time at the moment. And having spent so much time watching the films over the years ...
Let's begin by making the point that the films did serve a purpose and had an appeal which is understandable. When young I was always excited for any glimpse of Elvis, and the films were really the only chance for any sight of our idol in action. The footage of Elvis performing on TV shows in the fifties was not readily available, and since Elvis had effectively disappeared from television and live performance in the sixties, you had to watch these films simply to see Elvis at all. Even when I was young I understood that the films were, in the main, principally a vehicle to showcase a set of songs. I therefore tended to see an Elvis film as a kind of padded out music video. Whenever an Elvis film was on television, as they often were, I would be waiting under the screen with my mother's trusty Grundig tape recorder ready to tape each song as it came on. Some of the performances of these songs were great but, as time went by, I started to notice that they had become familiar in sound and formulaic in performance. He did the earnest ballads the same way, the poor leading lady on the receiving end doing her level best to look deeply moved by the attention, completely bowled over by the gushing romanticism of it all. Then there were the obligatory rock pastiches, which usually involved Elvis as a member of a band in a nightclub. In every film, Elvis' hitherto undiscovered singing talents were discovered by accident, and soon directed by design, as Elvis became the big attraction, in a club or a carnival, wherever. And there he would do a rhythmic number and do his little puppet dance, performing as the 'king of rock'n'roll' rather than actually be it. Offered a regular spot at the club in Girls! Girls! Girls!, Elvis says “Thanks Sam! I'm still a fisherman.”
Then he'd get involved in fights, lose the girl, sing a sad song of regret, maybe get involved in more fights, win the girl back, and all would end well, with a happy song and/or a love song, with everyone gathering in celebration.
In my pre-teen years I looked forward to seeing an Elvis film. But I soon realized that in many instances we were dealing with those cheap boxes of chocolates: the cover looked good and the promise of what the box contained had you salivating at the mouth, but when you tasted the contents you were quickly left with a feeling of disappointment. Having worked your way through the box you were left with a sickly feeling. That's an extreme statement, but not by that much. The big problem is that Elvis did far too many films of the same cheap and cheerful/cheerless character. It was a fake confection. He made over thirty films from 1956 to 1969, which is rather a lot. I am confident in my claim that at least half a dozen of these films are actually very good, and that at least another half dozen could be classed as entertaining and/or worthwhile (depending upon taste). Of the rest, some are actually worth watching for curiosity value, whilst others make one embarrassed for being an Elvis fan, and embarrassed for Elvis and his reputation. Some evade accurate description; you really have to see them to understand the depths to which Elvis could plummet. I make no apologies for spending more time than is healthy on these latter aspects. My point is that their faults cannot be glossed over as 'fun.'
Rather than keep writing generally, though, I'd prefer to go straight to the films and comment on each. Generalizations say everything and nothing. It's the details that matter. I don't propose to write a guide. I'm not interested in the films enough to be able to write such an objective assessment. I'll write as an Elvis fan, giving some indication as to whether a film is worthy of his talent or your time – or not. To be honest, more than anything I am interested in conveying some of my own memories of watching Elvis on film. You may notice that my comments below are not as critical as the commentary above would lead you to expect. Which maybe makes the point that I have, over the years, greatly enjoyed the Elvis films, even enjoyed complaining about the bad ones or the most embarrassing scenes! It's a paradoxical world, the Elvis world. And I am a paradoxical critic. Would I watch Tickle Me one more time? Yes.
Love Me Tender
20th Century Fox
Director: Robert Webb
Based on a story 'The Reno Brothers' by Maurice Geraghty
89 minutes
Opened: November 15 1956
In this, his first outing on the big screen, Elvis is co-star rather than lead. That was a wise move, with Elvis being given the time and space to ease himself into the acting business rather than having to carry the whole film as the star turn. The film is a post-Civil War drama involving a love triangle. A Confederate soldier (Richard Egan) who was thought to have been killed in the war returns home only to find his sweetheart (Debra Paget) now married his younger brother (Elvis). The situation creates tensions back home, with Elvis' character Clint Reno becoming increasingly insecure and irrational in his jealousy. Finally, conflict explodes and Elvis is killed by the eminently reasonable and noble Vance Reno. If the ending isn't quite happy, then at least it brings the impossible situation to a conclusion, and we get a superimposed image of a ghostly Elvis reprising the title song over the final graveyard scene. That was enough to appease the Elvis fans disgruntled by having their hero killed off in his first film. You have to keep the punters happy, ever ready to keep turning up.
I always thought this a very strange vehicle for Elvis' first film. 1956 was the year that Elvis took the world by storm with hits like “Heartbreak Hotel,” “Hound Dog,” “Don't Be Cruel,” “Blue Suede Shoes.” “Love Me Tender” is a world away from the new world Elvis was ushering in. In the film, Elvis is pure “country,” a “poor boy” (to use the title of one of the songs in the film) and in jeans. It's a convoluted tale, bearing all the hallmarks of a B-movie western. It's all well done in those terms, and comes to its predictable end. I don't much like westerns, so more than anything I found the film boring. Those who like westerns may find it worthy; it's well enough done in its own terms. The most memorable part of the film is Elvis' death scene, which goes on for so long that I for one was praying that he'd soon be dead, or that someone would plug him again and put us all out of our misery. And then we get a reprise, Elvis as a ghost singing the title track in the graveyard. I've only seen the film a couple of times. I'll make no bones about it, I find the film boring. I admire Elvis' ambitions to become a serious actor, and he acquits himself well enough here in a complicated role (marrying his brother's wife, when he had believed his brother to have been killed in the war). But I've seen more than my share of B-movie westerns, and they don't excite me at all. In its favour, I will say that the film is a notch or two above many of those of its ilk I have seen.
But there are problems with the film. It may be the 1860's, but Elvis gets to do his thing, sing, play guitar, and shake a leg. The anachronistic scenes in which Elvis gets up to shake his hips as the king of rock'n'roll country style stick out, and give a foretaste of what Elvis would be doing in his next film – still country and blue jeans, still rocking the world, but this time in a contemporary setting. At risk of seeming overly-critical, I don't like to see Elvis, the Memphis Flash, whose styles and music owed more to Beale Street and R&B than blue jeans, being portrayed as a “Hollywood Hillbilly.” I don't like Elvis singing “We're Gonna Move” as a male counterpart to Rosemary Clooney singing “This Old House.” Elvis was the real thing, not ersatz country for pop consumption, and that's how he ought to have been on screen. Here were the first signs that he was going to be in the clutches of those who prefer the fake and the pastiche. Too long in those clutches, and Elvis, the real deal, would be turned into pastiche, effectively performing the role that he had once embodied to the very core of his being. The dangers of Hollywood inauthenticity were there from the start: Elvis' musicians Bill Black and Scotty Moore couldn't get a role in the film because those in charge decided that they didn't sound 'hillbilly' enough! The danger is that of reimagining Elvis' rockabilly as a pure fake and sanitized Hollywood hillbilly.
On the plus side, “Love Me Tender” is one of Elvis' greatest ever songs, whilst “Poor Boy” is infectious. I believe that Elvis didn't care for the latter song, considering it to have been foisted on him. Such would be the story of Elvis' film career, I'm afraid. And “Poor Boy” is easily one of his better film songs. He was to sing much worse. Should he have said “no” right from the very start to material that did not meet his own standards, exercise his own quality control? When you sign contracts you are in danger of signing away your agency and autonomy. How to keep the latter and make the money you want to make is at the heart of the dialectic of art and commerce. Elvis was managed by people who were all 'business.' Elvis followed where the management led, signed the contracts, and was from then on obligated.
Loving You
Paramount Pictures
Producer: Hal Wallis
Director: Hal Kanter
from a story by Mary Agnes Thompson
101 minutes
Opened July 9 1957
This was a film I loved from the moment I saw it, not least because it bore a strong relation to the Elvis we knew, or thought we knew, the young rockabilly singer taking the world by storm. The story is familiar. Country boy and local singer gets discovered, excites crowds, takes off, becomes a big performer, hits the road, takes the place by storm everywhere he goes. Noticing the way the girls go mad in the crowd, and seeing the potential in the marketing rather than the music, press agent Lizabeth Scott seeks to manage the rise to fame and fortune. And, of course, nothing goes smooth. I'll not bother discussing what would soon become the obligatory themes: Elvis chases girl whilst lots of girls chase Elvis, Elvis loses girl, Elvis has a fight or fights with rivals, Elvis wins on all scores, Elvis regains girl, Elvis triumphs and ends on a song on the big stage. This is the basic Elvis film 'plot.' Take it as read that this is what happens. Watching such antics I would just shout get on with it, impatient for the next song. But it's actually done well here. The performance of “Mean Woman Blues,” followed by the fight with the surly brute who had been baiting Elvis all night is classic.
The songs in “Loving You” are great, and are showcased very well. In fact, these are the real strength of the film. On a critical note, after having watched this film a dozen times, I did start to realize that Elvis was being packaged as a very Hollywood version of rockabilly. You don't really notice it too much in this film, since the songs are so outstandingly good and showcased so well that you have no option but to enjoy them - “Got a Lot O Livin' To Do,” “Party,” “Mean Woman Blues” in particular, although “Teddy Bear” was the massive hit. With respect to the latter, I heard someone say that this was the point at which Elvis “sold out to the girls.” There is a strong suggestion of that in the film. The audiences are packed with screaming girls. Just like the real Elvis show. I've read critics refer to Elvis impressing his audiences of teenage girls but no-one else. There's a certain contempt and meanness in such criticisms, with the heavy implication that Elvis' music was fit to excite only those who knew no better but lacked the substance to impress any audience that knew real blues, country, and rock. Well, yes, Elvis was the idol of the youth. Which I think we already knew. But Elvis came up via the country route, and caused a storm wherever he went before those audiences. That's how he made his name and made it to Hollywood. Those who see the screen image and no more see nothing at all.
Elvis is in fine form here and you can certainly see what all the excitement was about. But there are dangers of him coming to be trapped within an identity foisted on him by others' perceptions of his popularity. For all of the 'toughness' in the rock numbers like “Mean Woman Blues” and “Party” (and just what on Earth is that boast about being able to “shake a chicken in the middle of the room” all about?), even here, with Elvis in a cowboy stage outfit that is far removed from his Lansky Brothers' styles, it is all very much a performance. That's Hollywood, of course. It's entertainment. It's very good entertainment. But note the defence of Elvis in the film when he finds himself in trouble with the law – he's basically a good, decent boy, and not remotely a rebel. That's the message. There's no rock'n'roll rebellion underway at all, it's all just good clean fun. Elvis is safe. Even when he does the slowed down blues ending to “Got a Lot O' Livin' To Do,” singing:
“Come on baby, to make a party takes two
Oh yes I've got a lot of living to do
A whole lot of loving to do
And there's no one who I'd rather do it with-a than you.”
I find it interesting that Elvis' love interest in the film, the very virginal Dolores Hart, would shortly afterwards become a nun. It's also fairly hilarious to see Elvis, this supposedly wild rockabilly rebel, being so shocked at being stalked to his dressing room by a predatory and very sexually excited female fan, and seeing him seeking to run a mile! I always had a feeling that the reality of the rock'n'roll world was nothing like this at all. Talk about anti-sexual signalling! The truth came out years ago, although the fake moralists of the contemporary world are still trying to make names and money by selling scandal. I just call the bluff of such folk and demand the return of traditional morality, only to see them turn tail and run. I'm not keen on prurient attitudes.
The messages being conveyed in these films run counter to what we would have thought to be the truth (and was the truth, if the many accounts we now read are even half true). It's all about making rock rebellion safe, portraying Elvis as a nice boy for nice girls. I'm suspicious of that kind of fakeness. Unchecked over time, it becomes a sickly confection.
I'm less keen on the film than I once was. I still love the songs, though, and I love the way that “Got a Lot O Livin' To Do” and “Mean Woman Blues” are staged. I don't much care for the cowboy outfit for the big stage, seeing them as the early equivalents of jumpsuits at Las Vegas. They do fit the persona of country artists in the day, which is fine. But I thought that Elvis was something different, rockabilly, fusing blues and country. We need to remember that Elvis was turned down by The Grand Ole Oprey, and was accused, by one of The Louvain Brothers for one, of singing "n*gg*r music." I'll point that out for the benefit of folkies out there who continue to sneer at Elvis as mere "pop." He was pop, and his race-mixing was far more revolutionary, courageous, and liberatory than anything most of his critics have ever done, for all of their folk purity. I rather like the idea that Elvis was just too much for the staid old country tastes of those established venues.
The musical numbers were directed by Charles O'Curran, husband of Patti Page. Whilst they are very professionally done, Elvis here is very much joining the world of ersatz pop country (Clooney, Bennett, Laine, Page etc) rather continuing his challenge to it as the marginalised real thing, the rockabilly rebel who is breaking down the doors and coming in from the outside to blow the established world apart at the seams. Instead of changing the old world, though, there was evidently a risk of him coming to be absorbed and changed by it, making it big on that world's own terms and hence being corrupted.
This film, with the image of Elvis in blue jeans, probably made the most impact visually of all of Elvis' fifties films. I have heard The Rolling Stones' Keith Richards describe Elvis' impact in terms of a world that went from black and white to technicolour. Interestingly, “Loving You” was the only Elvis film in the fifties that was filmed in colour. In the 1980s, British rock'n'roller Shakin' Stevens became the biggest selling act of the decade by dressing as the Elvis of “Loving You,” all blue denims and wiggling hips. The problem is that whilst this image was indeed the Elvis that was projected onto the world by this film, it really wasn't Elvis at all. He drew his styles from other than country, and was noted for some pretty sharp dressing in the fifties. He was a regular visitor to Lansky Brothers down on Beale Street. He was a peacock and a dandy among the rednecks. That's an important point to note, given the way Elvis' image and identity started to take on a life of its own from the very start, independent of Elvis' own inclinations and interests. In time, it would soon eclipse the real Elvis, becoming a steel-hard casing that would suffocate all life within.
After that, we have to judge exactly what the plan was – was Elvis to be considered to be a moody actor in the mould of Marlon Brando and James Dean, with songs to match? There are hints of that in “Loving You,” and in the two films to follow.
The film is clearly autobiographical, with Deke Rivers as a singing truck driver who excites the crowds, particularly the girls, and makes it big as a singing star. Of course, all the usual conflicts along the way are resolved and Elvis is reunited with his friends. I just find the Lizabeth Scott character the most interesting here, older woman, ambitious career woman, who determines to take Elvis over and manage him all the way to fame and fortune. She takes 50% too, just as Tom Parker came to do with Elvis. Elvis effectively became an employee in his own career. Here we see a repeated theme: the artist working for the manager instead of the manager working for the artist. The film was effectively Scott's swansong at Hollywood, her reputation never recovering from her suing the scandal magazine Confidential in 1955 for its allegations that she was a lesbian.
Britain's Picturegoer praised Elvis' “attack, sex appeal.” That may sound good, and certainly was for 1957, but you can't build a career on that, not least when the basic plot involves Elvis in pursuit of 'nice' girls only, seeing as he is basically a 'nice' boy himself. Past a certain age, it begins to look fake at best, and plain odd and strangely unbelievable in the main. But that's anticipating my criticism of the later films.
Jailhouse Rock
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producer Pandro S Berman
Director Richard Thorpe
96 minutes
Opened October 17 1957
“Jailhouse Rock” is remembered most of all for the incredibly camp dance routine that promotes the title track big time. Many claim it to be the classic Elvis on-screen moment, and in many ways it is definitive, for both good and ill. But that routine is a very misleading guide to this particular film, in which Elvis is semi-sensitive/semi-brutish – 'that's just the beast in me' – super-talented, very touchy, and thoroughly obnoxious. In complete contradiction to the overgrown beach boy roles foisted upon Elvis in the sixties, “Jailhouse Rock” presents him as an anti-hero. And very successfully, too, because as an Elvis fan I loathed the vision of Elvis here, thinking his character most unpleasant (little realizing that it was supposed to be). The film is far removed from the fluff and fun that would follow in the Elvis films in the sixties.
Elvis plays a construction worker who ends up in prison for murder, beating a man to death with his bare hands in a barroom brawl. He's in trouble with the law for real here. We are miles away from safe stuff like “Blue Hawaii,” where Elvis spends a night in jail after high jinks with his beach buddies, singing “Beach Boy Blues.” You guys sing beautifully, says a fellow inmate, I hope you get life with me! A funny line, but frankly, Elvis had indeed got “life,” being consigned to a career of beach party films when the evidence of “Jailhouse Rock” is that he was capable of much harder hitting films.
Behind bars, Elvis is taught to play guitar and carry a tune by washed-up country singer Mickey Shaughnessy. Out of jail, he becomes a chart-topping recording star and signs a contract to make highly lucrative Hollywood movies. Sound familiar? “Jailhouse Rock” is a kind of “anti-Loving You,” telling the tale of a young singer's rise from rages to riches. In “Loving You,” Elvis is a natural talent and remains true and wholesome; in “Jailhouse Rock” the subtext is that he took his music from others and, with fame and fortune, developed into a thoroughly selfish and unpleasant brat. That hoary old, and utterly false, accusation that Elvis the 'king' of rock'n'roll stole his music from much more talented others would be heard more and more as time went by until by the 1980's it became the obligatory take on Elvis. Such is life in the white man's world: jail, poverty and obscurity for the talented folks, fame and fortune for the cultural appropriators. That view is not just trite, it is false, and I try not to waste any more time on it anymore (if you want a quick blast, then try this for size: “Hound Dog” was not Willie Mae Thornton's song, if we are to criticize Elvis for not writing the songs he sang and made famous. Thornton did not write the song, two white Jewish kids did, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. When it comes to “stealing” music, Leiber and Stoller had to sue Thornton and Johnny Otis who were attempting to claim the song as their own. When it came to Elvis' hit single version, it's flip side “Don't Be Cruel” was a song that was written by a black R&B artist, Otis Blackwell. Blackwell was reared on country music of the Grand Ole Oprey and his favourite singer was the white singing cowboy Tex Ritter. The mixing of black and white in the real world is complicated, then, and far too complicated for the two-bit bigots who tend to have the most to say here. I could go into depth on this issue but won't, because it is a deviation and risks reinforcing the very divisions that Elvis challenged. Elvis was an integrator, be sure that you are too). And Elvis didn't steal country music either, which is the charge in this film.
Elvis makes it big as a singer, turns his back on his former cellmate and mentor, who finally loses patience and decides to teach the young oaf a lesson by punching him up the throat. Elvis' larynx being damaged, we spend the rest of the film on tenterhooks wondering whether he will ever be able to sing again. Elvis, miracle of miracles, regains his voice, sees the errors of his ways, acknowledges his debts, sings again, and everyone is happy, reunited as one big happy family.
I loved the songs in this film the moment I heard them, but absolutely loathed the story. OK, it's a film and it's acting, and it is a strong story and Elvis acts well. Elvis plays the kind of punk that conformed to the worst stereotypes of rock'n'roll's critics of the time. It was as though the film was trying to take the rebellion out of rock, making the claim that whilst these boys were once punks, with the guidance of the elders they can come to learn to see the error of their ways. Where once they were wild, now they are tame. Elvis is utterly obnoxious and offensive to people in a way that he never was in real life. In the film he abuses people talking about music in a way that he never did in real life, is dismissive of other forms of music, is pretty aggressive sexually (note the famous scene with Judy Tyler, “that's just the beast in me,” and note where his eyes are slanted in the strip club). The story and the character makes for unpleasant viewing. I can stand the antics of a young punk for about five minutes before I want someone to punch his lights out. Hell, it took John Wayne about ten seconds to sort this kind of thing out. I can't stomach it for an hour.
The saving grace of the film is the songs and their performance; these are fantastic. I love “Treat Me Nice” most of all, but “Baby I Don't Care” comes close. I'm ambivalent about the acclaimed performance of “Jailhouse Rock.” It's brilliantly done, for sure, and none other than Gene Kelly was on the set singing praise as Elvis performed his dance routine. It's definitely a highlight of Elvis' film career. For me, this was the beginning of Elvis as the rock'n'roll performance artist, his moves being scripted for him rather than being generated spontaneously by the music. It worked well enough here. Film after film, though, well into the sixties, it became clichéd. Elvis started to look like a puppet.
King Creole
Paramount Pictures
Producer Hal Wallis
Director Michael Curtiz
from the novel “A Stone for Danny Fisher” by Harold Robbins
Photography Russell Harlan
116 minutes
Opened July 2 1958
Michael Curtiz had directed films starring the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Errol Flynn, and James Cagney, good films too, (Casablanca, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Yankee Doodle Dandy), with which those great stars are identified to this day. He directed Bing Crosby in White Christmas, too. In fact, Curtiz directed ten actors to Oscar nominations in a career which spanned 102 films. James Cagney and Joan Crawford received the only Academy Awards of their illustrious careers in films directed by Curtiz. He himself received two awards. He works the same magic here on “King Creole,” which in the view of many is Elvis’ greatest ever film and performance. I can't disagree with that view.
Curtiz' initial reaction when approached to direct an Elvis film was to laugh. He presumed that Elvis, as a rock'n'roll star, would be incapable of serious acting. He changed his view after meeting Elvis, talking with him about his ambitions, seeing him work: "I began to sit up and take notice," Curtiz said, proceeding further, "I guarantee that he'll amaze everyone. He shows formidable talent. What's more, he'll get the respect he so dearly desires."
It didn't happen, but “King Creole” shows that it could have happened and ought to have happened. And we can lose the condescending attitudes with respect to Elvis' acting ambitions. Curtiz noted that Elvis was always the first on set when it came to filming, accepting direction as and when required, no matter how unusual or difficult: "You're the boss, Mr. Curtiz," he would say.
My point? Elvis put complete trust in the people around him, meaning that he needed good people around him. When that happened, the results were invariably good. It happened here in “King Creole,” where the story, the script, the acting, the photography, and the music all came together to produce a high quality picture. Elvis would never quite hit these heights again (I can think of a mere three films in his career that could be said to have been in this class).
For once, Elvis received a lot of good reviews for “King Creole”: Variety magazine declared that the film "Shows the young star [Presley] as a better than fair actor," which was high praise indeed at the time – most reviews wrote Elvis off as a joke. The New York Times was also broadly positive: "As for Mr. Presley, in his third screen attempt, it's a pleasure to find him up to a little more than Bourbon Street shoutin' and wigglin'. Acting is his assignment in this shrewdly upholstered showcase, and he does it, so help us, over a picket fence."
He received a lot of bad reviews, too.
On “King Creole,” Catholic World made its disapproval of the exploitation of sex and violence plain:
“Playing a part— an underprivileged youth who, on and off, displays some dignity and honest aspirations — that requires some histrionic effort, Presley shows signs that he is getting the hang of acting. The picture itself, however, after a promising enough beginning turns into a lurid melodramatic hash composed in about equal part of juvenile delinquency, gangsterism and sex. These may be legitimate dramatic subjects but the script gives them an illegitimate viewpoint and leaves muddled moral issues dangling.” ("Movie Reviews". Catholic World. Paulist Fathers. 187: 384. 1958).
They were not alone in that view. This had been the general consensus among conservative opinion with respect to rock'n'roll from the first. Elvis was the leader of that so-called revolution, which conservatives condemned as a false liberation that was little more than enslavement to the baser human instincts. The Monthly Film Bulletin gave “King Creole” a rating of III, denoting poor, condemning the violence portrayed in the film: "This entangled series of cliches, each with more unlikely motivation than the last, provides the most unattractive Presley vehicle so far. His numbers only offer intermittent relief from the calculated violence and viciousness, and he can do little to balance the disagreeable movie." (Andrew James Caine, Interpreting Rock Movies, p. 65).
Commonweal notes that Elvis goes unpunished for his various misdemeanours, something which sets a poor example for a youth likely to be follow his influence rather than the lack of punishment to the main character for his actions, but praised the director for his influence on Presley:
“No doubt adults won't be moved much by "King Creole" one way or the other, but unfortunately teenage audiences may be taken in, especially since Danny is supposed to be a sympathetic character and at the end goes unpunished by the police for his crimes ... It must be said in favor of Director Michael Curtiz that he does succeed in getting Presley to act every now and then, but the cards are stacked in such an obvious manner against Danny that even Montgomery Clift couldn't have handled the role with conviction.”
(Commonweal p.424).
I have no problem with the acting. Elvis does a fine job, and these reviews are over-critical, obviously born of a disdain, not to say contempt, for Elvis. And fear of Elvis and the consequences of Elvis. The issues raised, however, are worthy of comment, because the exploitation of sex and violence for entertainment and for commercial gain did become a hallmark of the Elvis sixties film and did become a hallmark of the film and music world in general, and not necessarily for the good.
“King Creole” is of a very different quality to the Elvis films of the sixties. The film is a high quality production all round, well scripted and acted, beautifully shot. It's a hard-boiled film noir with music that is both good in itself but fits the storyline perfectly too.
This film is one of the few films in Elvis' career that could work without its star performer. The story stands on its own merits. The story is based on the Harold Robbins novel “A Stone for Danny Fisher.” Elvis plays a sullen New Orleans youth in trouble at school, seeking to quit and get a job. He finds success as a singer in a Bourbon Street nightclub and finds himself lured over to the rival club of local gangster Maxie Fields (Walter Matthau). It is one of the few Elvis films in which I was interested in the story and not eager to move on to the songs. At the same time, though, the songs are really great, 'dixieland rock' with good ballads too. And they are performed wonderfully well.
Filmed largely on location in New Orleans, “King Creole” has an authentic look and feel, capturing the atmosphere of the city like few other films. See the opening street scenes in which Elvis duets with R&B singer Kitty White, one of the highest high spots in Elvis' film in my book. The superb supporting cast is in top form: Dean Jagger, Vic Morrow, Carolyn Jones, Dolores Hart, and Paul Stewart.
Elvis is involved in the world of gangs and local bosses. He gets involved with an older woman who just happens to be the gangland leader's wife. She treats him to quite a long and passionate kiss at the schoolgates, causing all manner of excitement among Elvis' schoolmates: a fight ensues, of course, with Elvis landing in trouble yet again. (He's basically a good boy, folks, and spends the rest of the time in these films proving it.) The mood and atmosphere is perfect, full of threat and unease. The black and white photography, too, is brilliant. It's quite a sleazy film, really, with Elvis even hiring a room for a romantic interlude with his love interest Dolores Hart, who remains as virginal as ever after “Loving You.” Nothing happens, of course, and Elvis runs off with his older woman, Carolyn Jones. The gangsters are not far behind.
Strong cast, strong story, great music, brilliant photography, a strong candidate for Elvis' best film. It's an absolutely cracking soundtrack. Even I, somewhat jaundiced after having sat through Elvis films far too many times than is sane and healthy, am impressed. To say that the film is hard to fault understates its qualities massively: the film is hard not to praise. Elvis did a few good films after this, and put in a few top notch performances. I think the terrible irony of Elvis' career is that he got better as an actor as the scripts, in the main, got worse. There are few, if any, better films in Elvis' career than “King Creole,” and he gave few, if any, better performances. And did I mention the great soundtrack?
G.I. Blues
Paramount Pictures
Producer Hal Wallis
Director Norman Taurog
104 minutes
Opened November 15 1960
When I was young, “G.I. Blues” represented the pinnacle of Elvis' career. This was Elvis at his very best, I thought. This was the first Elvis film I saw at the local picture house, as one of a double bill with “Blue Hawaii.” For many years after I considered those two films to be Elvis' key work. In time, you grow up, gain a little more insight and a lot more perspective. Both films really marked the beginning of the end for Elvis' ambitions in Hollywood. His job was merely to keep his large and undemanding public entertained just enough to have them ever ready to hand over their money three times a year. I was so keen on “G.I. Blues” at the time, though, that I had my mother sew a “U.S. Army” badge into my coat for school. There was a time when I came to think that really embarrassing, until I read that around the same time the super cool and super talented Bryan Ferry had Antony Price design an Elvis-inspired G I Blues uniform for his “Siren” tour (1975). You can see Ferry performing in the outfit on “Both Ends Burning.” Very suave, and highly artistic. Just like my good self. So I don't think I was as far off in my taste as I came to think when, years later, I dismissed “G.I. Blues” as lightweight twaddle in which Elvis the rebel goes over to the other side. (John Lennon was more forthright in referring to Elvis as having 'died when he went in the army.' Here, in “GI Blues,” is that “dead” Elvis. Having been wild and rebellious, Elvis was now in uniform, tame and conformist, marching proudly to the background of the Stars and Stripes. Commenting on Elvis' death in a 1980 interview, John Lennon said, 'He died when he went into the army. That's when they killed him, that's when they castrated him.' Is that true? Listen to the version of “Blue Suede Shoes” that Elvis performs for the “GI Blues” soundtrack. It is competent and passable. Listen to Elvis' original version from 1956 – it is incendiary.
The story involves Elvis involved in a bet as to whether he can spend the night with Juliet Prowse. Doing what, I had no idea at the time and didn't care. In any case, whatever it was he was supposed to be doing with Juliet Prowse, he didn't do it anyway, and so had to spend the rest of the film making a point of clearing any misunderstandings up in case anyone got the wrong idea of any wrongdoings that may have taken place, whatever they were, when they most assuredly did not. It's as though Elvis was 14. The army Elvis involved with a nightclub dancer, both of whom are being portrayed as teenage innocents who need to account for their every movement. Elvis is a nice boy and Juliet is a nice girl. I loved it at the time, but in time I came to think it utterly anti-septic. Elvis was supposed to be the 'king of rock and roll,” for crying out loud. He does a watered down version of “Blue Suede Shoes,” which is played on the Jukebox by that surly looking brute from “Loving You” as if to remind us of who Elvis once was; he delivers pseudo-rockabilly in the form of “Frankfurt Special,” which starts off like “Mystery Train” and has some exciting moments, only to be ruined by Elvis' army chums joining in. The rockabilly rebel is rebel no more, he is clean-cut, cheered on by army buddies. And he really isn't not rockabilly any more, not singing songs like “What's She Really Like,” “Big Boots,” and “Didja Ever,” even putting a military “hup two three four” on the “blues” of the title track (blues in name only). I was always struck by the fact the various females in the family who loved Elvis and loved “G.I. Blues” loathed his leading lady Juliet Prowse. Her dance scene is by far and away the raunchiest thing in the film, with Elvis, flirting with a puppet doll, coming across like Little Bo Peep in comparison. Having said that, I will confess to a great fondness for “Wooden Heart.”
It's a rotten story, frankly, and in pretty poor taste. Let's be honest, this is army chums egging each other on when it comes to bedding women. Even worse than that, though, is that the film even wimps out on its tacky theme, with Elvis shown to be totally innocent of all charges and all such thoughts. I just find it hypocritical and lazy, cynical too, a cash-in on Elvis' return from the army. The plot is wafer thin. But Elvis looks good and sings good, even if the songs are somewhat lacking.
In his column Disc Jack Good asked: “Why did Presley allow this?” He continued: “The apparently infallible Colonel Parker seems at last to have made a major mistake.” He quotes a derogatory comment made at the time: “Are his fans morons?” Good proceeds to give the Oxford Dictionary definition of the word “moron” to make clear what he is getting at: “Adult whose mental development is arrested at the stage normal in a child of 9-12 years.” At which point I feel fairly relieved. I loved “G.I. Blues” in 1974-77, when I was 9-12 precisely. That's about the only time in my life that I could be described as normal. After that, the fondness I retained for the film lingered on as a warm memory. It's just that when I came to watch it again in my teenage years I thought it utterly abysmal, an embarrassment to all concerned, myself included. How, on earth, could I have once been so excited by this tame vehicle? Having once loved the film in my younger days, I loathed it for a very long time. Over the years, I have continued a love-hate relationship with the film. Having hated it with a vengeance, whenever I watch it again I see that it is not nearly as bad as I had thought, and so start loving it again. Then I watch it again in the hope of being entertained, and come to see it as awful again. And so it goes on, the forever awful/wonderful “GI Blues.”
Coming back to Jack Good's points, the fact that the film was a box office smash suggests that there were an awful lot of morons in the world. Elvis himself noticed the marked drop in quality, in film and music, and seemed to pass it off as an aberration, a clearly exploitative vehicle building on Elvis' recent return from the army. His manager Tom Parker would see the numbers and the money generated and see not a mistake to be avoided but a template to follow in the future. Having signed contracts and taken the money, it's not clear that Elvis could do anything to halt any drop in artistic standards he would be confronted with. At which point the only thing to debate is whether this was a case of Elvis selling out or of Elvis being sold out. It's very probably impossible to disentangle the two, given the extent to which Elvis was totally subservient to his manager Tom Parker, but it is nevertheless clear that it was Parker, whose eyes were exclusively focused on dollars, who was making the key decisions. When Elvis agrees to work for his manager and his view of 'business' rather than have his manager work for him and his artistic ambitions, then the die is cast.
And what of Elvis? There had been doubts as to whether he could return to the top after a couple of years away in the army. “G.I. Blues” grossed over four million dollars at the box office, removing all doubt. But there were huge dangers in such success. The very great album “Elvis is Back” was Elvis' main recording business in this year, 1960, with the gospel album “His Hand In Mine” also a serious piece of work. Neither sold well, a couple of hundred thousand (weak by Elvis' standards). In contrast, “G.I. Blues” sold in millions and was nominated for a Grammy Award. With that kind of distorted feedback impressing his fundamentally tasteless and tacky manager, Elvis' career was in serious danger of being derailed by success rather than by failure. Elvis' vision as singer and actor was very different from the plans that those making the key decisions in his career had for him. That, in a nutshell, is the story of Elvis in the sixties. The only thing to add is that it is remarkable that Elvis not only survived but actually returned as a major significant recording and performing artist. I'm not inclined to make the most of a bad situation and pass off these films and their songs as any better than they were. The problem with the Elvis world is that poor standards soon became normalized, just as others took pop, rock, and soul into another dimension.
With respect to the songs, there are a few very good ones here (“Doin' the Best I Can” and “Pocketful of Rainbows” are quality), but they are not particularly well performed, with little that could work as a music video in a meaningful rock and pop sense. I can well do without a “stars and stripes” “rock'n'roll” too - if this really was the new Elvis, then it was already rebellion over, the system victorious. This is really what I take John Lennon to mean when he said that Elvis died when he went into the army. Elvis made great music after the army, a lot of it, but the point really goes deeper than that – Elvis had been sanitized. I don't know about castrated – he was to be increasingly surrounded with girls in the films that followed, not that anything ever happened - but it seemed that Elvis' severed head was to be paraded to the world ever after in these films. Elvis and puppets anyone? Elvis sings for children and morons, too …
Flaming Star
Twentieth Century Fox
Producer David Weisbart
Director Don Siegel
based on a novel by Clair Huffaker
91 minutes
Opened December 20 1960
When the opportunity to act in a dramatic role came his way, Elvis proved that he had what was required to make it as a serious actor. “Flaming Star” was an explicit attempt to make a 'serious' film. Elvis was unnerved early on in filming when he discovered plans to pack the film with songs. Director Don Siegel told him not to throw his performance away as a result and that he would ensure that the songs be kept to an absolute minimum. Thankfully, Siegel won that battle. Salvage operation successful, Siegel then coaxed some fine acting out of Elvis, particularly in the most emotional scenes.
“Flaming Star” is thus a serious western with no songs other than the title track and a sing-song round the table in the cabin, as in the good old days. It's one of the last of the psychological westerns from the 1950's, with Elvis playing the half-breed son of a Texan father (John McIntyre) and a Kiowa mother (Dolores Del Rio), thus torn between white and Kiowa cultures. The film proceeds to explore issues of division, identity, and belonging. As the story progresses, Elvis has to decide on which side of the divide he stands, either side or none, rejecting the prejudice of the one and the violence of the other. It's a heavyweight theme, raising the film several notches above the usual western (let alone “GI Blues”). The themes are strong and Elvis delivers one of his very best screen performances. This was precisely the kind of acting role that Elvis had sought from the first, and he acquits himself very well indeed.
Acclaimed director Don Siegel, who went on to work with Clint Eastwood, had wanted Marlon Brando for the part that eventually went to Elvis, but declared himself most impressed with Elvis' performance, saying “Presley was very good in the picture” (Siegel quoted in Stuart M. Kaminsky’s 1974 “Don Siegel: Director.”) Elvis was good, says Siegel, who then goes on to make the significant point that it wasn't Elvis' performance that sunk the film but his persona as a rock star: “However, I think one of the reasons the picture did not get the recognition I feel it deserves, especially in terms of its presentation of a racial conflict, is that the public was unable to get beyond the fact that Elvis Presley was in it.”
It's not only that the public was unable to accept Elvis as a serious actor, neither were the critics. We should bear that point in mind when it comes to being critical on the way that the Elvis films played out. If these films became inane, then let's remember the way that the critics hammered Elvis when he delivered fine acting performances in decent films, “Flaming Star” in this instance. In fine, the failures here are not just Elvis'.
Neither the critics nor the great public had much respect for Elvis' ambition to become a serious actor, treating it with contempt in the main. As for Elvis' fans, it seems that a lot of them didn't care for serious acting on Elvis' part at all. Compared to Elvis' sun'nfun films, the performance of “Flaming Star” at the box-office was profoundly underwhelming. The fans sat on their hands, shunning the film at the box office. It is easy enough to criticize “the Elvis film,” and I'll not pull any punches later on. The difficult part, however, is how to escape the double bind adumbrated above, fulfilling Elvis' artistic ambitions whilst at the same time putting bums on seats, not least when most of those bums don't care for art, only for fun and adulation, or, as with the critics, care for Elvis even less. I could never say that Elvis fans were morons, being one myself, but too many expressed little interest in Elvis as a serious actor. They wanted sun'n'fun. For my own part, I recently discovered a sheet of paper on which I wrote all my Elvis favourites in my teenage years. Under the category of “best film” I have put “Flaming Star.” Under best song I put “If I Can Dream.” I did have remarkably good taste for a young person, wise beyond my years.
Elvis attracted very good notices for his performance in “Flaming Star,” but the fate suffered by the film really indicates the barriers that stood in the way of Elvis' ambitions to be a film star. I've seen the odd place where “Flaming Star” is rated among the top 100 westerns of all time, but it is very rare to see such critical appreciation of this film (or any other Elvis film). Film critics mainly ignore it or dismiss it as an Elvis film. It's actually one of the last, and best, of the psychological westerns of the 1950's, and deserves to be recognized as such.
“Flaming Star” is a very fine film. The fact that it didn't do anything like the business of the other Elvis films leads to a disquieting observation – Elvis was artistically trapped between having to satisfy his massive fan base whilst trying to develop as an actor (and singer). Looked at in this manner, Elvis' huge popularity was less a blessing than a bane. The high returns on Elvis' films as well as the high sales of his singles and soundtracks masked a fundamental weakness – Elvis had a ready audience among his own fans but was not really making many new fans. His standing outside of the Elvis audience was insecure to say the least. In fact, many considered him a joke and treated him with disdain. His very popularity, and ubiquitous nature, bred resentment. There are other problems. His quality albums like “Elvis is Back” did not sell in anything like numbers of his soundtrack albums, his quality films were likewise profound under-achievers at the box office compared to the sun'n'fun'n'girls films. Elvis, effectively, was artistically bound to the undemanding tastes of his pre-existing audience, leaving much of the rest of the world cold or openly contemptuous. This, note, was before The Beatles showed up and took the pop world into another dimension entirely. We can't just argue lazily that Elvis was on top of the world and that The Beatles took it all away from him. The problems were deep-seated, The Beatles et al merely exposed the fractures that already existed. Elvis had been shunted into an artistic cul-de-sac by his own popularity and success.
How you break out of that predicament is a question that is not easy to answer, if it can be answered at all. Elvis never did. He barely survived and escaped, if anyone who died at the age of forty two can be said to have survived at all. And we are still arguing the pros and cons of the situation. I can well understand the view of those who say that at this distance in history, it is best just to appreciate the good things Elvis left us with. I do that daily. It doesn't stop me wondering, though.
Wild in the Country
20th Century Fox
Producer Jerry Wald
Director Philip Dunne
Screenplay Clifford Odets, based on the novel by J.R. Salamanca
114 minutes
Opened June 22 1961
“Wild in the Country” is as far away from all that we associate with “the Elvis film” as it is possible for a film to be. For years as an Elvis fan, I barely heard this film ever receiving even a mention, least of all from Elvis fans themselves. People knew the title track, of course, but the film itself was largely unknown and, even more so, unseen. I knew about it, but it was years before I ever saw it. I had to buy it on video.
It's a most interesting film indeed, an oddity, a consciously 'serious' film. With a screenplay that was written by the esteemed playwright and darling of the liberal intelligentsia, the legendary Clifford Odets, based on a novel by J.R. Salamanca, we have entered a different dimension entirely with respect to Elvis films. Note well the snobby disdain critics had for Odets in coming to be associated with such as Elvis. Such views were expressions of sheer bigotry and prejudice, something which dogged Elvis from the very first and, truth be told, which hobbled his attempts to be a serious artist – in film and music – every bit as much as his tasteless money driven manager and his undemanding fans, as well as his own inability to take care of business. He never shook that disdain off. Had the critics shed the blinkers, just the once, then they would have seen conclusive proof here – as in “Flaming Star” - that Elvis had what it took to take on the most demanding of acting roles. Some critics noted that Elvis' ambitious in the film overreached his abilities, although they did acknowledge that the role was a demanding one. Elvis' ambitions to become a serious actor were not misplaced, and he was badly let down in this by others, both those who were the main players in the Elvis films as well as the critics who, in truth, were nowhere near as clever and as sophisticated as they considered themselves to be.
In “Wild in the Country,” Elvis plays an angry but sensitive, intelligent, and talented young man who, on probation for inflicting serious bodily harm, reveals hitherto hidden potential as a writer. The theme is one of the sensitive misunderstood boy who is always in fights and in trouble and who stands in need of a creative outlet for his obvious intelligence.
Elvis is torn between affections for a good girl (Millie Perkins, known for playing Anne Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank) and, well, if not that bad a girl, then a teenage sexpot at least (Tuesday Weld), and ends up falling for the older woman, his psychologist and mentor Hope Lange, who encourages him to develop his untapped potential as a writer and become all that he could be. Lange encourages Elvis' ambitions for a literary career.
With sensitive direction by Philip Dunne (director of some of my most favourite films, the acclaimed “How Green Was My Valley”, “The Ghost and Mrs Muir,” “The Agony and the Ecstasy”), Elvis and Lange share the most tender and believable love scene we would ever see in an Elvis film. With suspicions of illicit affairs and an out-of-wedlock baby, and with Elvis going off to college to further his dreams of becoming a writer, the film is adult, remarkably so in light of the kind of films that were to come. Here, Elvis is a young man growing up, turning his dreams into realizable ambitions. In later films, Elvis is a grown man acting like a teenage beach bum. I know which I prefer.
In the main, with Elvis films, it is possible to cloud over faults by saying that at least the film was entertaining. “Wild in the Country” isn't entertaining. It's just a plain good film. If critics missed it, that's a problem with their blinkered vision and snobbish attitudes, not to mention their pretensions to be part of the intelligentsia. And if the public missed it, that's a problem with their meagre taste and imagination. Elvis did try to make it as a serious actor and here, in this film, he succeeded. Other forces outside of his own will were working against him. “Wild in the Country” had been long in planning, serving as a vehicle for Elvis' commitment to make it as a serious actor. Thankfully, it seems that the decision to proceed with the film had been taken before the huge disparity between the success of “G.I. Blues” and the modest interest in “Flaming Star” would end all artistic pretensions. It's sad to report the condescending attitude of critics with respect to Elvis here, berating Clifford Odets, hitherto the darling of the liberal intelligentsia, for degrading his art in writing a script for a mere rock star (and who, by definition, was 'low culture'). The people who criticize Elvis as a representative of the dominant white culture expropriating the work of the marginalized and excluded are clueless, expressing a blinkered bigotry of their own. The criticism that Elvis faced makes it clear that he himself was one of the marginalized and excluded, not the establishment, and that his attempts to make his way on the inside would be met with consistently strong resistance from the dominant cultural forces. If Elvis ended up taking the easy route in time, making money on sun'n'fun films, then maybe that was because all other avenues had been quite deliberately closed to him. His producer Hal Wallis never had any intention of giving Elvis serious roles, and his manager openly stated that all Elvis films were fit for was for making money. The critics hammered him from the first and never let up. Both “Flaming Star” and “Wild in the Country” offer conclusive proof of Elvis' own ambitions to make it as a serious actor.
Odets' script is excellent, there is a clear narrative flow, good plot, excellent characterization. The acting from all concerned is also excellent, the characters all completely believable. It's a proper film. With Philip Dunne as director, there were high ambitions for this film as a film in its own right, not merely as a vehicle for Elvis and his songs. There are, indeed, scant few songs in the film. It was a straight attempt at drama. The critics panned it and the public shunned it, effectively ending Elvis' career as a serious actor. Which is a shame. Because this is a very good film and shows real potential. In the New Musical Express, David Cardwell declared confidently that 'Wild in the Country is Elvis' best so far!' 'There is only one way to describe Presley's performance – superb!' I've always thought so, on both counts. Cardwell went on to comment, optimistically: 'Yes this was obviously Elvis' best film and he will be known from now on in my books as Elvis Presley, singer and film star.' That was Elvis' ambition, but it was an ambition that forces inside his own career and outside it were working to thwart. It is sad to record that his fans didn't like Elvis in such films in anything like the numbers they liked him in lightweight comedy musicals packed with songs, sun, sandy beaches, cars, boats, and girls. It's not art, it's a numbers game, and decisions follow the money.
Make the most of “Wild in the Country,” this is the film which indicated what could have been instead of what came to be. And if we are to condemn Elvis fans for being 'morons' in not supporting the film in anything like the numbers of the sun'n'fun films, then remember too the utterly condescending attitude of the critics and the intelligentsia, whose dismissal of Elvis and his acting ambitions was nothing short of class-ridden bigotry. 'Morons,' somehow, is insufficient a term to describe the mountainish pretensions and stupidity of these folk.
Blue Hawaii
Paramount Pictures
Producer Hal Wallis
Director Norman Taurog
101 minutes
Opened November 22 1961
“Blue Hawaii” was the first of the three films that Elvis shot in Hawaii. The other two are “Girls! Girls! Girls!” and “Paradise Hawaiian Style.” If it seems like he did more – and three are more than enough – then that's because “Blue Hawaii” set the template for “the Elvis film,” which came to be played out in other settings. "Blue Hawaii" is the last of the great Elvis films and the first of the worst Elvis films - discuss.
“Blue Hawaii” is a kind of “ex-G.I. Blues,” with Elvis playing Chad Gates who, returning home to Hawaii after a couple of years in the army, (again) rejects a job with his father’s fruit company in order to loaf about with his beach boy buddies, and surf, swim, and sing. His parents want him to run the family business, he wants to enjoy life, which seems to be one long party on the beach. That's about it, really. Those are the choices we all face in life. Not. Elvis is picked at by his mother as if he is a young teenage boy, and not just back from the army. In effect, he is playing an overgrown beach boy, that's all he is in this film. There is some serious disconnect going on in the Elvis world, he is living in the fantasy world of the idle rich. He gets a job as a tour guide, which involves working as an instructor to four teenage girls...
Abigail Prentice : Mr Gates, do you think you can satisfy a school teacher and 4 teenage girls?
Chad Gates : Oh, I'll sure try, ma'am. I-I'll do all I can.
Did he? No. It's just middle-aged bluff and cliché (Elvis' attitudes here being far older than his actual years). One girl forces her way into his bedroom and strikes some very sexual poses; Elvis is the very model of moral rectitude and sexual probity in response. Not that that dampens her ardor. Eventually, Elvis has to exercise a little tough discipline. The spanking scene has to be seen to be, well, if not quite believed, then, well, seen: 'do you have a headcold?' 'no! just the opposite!' I think I can safely say here that if such a scene went into a film today, it would cause a mixture of bafflement and outrage. I really wouldn't want to speculate on what the contemporary age would make of such a scene should it ever be shown on television again. I'm willing to bet that this safe and innocuously boring film couldn't go out now without a warning.
Watching this film now, you get the distinct impression that Elvis had wandered into a very strange world. My own impression of the film is that it is idle entertainment with an undercurrent of complacent, borderline reactionary, social attitudes. It may have been lucrative, but this is dangerous ground to get fat and lazy on. Elvis is settling into early middle-aged mediocrity. He got away with it here, but only just. It isn't the most appealing of images, and it has naught to do with Elvis' background. Blue skies and seas, golden sands, lots of girls, pleasant songs, next to nothing of a plot to follow, more girls – I loved it up to the age of 12, but even by that age my affection was driven more by love of a warm memory from when I saw it and heard the album aged 8 or 9, a time when my demands were simpler. Now, I am staggered and somewhat disconcerted that such a flimsy vehicle could have met with such huge success – the film grossed $14 million at the box office whilst the soundtrack was the second biggest selling album of the sixties. This must have been what John Lennon was thinking when he dismissed Elvis as the new Bing Crosby. Where the heck did the rock go? “Rock-a-Hula Baby.” To be fair, I did like that song, whilst the romantic ballads on the soundtrack are indeed sumptuous. There was a reason for the enormous success of the film.
“Blue Hawaii” is a musical comedy that set the template for “the Elvis movie.” Opinion is divided on the film. Whilst some see it as the last of the great Elvis films, others see it as the first of the worst. Let's call it the worst of the best and the best of the worst. If we were to let numbers decide, then this is Elvis' best film. It was a box office smash, and the soundtrack was the second biggest selling album of the sixties. It has all the elements that we would identify with an Elvis film, exotic location, nice scenery, fun and frolics on the beach, women in bathing costumes, younger females posing as women in bathing costumes, women who lose their tops, temptresses seeking to tempt our hunky hero (who proceeds to run a mile), obvious sex gags. It strikes me as remarkably square and old-fashioned, with Elvis coming over as an overgrown teenager. Indeed, he expresses a desire to live life as a beach boy in the film, turning down a role in daddy's business. Wasn't this the theme of the mid-fifties teen rebellion? No wonder John Lennon expressed his disgust. Elvis the fifties rebel led the rock'n'roll revolution only to settle for something as tame as this, a life loafing around as one of the idle rich! I'd have been inclined to rip cinema seats out of sheer disgust at such a tame ending of youthful rebellion. Elvis, really, how could you?
This movie is like sweets – very tempting, but too many of them will rot your insides. It was hugely successful, so the decision was taken to give the public what they wanted. It rotted Elvis.
At this point, we need to calm down and take stock. I'm not sure anyone who appreciated the film at the time ever gave the plot a second thought: the film is really about the songs and the scenery, which are indeed easy on the ears and the eyes. The film looks good and it sounds good, it makes no demands on the brain cells, it is beautifully photographed, and you just have to take it as that and no more. In those terms, it is very good. There are the odd funny lines, too. It may be the last of the good Elvis films or the first of the worst, but in truth it is a bit of both. It is well done and it can still pass a pleasant hour and half to this day. At the same time, it did set a template that would, with shooting time and budgets cut to the minimum, kill Elvis' film career. This was one of the films I used to watch as often as I could, classing it as one of the great Elvis films. I just find it idle now, not particularly awful, but far from being good: it's just not particularly anything. It has scenes which cause me no end of amusement, though.
Follow That Dream
United Artists
Producer David Weisbart
Director Gordon Douglas
screenplay Charles Lederer, based on the novel “Pioneer Go Home!” by Richard Powell.
105 minutes
Opened May 23 1962
This is a very funny and hugely enjoyable film, Elvis and his family of practising anarchists becoming homesteaders, seeing off gangsters who try to muscle in on their land in the process. Is Elvis dumb or just playing dumb? “I don't know any more,” replies one of the crooks, before they all decide it best to leave, their casino exploding behind them, blown up by one of their own bombs, which Elvis, their intended recipient, has returned to them, being so kindly and helpful as he is. The film boasts a great performance from Arthur O'Connell too.
“A fine, funny film” wrote What's On in London, and it's as simple as that. “A charming vehicle as well as a nice story based on the American theory that good simple folk will always triumph over city slickers … the script is witty, the direction clever, and Elvis' part brilliantly conceived' [and executed, I would add] (Films and Filming).
It's always been easy to be cynical, these days more than ever. I note how many critics are not so much critical as cynical. Even this film is dismissed by such critics as appalling. It isn't. Such critics are simply wrong, and we shouldn't be afraid to say so. The fact that many Elvis films were bad is used to support the facile generalisation that all Elvis films were bad; they were not. And there is a story to be told in making the necessary distinctions. This film has a heart and an innocence that is beyond the comprehension of cynics. I can only compare Elvis' guileless innocence in this role with Stan Laurel or Peter Sellers in Being There. That's praise indeed. “Follow that Dream” is a very good film.
Kid Galahad
United Artists
Producer David Weisbart
Director Phil Karlson
screenplay William Fay, based on a story by Francis Wallace
95 minutes
Opened August 29 1962
“Kid Galahad” must be unique in being a boxing musical. This, without doubt, is the greatest boxing musical in history. Come to think of it, it may be the only boxing musical in history. I can't think of another one. And if there is room in the world for a boxing musical, then this is the one!
This is a remake of the 1937 Warner Bros. melodrama directed by Michael Curtiz (the director of “King Creole” in 1957) which starred Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis and Wayne Morris. It says something that the remake doesn't suffer by comparison. Elvis plays the character originally played by Morris, an amiable ex-G.I, returning home and looking for work. Elvis plays Walter Gulick, back from the army (again!), looking for a job (again!), and getting involved with women (again!). He takes work as a sparring partner, discovers he has a knock-out punch, embarks on a boxing career, gets involved with crooks trying to swing fights, gets himself out of the mess. Instead of the job as a car mechanic he sought, he takes up the offer from washed-up boxing promoter, Willy Grogan (Gig Young), to work as a sparring partner, wherupon Elvis delivers a knockout punch to one of Willy's best fighter. Thinking he can make some money off this kid, Willy sticks Elvis in the ring.
It's a serious film, greatly benefiting from the presence of Charles Bronson, and easily stands comparison with the 1937 film. I'm not sure Elvis wholly convinces as a boxer, though: he doesn't look like a boxer. The action is a bit overdone, and if the extended beatings in the ring stretch credulity, then the make-up serves to make the bloodbath look like the aftermath of young girls (or boys, if you like) playing with their mothers' make-up bag (come on, admit it, didn't everyone do it? No? Oh well. I'll blame my brother). Frankly, the boxing is not very believable at all. (It rarely is in boxing films, mind).
The story is a cliché, really, involving a nobody who rises to the top in boxing through his being discovered to have a big punch. If we can get past that, past the idea of Elvis as a boxer, and past the idea of a boxing musical, then the film is actually very decent. That may seem like a lot of hurdles to clear, but the only thing that really lets the film down for me are the extended scenes in the ring where Elvis, with absolutely no defensive skills at all, takes punch after punch – any one of which would have floored even a professional boxer (not that any professional boxer would have been so defensively naïve as Elvis here) the total fakeness of the makeup only serving to underline the unreality of it all - before finally delivering the knockout punch we've been expecting all along. The film is well worth seeing for Charles Bronson playing against type, and playing well, in the role of the sensitive boxing coach. Very different from Bronson's usual tough guy roles.
It's a fine enough film, and with a total gross of $1.75 it ranked nine in Variety's list of Top Grossing films.
I'll pause here to say that we have now reached the tenth film in Elvis' career, and I am confident in judging the standard to be pretty high. There are at least three or four very good films in this list, a few box office smashes, with the rest being entertaining enough. It's important to make that point, because generalisations with respect to “the Elvis film” really refer to the most dubious ones, films so bad, or just so predictable and formulaic, as to cast a giant shadow over all the other films. It is really from this point that there was a progressive deterioration in quality. Had Elvis' film career ended here, it would have been judged in time as being pretty decent, with achievements of note, showing real potential for further development, and only the odd exploitation vehicle (themselves well received by the public).
Girls! Girls! Girls!
Paramount Release
Producer Hal Wallis
Director Norman Taurog
screenplay Edward Anhalt, Allan Weiss from a story by Allan Weiss
106 minutes
Opened November 21 1962
Elvis as a singing fisherman who has a problem with boats and girls. It is easy to be cynical and say that the title really reveals the basic theme of 'the Elvis film' to come. That's not strictly true. It would be more accurate to say “Girls, Sun, Boats/Cars/Planes (delete as appropriate).” And more girls. On the beach. When people say the Elvis films were appalling, it is this kind of film to which they are referring. I used to loathe “Girls! Girls! Girls!” with a passion. But feeling down one time I put it on, and actually found it quite enjoyable and most uplifting. I wasn't expecting much, and the film didn't disappoint. I just let it wash over me. I just treat the bad lines and scenes as sources of amusement. After knocking 'em dead in the night club, Elvis is offered a job as cabaret singer. He turns it down, saying he is a fisherman. I can imagine the conversation at Sun Records going this way: Thanks Sam, but no, I'm happy driving a truck.
I can live without what was to become the obligatory scene of Elvis singing to children – once is more than enough. In its defence, the film boasts quite a varied soundtrack, with some ultra-cool and old-fashioned ballads alongside contemporary twisters. And if Elvis does his best imitation of Jackie Wilson on “Return to Sender,” it is no less clear that he is effectively imitating himself as 'king of rock'n'roll' on the likes of “I Don't Want to be Tied.” As performance, it is entertaining enough, but as Elvis the meaningful recording artist it is unconvincing.
The film grossed $2.7 million, big numbers, so the die was cast. We'll do it all again next time. And again. And again.
It Happened at the World's Fair
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producer Ted Richmond
Director Norman Taurog
105 minutes
Opened April 10 1963
From boats to planes. I'm just wondering how Elvis missed out on ever playing a train driver. Here, Elvis plays a pilot, dusting potato fields. (I'm trying to think from which film “Plantation Rock” was cut, I think it was “Girls! Girls! Girls!,” it seems ideal here, or as ideal as any song with such a title could ever be). Again, I can do without the now obligatory Elvis singing to children scenes again … Elvis sings for kiddies and grannies, and to and with as well. Elvis covers all bases, and in the process loses the respect of those who just like plain good music. I think we are supposed to think it 'cute.' It may be, done once or twice. Just the once would be enough for me. Done over and again, it shows evidence of strategy, or malice of forethought. It's not cute at all, it is cynical and manipulative. These people just want your money and don't mind how they get it.
This is Elvis by numbers: same scenes and set-pieces, same misunderstandings and non-issues with women. Every time I have watched “It Happened at the World's Fair” I have thought the very same thing – 'nothing happened.' I just look at my watch in impatience for the end. 'Cute' wears thin very quickly, and I've always considered children in film and music to be something to be endured for as little time as possible. Those soppy enough to fall for that lazy old showbiz scam are welcome to it. But it's one of many reasons Elvis' film career fell into bad odor and stayed there. Vehicles like this are supposed to be lightweight, of course. It's not Shakespeare. But the plot is so thin as to make a wafer look like a loaf. The film just plain drags as a result; it is so vacuous as to become a heavy weight to endure over any period of time. In fine, it isn't light at all, merely a heavy burden to have to sit through. The only saving graces for me are three excellent songs, Otis Blackwell's “One Broken Heart for Sale” and Don Robertson's “They Remind Me Too Much of You” and “I'm Falling in Love Tonight.” I like “A World of Our Own,” too. But much else is disposable in this film. It's a waste of time and talent. At the end of this film I simply ask, can we not put Elvis back in the studio recording good material supplied by good songwriters and leave pointless films like this well alone? I've little time for the film, and my only memories of it are bad memories. And I note again Elvis' slipping into the pastiche - “Relax” sounds like Otis Blackwell's “Fever,” but is really a lame copy. And to those who say the Elvis films were profitable, the signs of decline were apparent here. There had been plans to issue the soundtrack album to the film in a deluxe gatefold sleeve. Those plans were shelved when the single for the film bombed in the charts. The public were falling away. The films and their soundtracks were squeezing the life out of Elvis.
Fun in Acapulco
Paramount Pictures
Producer Hal Wallis
Director Richard Thorpe
screenplay Allan Weiss
100 minutes
Opened November 27 1963
Elvis ends up cliff diving, for a reason I could never be bothered to work out (OK, a past trapeze accident). Boy meets girl, boy chases girl, girl escapes his clutches, rival gets in way, boy punches rival and proves how manly he is, boy and girl get married. Tiresome, frankly, not least because Elvis ought to be years past this kind of teenage shenanigans, and the girl in question is none other than the full-grown woman Ursula Andress. She may have come to be known as Ursula Undress, but in “Fun in Acapulco” she is put in a headband to play another of Elvis' virgins. Andress herself noted the anomalies in an interview many years later. “I do not believe in sex being flaunted. Equally I do not believe in being dishonest about it. When they put me in Elvis Presley's film Fun in Acapulco, for instance, it was a nightmare. I cried in the producer's office every day. They wouldn't let me wear lipstick or mascara and they put a ribbon round my hair, just to please innocent little girls who make up Elvis's audience. They wouldn't even let me wear a proper bikini. “You can't show your navel in a Presley picture,” they said in horror. Oh, it made me so mad.' The brief scenes of Andress in swimming costume make it clear that she is indeed very much all-woman. We are now far from the fifties when Elvis made the sexual underpinnings of all interesting things explicit. It's not only dishonest, it is deliberately tame, safe, stripping Elvis of all vitality. Others, like Charles Bronson in Kid Galahad, Andress here, would go on to much better things. Raquel Welch, of all people, would turn up later in Roustabout. They do nothing with her. Elvis seemed trapped in a plastic identity, a bland persona for everyone and, in time, no one.
The Elvis clichés by now are not merely tiresome but laughable. Instead of signs of growing maturity, as with “Wild in the Country,” there is increasing evidence of arrested development and a growing infantilism. We get the obligatory scenes of Elvis with young children, including yet another duet, this time with a young boy on a bike. 'Cute' it isn't, not when said child takes over as Elvis' manager, taking 50% of Elvis' earnings, as did his real-life manager Tom Parker. This was the second time that that arrangement had been referenced in an Elvis film (Lizabeth Scott in “Loving You” took 50%), normalising what was a very abnormal relationship. Tom Parker seemed to be rubbing Elvis' nose in the dirt, Elvis having being reduced to being a hired hand in his own career, slave to his manager. Oh, it makes me so mad … (Actually, I quite like Mexico, it makes me happy and I can occasionally be found singing along).
Elvis had earned his acting spurs by the time of his tenth film. Instead of being rewarded with better quality films and more demanding roles, standards were declining markedly. By now, manager Tom Parker's cut price cheap and cheerless policy was firmly in place. If Elvis is in it, the fans will turn up in enough numbers to make a clear profit. Rather than work hard and spend big on one film a year or every couple of years, just issue three quickies a year and total the profits together to make for a decent return. Of course the films would be rubbish and end up trashing Elvis' reputation, and wasting his time, in the long run. Just grab what you can while you can. Tom Parker is often hailed as a managerial genius. The truth is that he was cheap and nasty, a man who saw no value in Elvis, only his immense popularity, which he intended to mine for as long as it lasted. Rather than preserve the quality of his “product” for the long-run, he debased it and devalued it. He was a rotten manager. He was not a manager at all. He was a crook. A cheap one at that. He took something of real value and sold it short for immediate gain.
After that, all I can do is put in a few words in defence of the seemingly indefensible. So I'll go the whole hog. The song “There's No Room to Rhumba in a Sport's Car” is often cited as one of the very worst in Elvis' career. I'll be deliberately contrary and say that not only is it not at all bad, in being catchy in the sense of “She Wore an Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” (OK, I am being really provocative now), it contains some incredibly risqué lyrics:
there's no room to rhumba in a sports car
You can't move forward or back
There's no room to do what the beat tells you to
Without throwing your spine outta wack.
I'm doing my level best to incite tempers here, because once we fall into indifference all is lost... And that's pretty much what happened to Elvis' film career. The critics, who had criticized from the first, had nothing left to say when the quality of the films really did plummet; the great public simply looked elsewhere for entertainment. The swinging sixties were almost here. Elvis looked so tame as to belong to an age before rock'n'roll. The best song in this film is “Bossa Nova Baby.” It has nothing to do with Mexico, since the Bossa Nova is Brazilian. No one noticed, no one cared. It's a Leiber and Stoller song which gives Elvis the opportunity to revisit his rock'n'roll past. It's telling that in the film he performs the song in a nightclub to a 'sophisticated' audience, that is, adults slipping into premature middle age. And still Elvis is chasing full grown women portrayed as virgins. Dishonest, fake, false, boring, predictable, and utterly irrelevant to anything of any interest. I can't make any kind of case for films like this, other than it passes the time, if you have time to pass. I do like “Bossa Nova Baby,” though.
Kissin' Cousins
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producer Sam Katzman
Director Gene Nelson
screenplay Gerald Drayson Adams from a story by Gerald Adams
96 minutes
Opened March 6 1963
Heavens to Murgatroyd and Holy Artichokes! What in the name of all that is holy is this! I first watched this film as a boy in a season of Elvis films on the BBC, Christmas 1977. I was baffled by the whole thing, to be honest. Two Elvises and lots and lots of girls going wild in the country. I thought it to be complete rubbish at the time, and somewhat tiring, too, in that it involved me in trying to work out what the hell was going on. The story, such as it was, was not interesting at all. I seemed to be endlessly waiting for the film to start, little realizing that this was a case of what you see – which was nothing as far as I could tell – was what you get. I was twelve when I first saw the film, and I was really bored with all the girls who seemed not so much to dominate the film as to actually be the film. What was the point? I didn't understand. I considered this to be the worst Elvis film I had ever seen (until a few days later, when I saw “Stay Away, Joe.”)
There are two Elvis' in the film, with Elvis playing twins. One Elvis is in the army (again!), another Elvis is the dumb hillbilly his (very racist) denigrators had always claimed him to be. Then there are the hints, or more than hints, really, seeing as it's advertised on the tin, of illicit sex in the family (yet more hillbilly stereotypes, I suppose). I am probably making the film sound much more interesting than it actually is. No cliché is left unsaid. It is a hillbilly horror show, and it must have embarrassed the life out of Elvis to have to participate in the song and dance routines. To its credit, I can only say that given how quickly the film was shot (three weeks) and how low the budget was ($4 dollars three cents, I think), the result is remarkably .. if not entertaining, exactly, then memorable, if not always, or even mainly, for the best reasons. Apparently Elvis had to be coaxed from his dressing room when wearing the blond wig for his hillbilly persona. Neither love nor money would have tempted me out, and in all honesty The Kittyhawks would have had me running for the hills. Or away from the hills, depending on which direction these rampaging mountain nymphomaniacs were coming from.
Arthur O'Connell and Glenda Farrall are excellent in the acting department, and there's no point denying that the girls are indeed very sexy and voluptuous. The film's main expenses went to Elvis and his manager up front, with little spent on the actual film. Nevertheless it grossed $2.5 million at the box office. On the one hand, artistic rock bottom, on the other, clear profit. Lousy art, great commerce. If the people were shortchanged, then so, too, was Elvis' talent.
I've not seen the film in a long while now. I always hear alarm bells in my head whenever I hear it mentioned. It's the kind of thing that made me embarrassed to be an Elvis fan for a long while. So I've never had the courage to go back and revisit this film. I would hate the world to see this film and judge Elvis by it. I'm just amazed that his career survived this film, and far too many others like it.
The first thing that struck me as a teenage boy was all these girls getting in the way of the story and the songs. Wild girls, and lots of them. Something tells me that this was the story. Elvis is being pulled to and fro between Selena (Pam Austin) and Azalea (Yvonne Craig), whose physical exertions stop just short of actual rape, but only just; he tries to dampen their ardor by singing the soothing “One Boy, Two Little Girls” to them. That should calm them down, then, I'm sure. Not. These girls ain't little, either; frankly, they are mountain nymphomaniacs unlikely to be satisfied by sweet songs crooned sweetly in their ears. “There's Gold in the Mountains” Elvis sings during yet more rough and tumble in the hay. I don't know about gold, but there's girls in the mountains, a lot of them, a gang who go by the name of The Kittyhawks. When they hear that troops are to be stationed in the vicinity they immediately tear off in pursuit of anything in trousers. I think that's the film summed up.
The film was shot in less than three weeks, which is no time at all. That makes the fast paced action and musical scenes pretty remarkable, if only in the sense that in being so quick and so cheap they should have made for a totally unwatchable and incoherent disaster of a film. The best that I can say of “Kissin' Cousins” is that it wasn't quite a totally unwatchable and incoherent disaster. Unfortunately, the public sees only the film and judges is it on its merits and not its, heavily qualified, triumph over constraints.
This film was a disaster. Producer Sam Katzman was known as the “King of the Quickies.” If “Kissin' Cousins” is the start of the collapse of the Elvis films, then Katzman is the villain of the piece. I think the problems go back much further and go much deeper. I think Tom Parker, producers like Hal Wallis, the bigotry of the critics, and the low tastes of the public are the villains, with Elvis himself either unable or unwilling to do anything to take on such an array of forces. Katzman is not the architect of this debacle, just a hired hand with a tiny budget who does as he is ordered. And he is honest about his role in this sorry affair: “We shot the film in seventeen days and I think that was the turning point in Presley films – up until that time, certain standards had been maintained, but that was where we noticed that there was no rehearsal for all the numbers.” I'd say that that is a fair assessment, save for noting that there is a certain honesty in abandoning all pretensions at art. All Elvis films are good for is making money, said his manager Tom Parker. Why bother wasting time and money with rehearsals when none of it matters anyway? The public don't care enough to insist on higher standards. They'll turn up for anything with Elvis in it. Just shoot it, give it a number, book it, count the takings, divvy up the ill-gotten gains, and move to the next one and see how many mugs turn up for a mugging next time around.
I thought it a wretched film the first time I saw it, and I have thought it even worse than that every time I have watched it since (thankfully only the twice). I've never been tempted to go revisit and reassess. I have no idea how the film could be redeemed. People have seen it as a forerunner of Russ Meyer's sexploitation films. That makes it even worse, because it continues along this line of the Elvis film as sexually dishonest. Meyer was at least honest in what he was doing. Even worse, the films were corrupting Elvis' main career as a singer. He wasn't performing or touring any more, and his time in the studio was now taking second place to his film commitments. The Elvis of the films was the only visible Elvis in the world. No wonder the world outside of his own fanbase started to judge him to be an irrelevance and a joke. The great music he was still recording came to be overlooked. The immense ballad “It Hurts Me,” one of the greatest songs of Elvis' entire career, was issued as a B-side to “Kissin' Cousins,” which itself is a decent little twist number, but no classic, with both sunk by the association with this abysmal film. I'd like to say that this was the nadir of Elvis' film career. Actually, this was the opening of the gates. All manner of awfulness rushed on through.
Viva Las Vegas
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producers Jack Cummings, George Sydney
Director George Sydney
screenplay Sally Benson
86 minutes
Opened April 20 1964
This film is very much a return to form and standards, even if the story is formulaic (cars and girls - Elvis as a singing racing car driver). Time and money were spent on the film and it shows. Apparently Tom Parker complained endlessly about this, and pretty much forced through a hasty end to shooting. The final scenes in which Elvis whisks Ann-Margret off to be married are so brief that you would miss them in a blink of an eye. Parker was working on an entirely different template and plan: shoot 'em quick, spend little money, get 'em out, move to the next. The last thing he needed was people taking time to invest films with care and attention. This would be the last time Parker would countenance spending money on an Elvis film.
There is a need to clear up a little confusion in the chronology here. Although “Viva Las Vegas” was released after “Kissin' Cousins,” it was actually filmed before that film. Hence “Kissin' Cousins” really does represent a clear departure in the Elvis film, a defining moment, a spiral downwards. No more would time and money be spent on an Elvis film. Had that change in policy been dictated by box office results, it would have been almost understandable, but the facts show “Viva Las Vegas” to have been a huge success, grossing $4.7 million, compared to the $2.6 million for “Kissin' Cousins.” And a further point to be made is that even the most moronic of audiences will eventually realize that they are being taken for a ride and finally lose interest. Any serious management takes an active interest in maintaining the quality of the product it is selling. If you keep taking people for fools, selling them shoddy wares, then the time will come when all you have left is a shoddy product that no-one wants to buy. Parker's cheapskate strategy ran Elvis' film career into the ground. It did the same with the music. A lot of easy money was made in the short run – the films died a death in 1969 – but it denied Elvis big returns in the long run. In fact, it denied Elvis himself a long run. The biggest money of all comes with quality and longevity. Parker devalued the former and denied the latter. Elvis had the talent and the ambition to go the distance; he didn't have the management. And some people still have the nerve to call Tom Parker a manager of genius! He was precisely the opposite, simply taking the easiest option out of pure greed every time. He was a conman and crook, a small-minded man who managed to latch onto a big talent. The tragedy is that he wasn't identified as such from the first and rooted out, sent back to the small-time oblivion from whence he came and where he rightly belonged. If there is a Hell, then, in the spirit of Dantean punishment, I would have Tom Parker singing "Barefoot Ballad" for all eternity whilst dancing on a hot-plate.
As for “Viva Las Vegas,” the story is formulaic and predictable. We've seen “Elvis, boats, and girls,” (“Girls! Girls! Girls!) followed by “Elvis, planes, and girls” (“It Happened at the World's Fair.”) Now we get “Elvis, cars, and girls.” (It wouldn't be the last time). Elvis wins the race, wins the money, wins the girl, and everyone goes home happy. Some people like boats, planes, and cars, and a lot of people like Elvis. On paper, there is nothing to distinguish this film from the many others in the cars/boats/plans and girls category. Elvis drives cars, chases girls, Elvis wins race and wins girl. So why is it considered a classic?
Simply, Elvis is on top form, inspired by the presence of Ann-Margret, a proper dancer, who gets him to up his game considerably. The direction by George Sidney is punchy and the on-screen chemistry between Elvis and Ann-Margret is palpable. Watching this at the local theatre in 1979, aged fourteen, my mother noticed that for the first time my eyes were not entirely on Elvis. The duet between Elvis and Ann-Margret on “Lady Loves Me” was a revelatory experience.
Elvis and Ann-Margret make for a great double act. Ann-Margret is a great dancer and mover and seems to inspire Elvis to his best film performance for ages. It may not be 'serious' acting, but it is very entertaining. George Sydney's direction is excellent too, as we could expect from a man who had previously directed “Annie Get Your Gun,” “Show Boat,” and “Pal Joey.” Whatever the cheapness of Tom Parker's plans for the future, Elvis was in good company here, good enough company to produce a thoroughly entertaining film despite the almost complete absence of a plot.
The plot seems merely incidental: Elvis loses the money he needs for a new engine whilst serenading swimming instructor Ann-Margret (it would be construed as sexual harassment these days, should Ann-Margret have put in a complaint, which judging by her body language here would be the last thing on her mind). Elvis gains employment as a hotel waiter in the meantime, continuing his pursuit of Ann-Margret. He gets his engine and wins the race, and gets the girl, which is no plot all. The film is really about the explosive chemistry between Elvis and Ann-Margret. Take that out, and you have another 'cars and girls' film. With less time and talent and less interest, inspiration, and involvement, such a plot would produce utter mediocrity. Something like “Clambake” or “Speedway,” in fact.
There are some great songs and set-pieces in “Viva Las Vegas,” not least the title track, but also “C'mon Everybody” and “What'd I Say” (which works better in the film with its great routine than it does on record, in my view).
Roustabout
Paramount Pictures
Producer Hal Wallis
Director: John Rich
screenplay: Anthony Lawrence and Allan Weiss
101 minutes
Opened: November 11, 1964
On the surface, “Roustabout” is another formulaic “Elvis movie” — Elvis is an outsider (again) who turns up in search of a job (again), and is a singer/musician (again) who puts on a show (again) that draws a crowd (again) and gets involved with women (again), (the older manager/mentor (again) and virginal younger (again)). We've been this way before, many times. Of course, if people have turned up in droves those many times before, then it seems likely they would turn up again, and bad business not to do it all again. Give the public what they want, especially since it involves rehashing a tried and tested formula. “Roustabout” is a cut above most of the others in this genre, though. The script is stronger than usual, and screenplay writers Anthony Lawrence and Allan Weiss earned Writers Guild Award nominations for their efforts. And the film benefits hugely from the presence of screen legend Barbara Stanwyck.
My first thoughts on seeing this was that it is “Loving You” again. That may sound like a good thing, until you realize that “Loving You” was a good seven years earlier, when Elvis was the young rock'n'roll rebel on the rise. You can only really play the story of a young outsider coming good and making it the once. Elvis was now way too old and, frankly, far too well known and too hugely successful to have been portraying the poor misunderstood young man (yet again). He was, in fact, thirty. Elvis does not appeal as a surly young man. Not least because the world was in the process of being overtaken by some real young guns, with no less than John, Paul, George, and Ringo leading the charge. You get the impression that the Elvis people were essentially living in a world of their own, with the world populated by Elvis fans. They seemed to think that they could keep on telling their two or three stories over and again. This was a tale that belonged in the past.
As for the analogies with “Loving You,” for older woman/manager Lizabeth Scott, read the formidable Barbara Stanwyck the carny circus owner, for the virginal love interest Dolores Hart read Joan Freeman, who is not so much innocent as insipid. (Frankly, there is more chance of Elvis running off with the Stanwyck character, if life and vitality is what you are after). Elvis fights, sings, does deals with older woman/manager, gets girl. But, apart from the seven years, another big difference separating “Roustabout” from “Loving You” is the soundtrack. The songs from “Loving You” were rock'n'roll classics, the songs from “Roustabout” are OK at best, with an awful lot of film fodder. The best song in “Roustabout” is actually an old Leiber and Stoller song, “Little Egypt,” first recorded by The Coasters in the fifties. If Elvis was returning to Leiber and Stoller for inspiration, he was now doing so at second hand, because that writing duo had long since lost interest in Elvis, taking exception to the mercenary preoccupations of Elvis' management.
Elvis looks good and sounds good. The film, the plot, and the songs are just not up to much. It's a story from another age, a throwback. We are now in the middle of the sixties, there are huge changes underway, and Elvis is going backwards. Was anyone really interested in the world of the carnival at this time? The film is mainly of interest for the really fine performance gifted by Barbara Stanwyck. And I do like the way that “Big Love, Big Heartache” is showcased in the film. The film has its amusing moments, albeit inadvertent: “it goes with the cycle” (pronounced “sickle” by Elvis) Elvis says after beating up his would-be assailants with karate, after they had criticized his Japanese motorcycle. (Or sickle, as Elvis pronounces it). My school friends thought that scene most hilarious, but at least they watched, I thought.
Girl Happy
Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer
Producer: Joe Pasternack
Director: Boris Sagal
screenplay: Harvey Bullock, R.S. Allen
96 minutes
Opened: April 14, 1965
I really needed to jolt my memory on this one. My records show that I have indeed seen this film at some indeterminate time in the past. I have little recollection of it. I think it has something to do with girls. Not unlike Elvis' other films, then.
My recollection of the film is that of Elvis at thirty coming across as the kind of clean-cut squeaky clean teenager of which he was the antithesis in the 1950's. The Elvis of this film would be the kind of person who would never have listened to rock'n'roll in his youth, if indeed he had ever had a youth. Other than that, it's just the usual tedious rubbish – nighclubs, fake sophistication, Elvis in a band, lots of girls on show (but never any sex), lots of fights (but never any serious injuries, stabbings, gunshots, or deaths). Overgrown teenage fantasies for those lacking an imagination and any semblance of a life. I think this must be a case of selective amnesia on my part. 1965 was the year I was born. The Beatles were cementing their takeover of the pop world with extremely good, ground-breaking music. Two years later I would sit in the Yellow Submarine in Liverpool. The Beatles, and John Lennon in particular, expressed complete contempt for where Elvis was at this point in his career. Sometimes you just have to be cruel to be kind. I just find it remarkable that this film grossed $3.1 million at the box office. That's an awful lot of money for precious little effort. It's the kind of money that makes management do it all over again.
Those who are perplexed as to how Elvis could have lost his way so quickly and so badly need to go back to 1960. Elvis' hit single were huge million sellers, but his principle album, the very excellent “Elvis is Back,” sold very modestly (a mere 200,000) compared to “G.I. Blues.” Same with his next albums “Something for Everybody” and “Pot Luck.” Elvis' own fans wanted films and their soundtracks, and he was clearly not making too many new fans with his serious music. He couldn't quit the films either, given the fact that he had signed contracts. But even had he quit, it wasn't obvious that he had access to sufficient quality material in the era of the singer-songwriter to make a go of it or, even if he could, that such albums would sell in quantities sufficient to make the same money as the films.
Was Elvis even listening to what The Beatles were saying of him? He must have heard the same criticisms in the mouths of others. If “Girl Happy” is a response, then it is lame. There is a rock'n'roll track on there, “The Meanest Girl in Town,” but it sounds incredibly old fashioned compared to where The Beatles and those they were inspiring were taking rock and pop. Elvis needed to up his game big time. Instead he seems to be merely attempting to force an echo of what he had once done. The film also contains some of the most excruciatingly awful songs of Elvis' entire career. Critics make fun most of all of the single “Do the Clam.” And it is indeed wretched. The idea seems to be to start another dance craze like The Twist:
Hey, everybody, gather 'round
Listen to that bongo sound
Grab the first one in your reach
Now we're going to shake the beach.
People didn't gather round. This isn't the worst song in the film, though. The song may be bad, but it is at least kind of catchy. Incredibly, even “Fort Lauderdale Chamber of Commerce” isn't the worst song, although it ought to have been for boasting a title like that and lyrics like this:
“Girls on the beaches commit a sin
They don't show yards and yards of skin ...
Any male in Fort Lauderdale who is not pursuing a cute female
Will automatically land in jail...
Pretty girls eighteen to twenty-three
If their technique ain't what it should be
Get love instruction for free from me
Through the courtesy of the Fort Lauderdale Chamber Of Commerce.”
For all that, the music is not as bad as the words. Then again, how could it be? A song like that would sink a career now. It probably would have sunk every career then, except Elvis'. But even that is not the worst song in the film. The dishonour of the worst song in the film must go to “Wolf Call,” a song so bad I can't even be bothered to abuse it, only quote some of the lyrics:
“Flip, flop with kay-eye
What a cutie pie I see
Oops, shoopa, doo-wah
Lips of honey that's for me
Shim, sham, shimmy
I might forget you, baby; there's no doubt
I saw you standing 'gainst the wall
I whistled and I gave my all
Now don't tell me you don't fall
For that wolf call.”
If I had been made to sing that, I'd have drawn all my money out of the bank and hired a professional assassin, or a whole team of them just to make sure. Or done the job myself. With a garlic crusher. Elvis needed to say “no.” Every man and woman needs their own personal 'yes' and 'no.' If you don't have that, then you are at the whim of tasteless others. There are good people in the world and there are bad, and most are a mixture of both. It's best not to leave your life at the whim of others.
Elvis being Elvis, he still manages to charm. “Puppet on a String” is a breath of fresh air.
The film reviews at the time were quite balanced. British Record Mirror described this as 'the sexiest, smoochiest, craziest romp' of Elvis' career. The reviewer must have fled in fear from The Kittyhawks. In The Legend and the Music, a very insightful biography of Elvis, John Tobler and Richard Wootton describe “Girl Happy” as “quite awful.” Howard Thompson in The New York Times said that the film 'meanders familiarly,' which is my impression of it. I think that is what the public were thinking, too. What's the new Elvis film like? Same as the last one. Elvis had turned thirty but his career was idling into inconsequentiality. The films were still making money, but it was if they had become a retirement plan. Margaret Harford of the Los Angeles Times described the film as "another 'beach musical.” The Monthly Film Bulletin hit the nail on the head in saying it was "very much a standard Presley vehicle. In other words, Elvis is the only really interesting thing about it." With Elvis ceasing to be musically relevant, the time was nigh when people would lose interest completely, and there would be nothing of substance in the films and their soundtracks to resurrect Elvis' flagging career. Elvis was ceasing to be interesting at all. In fact, he was becoming tedious. That meant that the day was coming soon when the films were utterly without interest.
The film made money, though, making it inevitable that another one of exactly the same kind would come to be made.
Tickle Me
Allied Artists
Producer: Ben Schwalb
Director: Norman Taurog
screenplay: Ellwood Ullman, Edward Bernds
90 minutes
Opened: November 24, 1965
Elvis and girls, again. Lots of girls, in fact. Elvis arrives in town as an unemployed rodeo rider looking for a job, and is hired by Julie Adams, owner of a health spa for shapely man-mad young women. It's even got a plot, too, involving gold and ghosts. And it's a comedy. That's it, really - girls, gold, and ghosts. Which seems more than enough. American Variety records that the film grossed a huge $5 million, enough to save United Artists, a film company founded by Charlie Chaplin. “Tickle Me” was one of Elvis' most financially successful films. Elvis had, in effect, become a big film star after all, just not as he had planned. He was successful, in that he was making a lot of money. But his recording career had gone down the tubes, as had his reputation. He was no longer musically relevant. He was no longer even present. And he was not the serious actor he had set out to be. Instead, he was making money in films that veered close to soft porn, the kind of pornography that was clean, of course, what Ursula Andress would describe as “dishonest." But it was sexploitation, nonetheless. The BFI was scornful: “Exceptionally routine Presley vehicle, which spends nearly all of its footage demonstrating that every female in the cast swoons incontinently before Elvis's manly charms (and songs).” The BFI review ends by saying “there isn't much else except for a quantity of uninspired songs.”
That assessment is overly harsh, with the BFI betraying its usual snobby dismissal of all things Elvis. In point of fact, these songs were selections from Elvis' very good early sixties albums, and cannot be dismissed as “uninspired” at all. But the reliance on old material rather than record a soundtrack of new songs merely served to underline the cheap and nasty approach now being taken to the Elvis films. There was increasingly a greater reliance on shapely girls in these films since there was little else to carry them. The plots were now threadbare and the quality of the soundtracks was collapsing. As noted, “Tickle Me” didn't even have a soundtrack of new songs. Costs were now cut so low that old songs were gathered up and reissued.
Whilst it is evident that many critics just plain didn't like Elvis or his music, the BFI's main comment on the film above is pretty accurate. Cecil Wilson in the Daily Mail wrote: “it's the mixture as before. There is little new to report, except bikinis seem to be growing smaller. Or else the girls are growing bigger.” The costumes were getting smaller and tighter. Check the performance of “Night Rider” and you'll see what I mean.
When The Beatles met Elvis, John Lennon asked Elvis straight up why he didn't record songs like he used to. The film sessions left him no time for anything but film songs, he replied, and 'the fans keep buying them anyway.' That, for Elvis' manager Tom Parker, was the only consideration. It is artistic suicide, of course. Through their love of and loyalty to Elvis, the undemanding fans played right into the hands of the fundamentally tasteless and exploitative Tom Parker, suffocating all of Elvis' artistic ambitions. Years earlier, Leiber and Stoller had quit the Elvis operation out of contempt for the mercenary preoccupations: we could have made history, they said, but they were only interested in turning a buck exactly the same way.
Elvis was paid $600,000 up front for the film, plus another $150,000 in expenses, in addition to receiving 50% of the profits on top of this. The film cost $406,400 to make, making it the cheapest Elvis movie to date. The film went on to make $5 million worldwide. Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times wrote that the film had "lousy color, cheap sets, hunks of stock footage, painted scenery and unconvincing process work. But who's to quibble when the movie is so much fun?" Or when it makes so much money with so little effort.
It is abundantly clear that manager Tom Parker's sole plan was to keep riding this tired old wagon until the last wheel finally fell off.
Actors like Michael Caine will tell you that he would accept many roles in films that are artistically dubious but commercially successful in order to pay the bills, support a certain standard of living, and also enable them to take on much more artistically worthwhile, if financially unrewarding, roles. This could easily have been done with Elvis. Instead, “Flaming Star” and “Wild in the Country” were consigned to history for their (relative) failure at the box office. There was neither imagination nor ambition behind the Elvis film operation, merely dollar signs and cynicism. I'll give you my blunt assessment as an Elvis fan. I don't give a damn how much money Elvis or Tom Parker or the producers, directors, and film companies made; I do give a damn how they made it, because their choices and actions reflect back upon my taste and judgment as an Elvis fan. Elvis fans want to see and hear Elvis, and truth be told the enormity of that desire was a big part of the problem. So long as fans consumed low-cost, low-quality 'product' in sufficient numbers, then 'Elvis' would continue to pour off the conveyor belt. But I'm not really blaming the fans here for their devotion to Elvis. Fundamentally, the artist bears a heavy responsibility to ensure that the people who invest their time and passion into raising that artist to iconic status are not having their commitment and love exploited for base motives. I'm afraid this all leaves a sour taste in the mouth. It was enough to have me abandoning Elvis for a decade or more. I returned because, when all is said and done, he was a fine singer and, on balance, there was far more good about his career than bad. But there was bad, and we have to be honest about it. I used to be angry about it, but now I'm just sad at the waste it all represents. The time we had with Elvis was good, but it could have been so much better. Listen to Elvis at his best. There is ample material to choose from here. And then ask why he is reduced to cavorting with scantily clad females in order to turn a buck. That's what the cheap and the mediocre do. Packing a show with girls is the age old ploy of the dull, the talentless, and the unimaginative. If you've got nothing to offer, then just put a load of dancing girls on. Did Elvis really need this? Was he now creatively bereft as to require gimmicks to turn a buck? His performances were lazy in the extreme. The music in this film was fine, being drawn from his studio recordings. But see how Elvis performs it. Take a look at those appalling clod-hopping routines by which he seeks to sell his songs in the films. He can't dance for toffee and looks leaden, plodding from foot to foot. His persona is lame and stale. This is the kind of thing that made me feel embarrassed as an Elvis fan. There are good reasons why Elvis fans always seem to be on the defensive. Watch the performance of “Dirty Dirty Feeling,” see how much you can stomach of it before putting your head in your hands.
You can safely say that I'm not a fan of “Tickle Me,” or of much that was “familiar” in the Elvis films. Our expectations of Elvis were so much higher than this. Even as a teenage boy with healthy obsessions, its titillation was a diversion from what was good about Elvis. The last word on “Dirty Dirty Feeling” is also the best word on these kind of films: it was, appropriately enough, sung by the talking horse: “gone.”
As an Elvis fan, I would hate to have Elvis judged by a film such as this. I would dread non-Elvis fans ever coming to see a film such as this. This is far from the worst, to be fair. It's actually quite funny. But with all that was happening in the mid-sixties, I can't understand why anyone would find any of this interesting or entertaining. I have a feeling that only morons could have been left watching Elvis by this stage. This very same year, 1965, Catherine Deneuve was starring as a sexually repressed woman in the film Repulsion, a film noted for being the first depiction of female orgasm in film to be passed by the censors. It may have been sound only, as Deneuve listened to her sister having sex, but it was far more tangible than the endless bevy of bimbos who are really virgins who never take their clothes off in the Elvis films. In “Tickle Me,” note how tight Jocelyn Lane's shorts are, and how often she has to adjust them when standing up. Teenage fantasies, far short of anything truly shocking like sexual reality:
“The nightmare world of a virgin’s dreams becomes the screen’s shocking reality!”
REPULSION
Roman Polanski, 1965
I can't help but contemplate these words as I examine these incredibly bland attempts at sexploitation in the Elvis films. They hint at sex, but no more, in case they scare off the aged virgins who are the only ones who could have been entertained by such goings on.
Premiere voted Repulsion as one of "The 25 Most Dangerous Movies." I hate to say this, but in comparison to other developments in the sixties, Elvis was utterly safe and laughable, an irrelevance, not serious. Given his talent and his history, that is criminal. There was a disconnect here, a suffocation of reality by the need to maintain some fake image, that made Elvis seem more unhip and square than the pop stars he had replaced.
Harum Scarum
Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer
Producer: Sam Katzman
Director: Gene Nelson
screenplay: Gerald Drayson Adams
84 minutes
Opened: November 24, 1965
In “Harum Scarum,” Elvis Presley is forced to do battle with kidnappers, assassins, numerous songs on a desert theme, and a script that some would describe as challenging, others as plain baffling, all of which stand in the way of his pursuit of Princess Shalimar, played by Mary Ann Mobley, the first Mississippian to have been crowned Miss America (in 1959). Sounds good! I need to know more.
The film was titled “Harem Holiday” in the UK for reasons I can't be bothered to research. I'm not sure which title was more appropriate, although I think the British title more likely to attract a crowd than the American one. Elvis plays a film star promoting his new film Sands of the Desert in a sheikh outfit. He is a sword fencer, too, and a karate expert. He is presented by the Ambassador to Prince Dragna and invited to be the guest of King Toranshah of Lunakhan. He takes a plane and flies over the Mountains of the Moon. When the Prince retires, he is entertained by the exotic Aishah, who gives him a glass of wine. He remembers nothing after that. Kidnapped by the enemies of the king, the Asssassins, he awakens surrounded by a host of beautiful young houris in the Palace of the Garden of Paradise. He is then dragged off to be questioned by Sinan, Lord of the Assassins and master of the exotic Aishah, who was behind the drugging and kidnapping. Sinan explains that he requires Elvis to use his karate skills to assassinate a 'very important man.' Elvis refuses and is dragged away for a thoroughly good whipping, but at least those attractive young houris are soon on hand to tend to his wounds. More double dealing and double crossing, with Elvis offered a chance to escape in return for a payment of $10,000, with Elvis escaping not to freedom but to the pool of the quarters of Princess Shalimar, no less (Mary Ann Mobley), who pretends to be a slave girl, promising him horses for an escape. They meet up with Zacha at the Pool of Omar, and they swap quotes from Omar Khayyam with each other before sharing a hug. When Elvis tells her that he is required to assassinate a 'very important man,' she runs away with the horses to warn her father, who is the King. Zacha hatches another plan for Elvis' escape … and so the film goes on until there is a big chess showdown and Elvis concludes matters at the Galaxy Hotel, Las Vegas, where he is the star attraction, accompanied by the exotically attired Harem Holiday beauties.
It's a masterpiece! How this didn't take the Oscars by storm I will never know. Is there no justice?
This was “King of the Quickies” Sam Katzman's second film for Elvis. Whatever the rest of the world may have thought of “Kissin' Cousins,” it was cheap and represented clear profit for little effort. So Katzman was hired again. Gene Nelson was back, too, as director. So we are judging against low expectations. “Harum Scarum” may have been bad, but it was not as bad as we were entitled to expect (nothing could have been, except maybe “Stay Away, Joe”).
1965 was something of a turning point for Elvis. This was the year that Elvis came face-to-face with The Beatles in person, when John Lennon made his dislike of Elvis' current films and music crystal clear: Why don't you make records like you used to do? Elvis explained that his film commitments left him with no time. The obvious response would have been to make time. Unless you just want to turn a quick buck and have no regards to quality let alone respect for the public. Elvis was still hugely popular, and enough of his fans were still paying to watch his films to have them return a clear profit even after Elvis had had his substantial cut up front. His records were still selling, too. But it was noticeable that numbers in all areas were falling off. His older fans were now young adults with other priorities than the sun'n'fun they had seen many times before, and Elvis had lost the younger pop audience to new acts like The Beatles.
What “Harum Scarum” was supposed to be is anyone's guess, Valentino meets The Monkees in Ali Babba meets Aladdin, I would suggest. I think it was supposed to be dashing and romantic, and Elvis does indeed look good in his sheikh garb. In a decade known for its bizarre antics I just find the notion of the former king of rock'n'roll reinventing himself as Valentino in order to meet the challenge of the beat groups the most bizarre of all. In retrospect, it makes Elvis look like a real one-off, an interpretation that works so long as we bracket out the appalling mismanagement that had brought Elvis to this. Given the low budget, all involved did a decent job, with fast pace, pretty dancing girls and good choreography papering over cracks that were of historical and geographical proportions. 'Entertaining' isn't quite the word to describe the film. It passes the time, so long as you don't think too much, or at all. And it does have you wondering what on Earth was going through Elvis' mind in suffering this nonsense. At some point, surely, he must have pondered the question of how badly his career was being mismanaged. Why wasn't he in the studio recording serious music? Why did he not have access to the best songs of the new era of pop music, an era he had done more than anyone to bring about? Why was he not meeting the new generation of artists, getting his reward as their inspiration? Why was he not on stage performing live?
I once tended to pass over this film with complete disdain. It looked like Elvis as a sad uncle trying to get in on the zanier end of the sixties. Elvis was older than the Monkees, and his audience was, or ought to have been, somewhere beyond the 9-12 age group. Who was this film aimed at? Middle aged children? Morons? The truth is that these films were strictly for undemanding Elvis fans, no one else. The films were merely vehicles to empty the pockets of Elvis fans one more time.
The title track is just lame, “every pretty girl is going to know I'm around … pretty women by my side, I'm going to kiss them all because I've got to keep them satisfied ..” Good grief, this sounds like the anthem of thirty to forty year old virgins, not so much sexual fantasy as sexual delusion and desperation. I think that this was supposed to be Elvis staking his claim to be a romantic lover in the tradition of Rudolf Valentino. Some hack somewhere was tasked with writing the appropriate song and came up with this one. The obligatory number sung to or with children, “Hey Little Girl,” goes well beyond the border separating the cute from the plain creepy. It was bound to happen given the tawdry nature of the Elvis film operation. The song hints at Northern Soul in places, which gets me excited, only to throw that promise away with the usual tired and lazy musical and lyrical clichés. It could all have been so much better had anyone been bothered enough to invest the time and energy into the attempt. The “Hey Little Girl” scene in the film makes me squirm.
That said, I'll confess to actually liking more than a few of the songs on this most ephemeral, and most overlooked, of Elvis soundtracks: “My Desert Serenade,” “Go East, Young Man,” “Kismet,” and “Mirage” are actually very decent tracks, so long as we are allowed to live in a world of our own, a world in which Elvis is the one and only true King. Songs like this make absolutely no sense at all in the world of sixties pop, soul, and rock. It's like Dylan, Hendrix, The Doors, Beatles, James Brown, Otis Redding, Motown, Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder, Aretha Franklin et al simply don't exist at all in the Elvis world. It's rubbish, right? As I ask this question I am listening to “Kismet.” I love it. More than fifty years on, it has lasted the years well. I can't categorize it, and I certainly can't relate it to anything that was going on in the pop and rock world at the time, although this, and the other songs I have mentioned here, do have something of a sixties rhythm and instrumentation. There may be something to be said for being out of fashion. Best of all, here, though, and by a considerable distance, is the smouldering ballad “So Close, Yet So Far (From Paradise)” with Elvis' powerful baritone reaching up to tenor at times. Truth be told, I'm listening to “Mirage” now, which reminds me as to why Elvis is my favourite singer. Apart from the voice, which is the most important thing of all, it's the diversity and the sheer oddness of the man and his music that does it for me. I really don't care what the rest of the world was doing. I don't care how great and how cool James Brown was, or Marvin Gaye or Dylan and The Beatles. You'll find nothing like “Harum Scarum” in their back catalogues. Now some may think that a good thing. But it leaves them without a “Mirage” or a “Kismet.” When I'm listening to Elvis, that other world doesn't exist. The music has nothing to do with 1965. That's why, fifty years on, it sounds fresher than ever. It's music that doesn't date, for the reason it was out of time - and place - when it was recorded. “Kismet.”
When the director told Tom Parker that “Harum Scarum” was so bad he couldn't save it, Parker suggested putting a talking camel into it, and charged $40,000 for artistic advice. That wasn't so much a fee as a penalty, making it clear to directors that their job is not to ask questions or put any thought or care into a film, merely shoot it on time and on budget.
Frankie and Johnny
United Artists
Producer: Edward Small
Director: Frederick de Cordova
screenplay: Alex Gottleib from a story by Nat Perrin
87 minutes
Opened March 31, 1966
The usual romantic shenanigans, this time set on an old showboat. “Roustabout” did it in a carnival, “Frankie and Johnny” does it on a river boat. Same script, same story, just change the location. We can cast the film in positive light and say that this was Elvis trying his hand at a classical musical, with the old folk blues of “Frankie and Johnny” reimagined as Showboat. Showboat it isn't, and it is less than sure that even had it been that then it would have been a good thing for Elvis in 1965. You get the distinct impression that Elvis and the people around him were flat out of ideas and inspiration and that rather than meet the new music of the sixties head-on were seeking a workaround, hitting the till for as long as they could. If Elvis was out of date, then there was nothing for it but to grab what you could from the audience so long as it was still around. There were still a lot of Elvis fans in the world, but the numbers prepared to pay to watch Elvis on film – or buy him on record – were dwindling. And no wonder.
The artist was committing professional suicide; in truth, the life was being squeezed out of him. Elvis and his management were retreating to worlds where The Beatles and the new beat groups and soul singers simply didn't exist and had never happened. It was an attempt to evade the competition and avoid improving one's own standards by dependence upon the soft market of already existing Elvis fans. That strategy is profitable in the short run but is a sure-fire recipe for artistic decline. Even the most loyal of Elvis fans would notice the drop in standards in time, and once they walk away it's game over. Sooner or later, artistic decline will ensure commercial decline.
Where, exactly, was Elvis on the charts in the mid-sixties? His last big hit had been in 1963 with “(You're the) Devil in Disguise.” That marked out a future for Elvis in funky country rock. Dylan came along with “Mixed Up Confusion Blues” and “Subterranean Homesick Blues.” It took Elvis until 1967 to get back in this groove with “Guitar Man” and “Big Boss Man,” but he was a badly compromised figure by then – the records were classics but did nothing on the charts.
What was in mind with “Frankie and Johnny” was an old fashioned, forties, fifties musical that had long since had its day. It's not actually a bad film. In fact, in its own terms, it is very well done, if you have a little nostalgia for the music hall. If we are forever judging Elvis in relation to The Beatles then we are at risk of judging apples against pears. Of course, one is entitled to think of Elvis and The Beatles as apples both. Or pears. There really is not a world of difference between them, so comparison is justified. But worlds had evidently separated. What Elvis was doing had naught to do with “Revolver,” “Blond on Blond,” or “Electric Ladyland.” Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing depends on taste. I really would have liked Elvis to have been a lot more rock and soul in the sixties than the screen prostitute he was.
“Frankie and Johnny” is at least a proper film, and it would have been considered very lively back in the early fifties. It is worth pointing out, too, that many of the songs which sound lame and even loopy when heard on the soundtrack - and there's more than the usual share in this film: “Come Along,” “Petunia, the Gardener's Daughter,” “Chesay,” “Look Out Broadway,” “Everybody Come Aboard” - really need to be both seen and heard in the film only and nowhere else. On record, “Petunia, the Gardener's Daughter” has me hiding my head in my hands and apologising in company with non-Elvis fans. In the film, Elvis romping around in that big yellow jacket and white trousers in duet with Donna Douglas is one of the more surreal moments of the sixties:
“I'm as daffy as a daffodil
I long to kiss her all the time
Tonight I'll steal into her garden
And make Petunia's two lips mine.”
I cannot help but think of these 'two lips' metaphorically, or even literally, depending upon how one reads Luce Irigaray. (See This Sex). I digress, in a desperate attempt to keep myself amused when entering the twilight zone of the Elvis film world. #
“Petunia” has a certain entertainment value. It's music hall, and has a certain immediacy in its appeal. You just know that this is going to be entertaining from the moment it starts. In context, it's … vaudeville. And judging by the evidence here, Elvis could have made a fine vaudevillian. What people made of the track when it started to appear on Elvis compilation albums, the mind boggles. Mine certainly boggled when I heard it on a budget album, coming on straight after some heavyweight stabs at blue eyed soul and psychedelic balladry (“Clean Up You Own Back Yard,” “Rubberneckin'” and “Edge of Reality,”) and before a decent blues (“Hard Luck.”) It doesn't fit in this context. Frankly, not only did the song sound ridiculous, it made a mockery of the music around it. This is an example of a film song that ought to have stayed in the film, where it does make some kind of sense. To make sure I am right on this, I just checked it out on You Tube. I note the comment from someone underneath to the effect that “Petunia” has got to be “the worst of some really bad Elvis movie songs. And yet, it makes me smile and I love it.” It's not the worst, and it does make you smile, after you've got over raised eyebrows and dropped jaws.
There are a few good songs in the film. In the seventies when I was a young boy I used to love the title track, “Frankie and Johnny,” as one of the great Elvis songs, one of the best five or ten songs of his career. I don't rate it remotely so highly these days. Elvis acquits himself well, and the song was considered good enough for single release. It made for a modest hit, reaching number 25 on the Billboard Hot 100, 3 on the Adult Contemporary chart, 4 in Canada, 21 in the UK, 40 in Australia and 13 in New Zealand. (Compare to Johnny Cash's version “Frankie's Man Johnny,” which hit only 57 in the US Hot 100 in 1959). I think Elvis' version stands comparison with Cash's version and the great Brook Benton's, too. Which is good company. Personally, I prefer the life performance by Liverpool's very own jazz blues artist George Melly. And for effortless sex and swing, Sam Cooke is in a class of his own, the top class too.
The soundtrack boasts three fine ballads “What Every Woman Lives For,” “Beginner's Luck,” and “Please Don't Stop Loving Me.” These combine sophistication and simplicity, and stand on their own merits independently of the film. I used to pass over “Hard Luck” as a mere pastiche blues, but I heard a blues band rework it as an out and out “Black Cat” blues and it really brought out the qualities of the song. So I revisited “Hard Luck” and now think it a fine blues indeed, with great work by Charlie McCoy on harmonica.
Paradise Hawaiian Style
Paramount Pictures
Producer: Hal Wallis
Director: Allan Weiss
91 minutes
Opened: July 6, 1966
For some reason, which rest assured has naught to do with personal preference, I have seen this film more times than any other Elvis film. It's a film that always seemed to be shown on television, in all time slots, morning, noon, and night. And being an Elvis fan, I had to watch it. In fact, in the decade or more when I came to detest Elvis, I would take the opportunity to watch this film, reinforcing my current dislike of Elvis. I loathed this film from the very first time I saw it. I took a particular dislike to the precocious brat endlessly mugging for the camera from the beginning of the film to end. She comes over as six going on sixty. It's just too much to see Elvis being forced to sing one appalling number after another, then having to sit on his hands whilst said brat bumps and grinds her way through the old blues standard “Bill Bailey, Won't You Please Come Home.” "Always leave them wanting more, isn't that what you always say, uncle Rick?" she asks Elvis' character. No, that's very much what Elvis' manager Tom Parker always says. It's galling. I always had the feeling that there was a subtext in these film scripts which were designed to give constant reminders of his true place in this entire operation; he was the hired hand of his management. And instead of some blues classic that he could have worked magic with, what does Elvis get to sing? “A Dogs Life,” for crying out loud. One of the most humiliating events in Elvis' career was having to sing “Hound Dog” to a dog on the Steve Allen Show; here, he is reduced to singing with dogs.
I can't put a positive spin on much here. Regardless of the mostly average songs, the film itself is dire. Elvis is a pilot, out of work, returning to Hawaii looking for a job. And then he gets involved with a lot of women. To which I simply ask, who on Earth is remotely interested any more? Elvis himself looks the least interested of all, sleepwalking his way through the film. He got lucky with “Blue Hawaii,” where he is a good sport, and got away with “Girls! Girls! Girls!” To try it again for want of any ideas is either pure cynicism, laziness, or desperation, most probably a combination of all three. I note that Hal Wallis is back as producer. I have nurtured a real loathing of that man and his approach to Elvis as an actor. Most of all, I am just hugely disappointed by the fact that Elvis either didn't realize he was being had by Hollywood, being treated as the mere means to access the cash of his extensive fanbase, didn't care so long as the money kept rolling in, or simply didn't have whatever it would take to assume control of his affairs. This whole sorry mess should simply never have happened.
As for the obligatory song with children, it's best not to go there. “Datin',” a song sung in duet with the 'cute' Donna Butterworth, is bad enough, but “Queenie Wahine's Papaya” really takes the entire biscuit tin. The song is defended as being for a younger audience: Elvis sings for kiddies at one end of the age range, grannies at the other, and morons of miscellaneous bents and proclivities in between. I cast no aspersions on Elvis fans, I'm in there somewhere myself. Such material fits the management's “Elvis for everyone” approach, having Elvis cover all bases. It is testament to Elvis' great facility as a vocalist that he could indeed sing a wide variety of songs and be so persuasive. And that could simply be the right way to judge “Queenie Wahine's Papaya,” a fun little tongue twisting ditty. It may be just that and no more. But it's just so God-awful that my rational mind thinks that there could actually be some truth in the rumour that the song has another meaning that slipped under the radar, if only because nothing could be as bad as this song seems to be when taken at face value. On second thoughts, though, it could easily be as bad as it seems, given how low Elvis' career had sunk. I'll not elaborate, but the writers Bill Giant, Bernie Baum, and Florence Kaye were not hacks, having penned classics like “Devil in Disguise,” in which the walking, talking angel turns out to be a devil. They wrote another double entendre song for “Paradise Hawaiian Style,” “Scratch My Back (Then I'll Scratch Yours,)” setting it to a rhumba beat. So who knows? (And who cares?) Could the writers be having a little joke at the expense of the tasteless creeps who were giving them lousy assignments like this? It happened before in Elvis' career, most notably with Leiber and Stoller and the songs they wrote for Elvis (“Santa Claus is Back in Town” and “Jailhouse Rock.”) I'll merely mention that Mitt Romney got into trouble for professing a love of papaya in Cuba. Hawaii isn't Cuba, of course. But the bossa nova isn't Brazilian, either. The horrible truth is that the song could really just be as bad as it sounds.
As for “Scratch My Back,” I remember it well from the first time I saw the film, part of the Elvis season on BBC TV Christmas 1977. An Elvis film on TV was always a highlight, and we'd get the old Grundig tape recorder ready to tape all the songs. Even I started to have my doubts as this film unfolded. The songs just seemed awful in the main, not proper songs. When the erotic duet and dancing started for “Scratch My Back,” at the Piki Niki club no less, with an amply proportioned woman with long legs leading the way, (one that I, even at the age of twelve, identified as a real woman rather than one of those young bimbos who decorated the other films), I got nervous. I looked to my mother and asked “Should I tape this?” She showed her complete disapproval, leaving the room saying “You can do what you like.” I got the distinct impression that that was a most emphatic “NO!” Ask a stupid question. I taped it all the same. I did read a comment on You Tube with someone saying “how this made it through the TV censor I'll never know.” I don't know either, the way that this woman was grabbing her body and kicking her legs high and handsome.
“Scratch me now, a little lower, what a feeling, do it slower.”
“You just hit the spot.”
It went out around 11 am as I remember. I can only think that Elvis was now considered so tame and lame, in singing mainly for kids and morons, that he was considered a threat to nothing other than good taste and sanity. Nobody bothered checking.
The film would go out at all times, morning, afternoon, night, provoking no reaction other than boredom. Apart from my mother. Who most certainly took the huff. The film doesn't even look good. It's impossible not to look good in Hawaii, but the film on this looked cheap.
Spinout
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producer: Joe Pasternack
Director: Norman Taurog
90 minutes
Opened: November 23, 1966
Elvis is lead singer in a rock'n'roll band and a driver of racing cars. A singing racing car driver! Whhoooo! Awesome! Oh, and he likes women. I remember little of this film, and so feel justified in describing it as 'unmemorable.' In my mind, this film blurs into elements of “Girl Happy” and “Speedway” as well as other films. But it doesn't stand out. Films like this make me want to go back and reassess “Kissin' Cousins,” “Tickle Me,” “Harum Scarum,” and “Paradise Hawaiian Style.” Those films may well have been bad, but there was something memorable about them in all of their awfulness and/or bad taste, even if not necessarily in a good sense. “Spinout” just strikes me as cars and girls without Ann-Margret. I'll be blunt and state openly that there is something not merely sleazy but downright creepy about films in which a now thirty something Elvis is constantly surrounded by scantily clad dancing bimbos wiggling in excitement as they parade in front of Elvis. It suggests a fear of real women, which itself indicates something fake and phoney about all of it. If you think I'm being overly sensitive, then track down the video for “Beach Shack,” and count the girls in bikinis by the pool:
Come see my etchings
I wish you would
Don't be afraid girl
My intentions are good
You believe me now..
Dumb-di-dumb-di-dumb, yeah-yeah-yeah
I know girls by the pack
There's no-one I want there but you
In my little beach shack
The song is written by the Baum-Giant-Kaye team again, people with history.
I quoted Ursula Andress earlier referring to the “dishonest” attitudes to sex in the Elvis films. I may be over-analysing here, and I am certainly generalizing. It could simply be that, out of sheer desperation for want of ideas, throwing a lot of pretty girls into the picture was about all that the lame brains in charge of the direction of Elvis' film career could think of. I also mentioned earlier that when the director of “Harum Scarum” told Tom Parker that the film was so bad it was beyond salvation, Parker responded by telling him to put a talking camel into it, which was helpful. Talking camels being in short supply, so the directors had to make to with a lot of girls, of which there seems to be a never ending supply. With so many girls populating one film after another it is impossible not to become cynical. The visual effect is somewhat deadening, at best. It can actually be quite sickening. I'm remembering the lines penned by Mancunian punk poet John Cooper Clark about The Daily Mail:
“This paper's mindless, boring and mean
full of pornography, the kind that's clean.”
The same could be said of too many of these Elvis films, mindless and boring, certainly (to their credit, they are rarely if ever mean, stupid, yes, but not mean). And fake. And infantile. I quoted Ursula Andress' view earlier that Elvis' audience was made up of “innocent little girls” in the main. Innocent little boys, too, we could add. Or people who were forever infantilised. Notice how often guys are chasing gals, and vice versa, and yet no one ever has sex. In fact, notice how often Elvis has a fight in his films, but people rarely get hurt (“Jailhouse Rock” is a notable exception). It's not just garbage, it is hypocritical, fake, and pathetic. It's boring, too. As for those damned cars! How many more times?! Not interested.
Easy Come, Easy Go
Paramount Pictures
Producer: Hal Wallis
Director: John Rich
95 minutes
Opened: March 22, 1967
Still here? Still interested? You soon won't be. I knew that this film was rubbish the first time I saw it aged eleven or so. In fact, I knew that it was going to be rubbish as soon as I saw the opening credits. I note that Hal Wallis is the producer again. This is a man who made films like Beckett. Neither he nor Elvis' manager Tom Parker ever had the slightest of intentions to further Elvis' ambitions to be a serious actor. Both believed that all that Elvis films were fit for was making money. It's as simple as that, and hardly worth spilling words over the issue, other than to note the sheer cynicism with respect to Elvis' fans. Elvis was let down by his management, but he let himself down in taking the money, staying passive, and getting lazy (and depressed and defeated). And he let his fans down, betraying their loyalty to this bunch of parasites and cheapskates. But maybe, in truth, there was nothing he could do, the machine that swallowed him was so much bigger than he was. A lot of people he was paying to help him actually let him down and sent him down a blind alley.
I'll admit that I am not actually reviewing the films here, merely giving my own personal likes and dislikes, which people are free to regard or disregard as is their wont. But I really don't think films like “Easy Come, Easy Go” merit a review. In offering a description, I merely serve to make the film more interesting than it actually is. Elvis is in uniform again, playing a frogman who goes off in search of treasure on an old wreck. If that sounds good, then along the way he meets a rich nymphomaniac who owns a yacht. The film recycles familiar Elvis film themes, then. He does, however, get to sing a duet with Elsa Lanchester, the Bride of Frankenstein herself, playing Madame Nehrina, on the immortal “Yoga is as Yoga Does.” The way that art and folk roots had been thrown into the machine and turned into a monster that was proceeding to eat Elvis up all makes some kind of perfect (non)sense. I have a feeling, with all the hippies and artie types in this film, that this represented an attempt to 'get with it.' Or, given the sneers and snits like the ones offered in the above song, offer a rationale as to why Elvis would never be inclined - or allowed - to get with it. All such a world does is give you a pain in the posterior, after all. The songs have a certain contemporary sound and feel, and there are signs of maturity, at last. The performance of “The Love Machine” is just embarrassing, though. Same with the performance of “Easy Come, Easy Go” in the opening credits. I actually like the song on record, I think it's quite a good rocker. In the film, Elvis performs the song in a boat with his buddies, all of them in uniform. It is totally unhip, Elvis as the John Wayne of rock'n'roll. It's like “G.I. Blues” reinvented for the swinging sixties, a monstrous musical and cultural misconception in the middle of Vietnam. It's like watching a bunch of aged uncles trying to 'get with it,' only serving to make it clear that they haven't got the first idea of what 'it' is, still less where it is and where it's at. Elvis gives the hippies some modern gospel, introduced by a blast on the trumpet: “Sing You Children.” I like it. It's just that Elvis sounds like my old deputy head, getting hip with the kids and making the connection between the hippy philosophy and the religious ethic of love. Which isn't a bad thing at all. The condescending attitude to the hippies and the avant garde is revealing, though. We know that Elvis was very much interested in eastern spirituality. The spirit behind this film is quite patronising. There is a sneer, here, that doesn't quite fit what we know about Elvis.
I take it as read that fans think Elvis is wonderful and that the controversy over the films and their songs is overdone. It's just fun and entertainment and they made money. That's the stock defence. But that's not a defence at all, it's a clear denial and evasion. Because we know for a fact that Elvis himself expressed frustration, disappointment, and anger with what he was made to do and sing in the movies. One comment I read on the You Tube video for “Yoga is as Yoga Does” is:
“Mein Gott!!! Elvis what went wrong?
Nice girls though."
If we have need of generalisation for want of explanation, then that comment could be applied to what happened to Elvis' film career. There are no pretensions to great art, here, only a determination to turn a buck. The Elvis films were never going to be about great art. The die was cast early on that. Film makers know that great films take a lot of effort and finance, and are often subsidised by more popular, low culture, endeavours. Elvis was defined as low culture. He did make a handful of quality films, but the fact that they were relative box office failures (relative to 'sun'n'fun'), as they were bound to be as 'art,' sealed their fate with a management for whom commerce was the overriding concern.
So it went wrong from an artistic perspective. And it went wrong financially, too. That may seem a false statement since, as people repeat, no Elvis film ever lost money. (I think “Easy Come, Easy Go” is the only Elvis film that didn't make a profit). But these films made money on the back of Elvis fans' devotion. To say that Elvis' films were successful says no more than that Elvis has a lot of devoted fans. The fact that no Elvis film lost money is a comment on the fans' devotion not the films' quality. These fans turned up time and again thinking they were going to get Elvis at his best. Instead, they got Elvis increasingly at his worst. And over time they turned up in less and less numbers. Financially, too, the Elvis films died a death. Commerce negated art in the first instance, then ate itself up by pure greed in short time after. Elvis did not have a long film career at all. And the time from when manager Tom Parker imposed his cut price regime to the end was shorter still, 1964 to 1969. That's not a business strategy at all, that's cheap exploitation, an obsession with cheap and easy money. The big money comes from looking after quality in the long run.
Tom Parker was the antithesis of a great manager. He was a hack, a small-time carny man with a small mind. His forte was painting sparrows yellow and selling them as canaries or having chickens dance on a hotplate. That's what he thought of Elvis. The only thing about Elvis that attracted Tom Parker was the mass interest he generated. To Parker, that meant dollars. All he was concerned to do was to get his hands on the money as quickly as possible, by any means necessary.
In making these criticisms I avoid turning this into a simple Tom Parker bad-Elvis good, Parker guilty-Elvis innocent binary. That's far too simple, as those who defend Tom Parker's management are quick to point out. But I'll stand by the claims I make on Parker as a cheap, nasty, and tasteless mediocrity who should have been nowhere near the career of any serious and substantial artist. I think that is very true, and the wasteland of Elvis' career, from a position of strength, is there to prove it. But if that is true, then it also begs some serious questions of Elvis himself. He liked the money, he liked what the money could buy him, and he signed the contracts without insisting on quality scripts and songs. There was a strict distinction maintained between 'music' and what Tom Parker called 'business,' with Elvis accepting that he focused on the music whilst his manager had exclusive control of 'business.' What Elvis never understood is the extent to which 'business' not only impinged on the music but effectively shaped it. The dualism of music and business led to an inversion which not only placed artistic considerations at the bottom of the relationship but threatened to eliminate them altogether. Elvis was a grown man of money and power who signed contracts without giving them anything like enough thought. He signed his agency and autonomy away, hence his complete passivity and, indeed, complicity in these continuously and consistently poor career choices. The tasteless money grubbing manager is responsible for these bad directions, for sure, which sent Elvis to an early grave after a lifetime of creative frustration. But Elvis was responsible too. He didn't take care of business, he didn't fight anywhere near hard enough for his music and his art. He does seem to have thought that from nowhere someone in the world of film will deliver a great film and film role to him, tied in ribbons. Study the careers of all the great actors and actresses, all of them have had to do films of dubious quality. But at the same time as they were doing these, paying their bills, becoming known, they were working hard to land the quality roles, cultivating links with others, making contacts, fighting with every fibre of their being to get a good part. It's highly competitive and highly uncertain business. Elvis had the power to make much greater demands, and more forcefully, than he did. When he heard that he would be made to sing “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” in the film “Double Trouble,” he raged at his wife: “It's come to this.” That's weak. Like some powerless hired hand, Elvis merely went home to kick the dog, complain to people who had no power to alter things. Elvis had that power. He didn't use it. So he is culpable in his own demise. And it is sad. Because he was evidently incapable of being more proactive in the choices shaping his life. So he left it to his greedy manager and remained passive as his career, and ultimately his life, went down the toilet.
Why didn't Elvis fire Tom Parker? He was a rotten manager who had succeeded in making Elvis a joke, even, and perhaps most especially, among the new generation of rock and pop stars that Elvis had inspired in the first place. John Lennon was openly contemptuous. He wasn't the only one. In 1968, one time fan Jimi Hendrix said that the only progress Elvis had made in recent years had been in his bank balance. In the end, if we are looking for one person to blame – if the blame game ever serves any useful purpose – for the demise of Elvis' career and life, then it is Elvis himself we have to come back to. It is evident that he didn't have the nerve to back art against commerce; that is, so long as the money kept rolling in, Elvis was inclined to keep quiet. The money bought his complicity. Elvis was artistically apathetic. Hence he would turn up for work, clock on and do as he was ordered, even if that meant singing dreck like “Yoga is as Yoga Does.” And it's even worse than that. Because he didn't just sing these songs, he actually performed them. He raged about “Old MacDonald” back home, but he still turned up for work and sang the song, mimicking farmyard noises to boot, at the back of a truckful of farm animals. I challenge anyone not merely to listen to “Queenie Wahine's Papaya” but to watch its performance in “Paradise Hawaiian Style.” Elvis is enacting his castration and humiliation, expressing his defeat publicly, confirming his subservience. There was no spark of rebellion, only a meekness that not merely bordered on weakness but collapsed into complete cowardly surrender until not even a scrap of self-respect could have been left. Elvis was of the view that Tom Parker had had this stupid skit of yoga inserted into “Easy Come, Easy Go” in order to ridicule Elvis' growing interest in yoga through his friendship with Larry Gellar. Parker wanted to monopolize Elvis and insulate him from any external influences that may actually tempt the Golden Goose into other than strictly 'business' considerations. Tom Parker wanted nothing more than to keep making money off Elvis, and Elvis was passive and inert in response. This was the time that Elvis had formed a friendship with his hairdresser Larry Geller, who was keen on yoga and eastern spiritualism. Elvis was developing an interest, too, and Tom Parker along with the Memphis Mafia Elvis surrounded himself with loathed it all. Deep down, Elvis knew it: "That son of a bitch!” he raged against Parker. “He knows and he did it! He told those damn writers what to do, and he's making me do this." (Elvis quoted in the book "Careless Love, The Unmaking of Elvis Presley” by Peter Guralnick). But that was as far as Elvis' rebellion went. Had he continued to pursue his interest in yoga, he may well have avoided the descent into a bloated mess and early death.
Elvis, just get rid of that greedy, robbing manager of yours, being made to perform dreck like this is grounds alone. If songs like these are not in breach of contract, then the contract that allows, indeed enforces, such dreck isn't worth the paper it is written on. Elvis seems to have seen himself as the employee in his own company, working for his manager instead of having his manager working for him. But Tom Parker knows about 'business' and Elvis knows about 'music,' hence the division of labour comes the response. Tom Parker was a small-time carny con-man who knew about scams and gimmicks. He knew nothing about proper business, other than Elvis was popular, and that where there are people there is money. He knew nothing about music, and could care less. Elvis at least knew the latter, and was passive in fact of a manager who threw it all away.
It's a tough old world for idiots.
There's other things going on in this film. There are lots of women with long legs in bikinis, women in tight costumes too, doing yoga, and body painting too. It was an education for a young boy. We were far away from “G.I. Blues” in this respect. It was noted, but passed by in silence, back home. It took a school friend to point out the obvious in one of the frogman scenes. He was a year older than me, but a lot more advanced in his knowledge of such things. He seemed a very old ten to me. In my Elvis Special of 1973 (a present for Christmas 1972, which I still have), he singled out the photograph of Elvis in frogman's outfit with Pat Priest in a bikini. Remarkably, that's the same Pat Priest who starred as Marilyn Munster in "The Munsters" from the 1950's. The Elvis world is a strange world indeed. In 1967, the innocence of the fifties was a long decade ago. But that doesn't mean that the Elvis people really had much of an idea. Looking at the way the songs are performed, it seems that those making the effort to update Elvis' image can thing of nothing better than the old bohemians and beatnicks that are so pre-rock'n'roll, making it clear that no one here really had much of a clue after all. In other words, this was a case when appearances were not deceptive. In many respects, “Easy Come, Easy Go” is far more embarrassing than “Harum Scarum” and “Frankie and Johnny,” because at least there, there was a studied avoidance of the contemporary world. With “Easy Come, Easy Go,” and the film that followed it, “Double Trouble,” there was a conscious effort to look and sound contemporary. It only served to show how out of touch Elvis really was. The Bride of Frankenstein and Marilyn Munster look far more 'with it.'
Double Trouble
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producers: Judd Bernard, Irwin Winkler
92 minutes
Opened: April 5, 1967
Elvis is still in the process of 'getting with it,' entering swinging London, albeit whilst never stepping foot outside of Hollywood. Swinging sixties it may have been, but with Elvis that merely meant doing his stuff in a nightclub, as he had done in all the other films from earlier in the sixties. Annette Day is Elvis' love interest. She was at least British, discovered in London's Portobello Road, kind of pretty, plenty virginal, in fact way too much. It doesn't feel right. At least Ursula Andress and Ann Margret were women. “Double Trouble” is pretty tired: girls chasing Elvis, Elvis chasing girls, there are jewel thieves, too, and a comedy trio, the Weire Brothers, playing inept Belgian police officers, which gives us three rotten Inspector Clouseau's for the price of one. Peter Sellers himself couldn't have rescued this. For me, the most memorable thing in this film is the jazzy “City By Night.” It's pastiche blues, but it is well done and Elvis is in great voice. I would happily swap a handful of films like this for one album of blues-jazz ballads by Elvis. He could have done it. In fact, on “Fever” and “I Need Somebody to Lean On,” he had already done it. It's a shame he didn't do much more of it.
Against that fine song, and the nice ballad "Could I Fall in Love?", the film contains three of the worst songs of Elvis' – indeed of anyone's – career. The really interesting thing with respect to this film is to debate which of these three songs is actually the worst. Most people would go with “Old MacDonald,” which is indeed truly execrable. It could only have been. “Who could sing such drivel and make it stick? Who could put across such drivel and keep the customers lined up for more? Only Elvis.” (Dave Marsh, Elvis). I don't think “I Love Only One Girl” is quite so bad – I don't think anything could be – but at least “Old MacDonald” was dreck that knew itself to be dreck. “I Love Only One Girl,” which is based on the traditional French song “Aupre de ma Blonde,” shows evidence of thought and planning, as though the writers really did think they could reproduce that catchy little ditty in modern pop form. It's jolly, yes, jolly irritating. I loathe “Long Legged Girl (with the Short Dress On)” most of all, though. Why? Because the cretins behind it really do seem to have been trying to get Elvis back to his rock'n'roll roots, only to make clear the extent to which all concerned had seriously lost the plot, if they ever had it in the first place (which I doubt). Elvis had roots and once had the plot; he was once on nodding terms with his talent. Judging by films such as this, there is serious disconnect going on in the relation of Elvis to his music. There is another point that is worth making: whereas once Elvis' music was inherently sexual and sensuous, only for it to be sanitized and concealed in the earlier films, the overt appeal to sexual imagery that became more prominent as we passed the mid-point in the sixties is not merely crude but fake, the cheap tactic of the clueless.
Clambake
United Artists
Producers: Arnold Lavan, Arthur Gardner, Jules Levy
Director: Arthur H Nadel
97 minutes
Opened: November 22, 1967
OK, I give up. I should just cease writing now, because by this stage the only fun I'm having lies in stating, over and again, just what dross these films are, a waste of Elvis' talent and of the fans' money. I'll try my level best to review objectively and see how far I get. “Clambake” recycles the usual Elvis film ingredients, but does so within the old Prince and the Pauper storyline, which is a novel enough twist. That gives the story a little more substance than usual. Elvis is involved in a race, again, boats this time instead of cars. He will win the race, of course, despite the threat of the boat exploding, and he does so through the application of some magic potion called “gunk.” And he'll win the girl, too. And the money. There's lots of girls in bikinis, again, and lots of beach parties, again. What was it with the people who enjoyed these staple elements? Didn't they have any girls where they lived? Didn't they have any friends or get invited to parties? Was one of Elvis' screen parties all they had to look forward to?
Jack Good had reviewed more than a few Elvis films by now. He described “Clambake” as “one of the really, really awful ones.” I'll balance this by quoting the review in American Variety: “Elvis at his best in a well-motivated yarn … one of the singer's top offerings to date, backed by a legitimately premised story line, melodic songs, acceptable acting and winding with a spectacular water race. The film has all the makings of being one of Presley's heaviest grossers.” He must have been on the payroll. The prediction of a box office smash was proven wrong, and this glowing review was very wide of the mark in all other respects. Howard Thompson in The New York Times described the film as "a real Christmas clinker" and a "silly, tired little frolic." He went on to say that "even staunch Presley admirers—and we're one of them when he delivers the likes of Fun in Acapulco and Viva Las Vegas—will have to strain to justify this one." So if my views seem harsh, I am making them from the perspective of an Elvis fan who knows Elvis' true worth and value to be many levels above dreck like this. Elvis was not unaware of how bad a lot of these films were, considering “Clambake” to have been his very worst film (and there are quite a few contenders). (Neibaur, James L. (2014). The Elvis Movies. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 219). The Monthly Film Bulletin put the blame on Shelley Fabares: "the only really jarring note is the very unpersonable heroine." Which strikes me as most unfair. Fabares was one of Elvis' favourite leading ladies, I read. She made three films with him, in any case. The problems lie elsewhere. As a one-off, films like this are entertaining enough in an undemanding kind of way. There's room for such films. But there were far too many of them in Elvis' career. If they bore me as an Elvis fan, then just imagine what the great public would think of them (not to mention the critical public).
By this stage, the decent songs that these films contained were not only becoming fewer but were being staged in a thoroughly unimaginative way.
Stay Away Joe
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producer: Douglas Laurence
Director: Peter Tewkesbury
screenplay Michael A Hoey, based on the novel by Dan Cushman
102 minutes
Opened: March 8, 1968
I'll not mince words here. The first time I watched this film, as part of the BBC's season of Elvis films at Christmas, 1977, I thought it an utter unmitigated disaster. To my young eyes, the film was an atrocity. In fact, taking the opportunity to watch it again whenever it was shown again on TV, I drew the same conclusion. In fact, noticing the casual racism for the first time, it was even worse. Things were not helped by the very promising opening, great shots of the American canyons as Elvis croons “Stay Away,” a song based on “Greensleeves,” a tune I love. This is going to be a good one, I thought. Then I sat and waited for aeons for the film to actually start. The fighting, the womanizing, and the drinking just seemed to keep getting in the way of the film, I kept thinking, until I realized, about an hour in, that the fighting, womanizing, and drinking actually was the film. Elvis had won some award or other from the Indian Council for his sympathetic portrayal of native Americans in “Flaming Star.” He deserved it, too. They took it off him for this pandering to racial stereotypes. He deserved that dishonour too, particularly at a time when the USA was showing signs of a more sympathetic understanding of native Americans. I have no idea how Burgess Meredith and Joan Blondell ever allowed themselves to be persuaded to take roles in this fiasco.
As to the film, I really don't know what to say specifically. The government gives an Indian reservation a bull to start a herd, making them self-sufficient hard working folk. The bull is not remotely interested in doing as nature intended, so Elvis sings him a song “Dominick” (The Impotent Bull). I'm not joking, honest. It seems that the bull is a rodeo bull and so just wants to sleep rather than sire a herd. Elvis sings him a nice song telling him about the birds and bees. He just misses the essential bits about bulls out. Then, in a wild drunken party, poor Dominick gets killed, roasted on a spit, and eaten. Honestly, I really am not joking. Elvis plays a hard drinking, fighting, partying Indian who is out to bed all the girls in the vicinity, with even sixty plus Joan Blondell counting as one of his conquests some time in the past (he's after her daughter here). But some things never change. For all the constant references to sex, there never actually is any. Elvis ends up with nothing to show for the chase. It's juvenile, in other words. Chase too many targets rather than one and you get none. Like young bears and fish.
I think the film is rotten to the core, and not merely for being racist, sexist, and stupid. It just really is rotten. But I have long ceased classing it among Elvis' worst films. Not because it isn't among Elvis' worst – it most certainly is – but because I've started to see it as Elvis returning the contempt for Hollywood that Hollywood had shown for him from the start. That may be an overstatement, given that many talented people had done their best working in the Elvis films over the years. I refer specifically to the contempt that the main players, decision makers and critics in the film world had shown to Elvis at every stage of their career. I'll just add this caution. Director Don Siegel had seen the constraints Elvis was working within in his desire to become a serious actor, and had seen Elvis' discouragement filming “Flaming Star.” He encouraged Elvis not to throw his performance away on account of these external forces, coaxing on of Elvis' best performances out of him. In the end, though, Elvis was ground down, and actually seemed to enjoy himself larking around in this film, as if showing how rotten and worthless Hollywood really was at its core. That's why I like the film. Not because it's good, but because it really is wretched, and because that's all that Hollywood deserves.
My mother was an Elvis fan. I watched this with her Christmas 1977. She didn't watch for long. She had better things to be doing. We all did, really. It was utter rubbish and we all knew it. The themes being played out in the film made for some very uncomfortable viewing at times. I think it is safe to say that we were entering the world of soft porn with films like this. Or we would have been, had the endless talking about sex ever taken shape in terms of action. We were forever on the verge in this film. I distinctly remember the scene when the two girls were leading Elvis into the hills, shedding a garment of clothing as they went, leaving a trail to be followed behind them. This made for interesting viewing Christmas morning. But where the heck did they go? It's not the kind of thing you want to show much of an interest in finding out when you know your mother is monitoring in the background, and strongly disapproving.
Speedway
Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer
Producer: Douglas Laurence
Director: Norman Taurog
94 minutes
Opened: June 12, 1968
I can't really comment. My records show that I have seen the film, way back when. It made absolutely no impression, although I think I may be finding it impossible to distinguish it from “Spinout” and “Clambake”, Elvis as demon racer (whether cars, as here, or boats). Elvis is out to win a race, win money, win the girl, and that's precisely what he does. Oh he's good, isn't he!? Amazing how he always wins! So totally unexpected, too. We were all on tenterhooks there, for a millisecond. I just remember it as an attempt to rework “Viva Las Vegas” with Nancy Sinatra instead of Ann-Margret. I think there is no comparison on any level. The facts and figures show Nancy Sinatra to have been hugely popular at this time (she was having bigger hits than Elvis in the charts of the day). And the film grossed a whopping $3 million at the box office. Even I am left speechless by that. If you were Elvis, knowing what you were doing to be dreck, yet making so much money, with seemingly such little effort, then tell me what you would do? The uncomfortable truth is that these films were money in the bank, the only certainty in Hollywood, and very probably making more money than any Elvis album of serious songs could ever have made.
The declining grosses being turned in by recent Elvis films led to an attempt to put some oomph into the formula. That oomph amounted to stock-car racing, with promises of crashes, and Nancy Sinatra, who was seeing more chart action at the time than Elvis was. Sinatra even got a song of her own in the film and onto the soundtrack album. The plot was pretty much a variation on the same theme, so it was down to Sinatra and stock cars to inspire a more interested performance from Elvis.
Whatever it was, it did the trick. The film may have been lousy, but it pulled the ticket-buyers in to gross $3 million at the box office, placing at #40 on Variety’s list of “Big Rental Pictures of 1968.” An Elvis film hadn't grossed this much at the box office since 1965, some ten pictures ago.
So what did this film have that the previous ten didn't? In the view of Variety, (May 22, 1968), it was stock cars and Sinatra that explained the added interest:
“Presley belts out his usual assortment of ballads and dance songs here, and has Nancy Sinatra as co-star for possible added box office lure. Aside from Presley’s singing, however, most of the interest footage, lensed at the Charlotte Speedway in North Carolina, rests in exciting stock car racing where a crash-a-minute is practically guaranteed.”
Many critics consider the soundtrack to be an improvement on recent soundtracks. I see it as decidedly average, with the usual film fodder and dreck (“He’s Your Uncle, Not Your Dad”) and fake, forced 'rockers' (“Speedway,” “There Ain't Nothing Like a Song”). And we are back in the clubs for the same old pseudo-sophisticated performances. Elvis performs three of the six tunes at a disco called the “Hangout.” Groovy! Oh, and Nancy Sinatra gets to perform her own song, “Your Groovy Self,” written by Lee Hazlewood. I see no reason to rate the soundtrack as anything out of the ordinary, there are just the seven tracks, one of which is a duet with Sinatra, an other which is Sinatra on her own. The bonus songs are interesting, but not remotely in the same class as the bonuses added to “California Holiday” and “Clambake.”
The best song here by a considerable distance is “Let Yourself Go.” The song is an almost completely overlooked classic in the Elvis catalogue and counts among the very best of all of Elvis' film songs. If I was to be slightly critical, I could say that the instrumentation is a little dated for the late sixties and that the song could have been even more powerful with a more authentically contemporary sound. But it's a powerhouse number all the same. The fact that it was a big production number in the film as well as a single release indicates hopes for a significant impact in the number. That said, for reasons known only to the record company, this punchy track was marketed as the flip side of the sweet but relatively innocuous “Your Time Hasn’t Come Yet Baby” when it came to the single release. In making the criticisms I have made, I have hoped to avoid the familiar narrative of Elvis as an artist in decline. The title of 'comeback' that was added to the NBC TV Special of 1968 was always something of a misnomer, since Elvis had never gone away and, for all of the dubious songs and films he gave his name to, was still making fine music. It's just that you had to look for it beyond the public persona of the film star. “Let Youself Go” is a high-powered rocker that disappeared without trace. Elvis tried to reintroduce it at the '68 Special, as he did, too, with another ignored gem from the films, “A Little Less Conversation.” It took over thirty years for “Conversation” to be discovered, becoming a worldwide number one smash in 2002. “Let Yourself Go's” time has yet to come.
In pairing Elvis with Nancy Sinatra, MGM were clearly hoping to re-create the on-screen chemistry Elvis had shared with Ann-Margret in “Viva Las Vegas.” That was four ago, a long four years in which the pop world had been transformed beyond recognition. True, Sinatra was an international star in her own right, scoring a #1 with “These Boots Are Made for Walkin'” in 1966 as well as a number of other hits in the year before “Speedway.”
Leaving aside current chart popularity, Nancy Sinatra was no Ann-Margret, her persona lacking the energy and sex appeal with which Ann-Margret had inspired Elvis in “Viva Las Vegas.” Renata Adler put it well in her New York Times film review of June 14, 1968: “Miss Sinatra is far better singing than dancing or acting; the ‘These Boots Were Made for Walking’ spirit is just too formidable in a dancer.”
We get the usual gags and slapstick to compensate for the paper thin plot, Elvis' familiar troubles with finances, females, and fisticuffs (and boats/planes/cars). Elvis also takes in a family of kids, cue the obligatory song with and to kids. And in grim anticipation of the 1970's, there is also a manager who gambles away Elvis' money. For all of the added elements, yet again it is Elvis' energy, talent, and personality that carries the film beyond its weak story and thin plot:
“Under Norman Taurog’s know-how comedy direction even some of the silliness in the Phillip Shuken script gets by as entertainment, but the story lacks the legitimacy of better Presley starrers. However, with Presley in there swinging in his usual style and his own particular brand of lightness, the feature stacks up as an okay entry.”
I'd say that “okay” is a pretty generous assessment. But if "okay" is the best we can hope for, and have to settle for, then we really do need to ask just what the point is. Over the years I have met many Elvis fans who get very defensive here and ask why we can't just accept these films for what they are, a little light entertainment and escapism in a troubled world. That may sound reasonable until you consider two things: a) the industrial scale production of these films; and b) the immense nature of Elvis' talent. My contention is that the former utterly devalued, denigrated and, ultimately, destroyed the latter. Elvis was capable of much, much better than films such as this. The movies were largely a waste of Elvis' time and talent. More than that, though, they were an abuse of Elvis' abilities and of his relation to the fans who, ultimately, made his wealth. That's why I refuse to be lenient. There are other, much lesser, stars who the world employs for inconsequential light entertainment. Elvis had the kind and depth of talent that ought to have had substantial consequences.
With “Speedway” in 1968, Elvis' Hollywood career was drawing to an end. If Elvis had any ambitions to be a serious actor left, then it was now or never. It is evident, though, that the approach all along was merely to issue the films to Elvis fans only, for so long as they were prepared to hand over their money. Once that strategy had been run to exhaustion, though, there was no room for manoeuvre left. The fans would walk away and no one else would be interested, after dozens of 'sun'n'fun' films, in Elvis' supposed acting aspirations. Anything different that would come to be tried would be less a result of artistic ambitions than of commercial desperation. It's a harsh view that will upset Elvis fans, but I'm as big an Elvis fan as anyone, and I bitterly regret his wasted time and talent as well as the abuse of his position as leader of the new rock and soul pop world. After giving “Speedway” a little praise in her New York Times review, Renata Adler spoke well in lamentation in what had become of Elvis, the pioneer of rock and blues based pop. She openly called the films a waste of Elvis’s talent, and as upsetting as it may be for certain fans, I, for one, am in full agreement:
“And this is after all, just another Presley movie—which makes no great use at all of one of the most talented, important and durable performers of our time. Music, youth and customs were much changed by Elvis Presley 12 years ago; from the 26 movies he has made since he sang ‘Heartbreak Hotel’ you would never guess it.”
Had such films been one-offs, done for a little light entertainment, time off from serious “Heartbreak Hotel” type work, then we could be lenient and accept them and even enjoy them for what they were: undemanding, entertaining, light-hearted travelogues with lots of girls. But in becoming the main business, they took the place of serious work, and that constitutes an artistic abomination.
Live a Little, Love a Little
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producer: Douglas Laurence
Director: Norman Taurog
screenplay Michael A Hoey, Dan Greenberg, based on Greenberg's novel Kiss My Firm But Pliant Lips
90 minutes
Opened: October 23, 1968
A curiosity of a film. I'll award a mark or two for ambition. At least someone was trying to do something different. As to what that was, I had no idea when I first watched. In the first place, I could never work out what Michele Carey's problem was or why Elvis was dragged into it and allowed himself to stay in it. It looked like she had kidnapped him and was hell bent on keeping him a prisoner, to what end I had no idea. She puts him to bed, seeing as he is running a temperature. You have to forgive us Elvis fans for being so uncomprehending, but the idea of sex slaves and female rapists are not exactly the first things that come to mind when watching an Elvis film. It's a curious old set up. A delivery boy turns up, as does a milkman, and the fact that they seem to have the run of the house heavily implies that they are frequent and very familiar visitors. Carey's 'dead' husband turns up too. Except that he isn't dead at all. He isn't her husband, either. He is very much alive. Elvis soon starts to think he is losing his mind. And so, no doubt, do the rest of us. As a song, “The Edge of Reality,” is one of a kind, a surreal psychedelic big ballad, the kind of thing that is possible only in Elvis world, a world in which a nymphomaniac can take you to bed and yet place a wooden dividing board down the middle. The film is an attempt at some kind of Frank Capra/Cary Grant craziness. Full marks for the attempt at a sophisticated sex comedy, but it was botched, stymied from the start, and poorly scripted. There was no end-game, which means the pretence soon wears thin. From the intriguing premise, we soon come to understand that the film is going nowhere. That leaves the actors with the impossible task of sustaining pure empty illusion. At which point, the shenanigans cease to amuse and start to irritate.
The film may look like an ambitious attempt to try something different with the Elvis film, but it was betrayed by the continued domination of commercial considerations. It was not an attempt at sophisticated sex comedy at all, it was a marketing strategy which, having seen the exhaustion of the tried and tested formula, looked around in desperation for something else that could be exploited. So we get this half-baked 'solution' to the problem of declining interest in the Elvis film that goes off half-cocked. Such solutions, of course, make problems much worse more often than not. That dividing line in the bed says it all. Michele Carey is supposed to be a nymphomaniac who kidnaps Elvis to be her sex slave. She even gets him into bed, which is a first in an Elvis film, only to make a big thing of the dividing line. I don't know, were Elvis fans still the “innocent little girls” that Ursula Andress claimed them to be in 1963? The problem lies, of course, with those making decisions and exercising pretty severe vetoes with regard to what little is permissible in the permissive society. The Elvis films are packed with gaggles of groovy chicks, but it's all as ersatz as the 'groovy' rock and blues numbers. The fuss made over the shower scene says it all. Elvis is showering. I suspect that he has no clothes on, which is the normal procedure. Carey approaches, in her own home, as if her behaviour is wildly transgressive. She approaches like a teenage girl offering to rub Elvis' back, and is all wide eyed and apologetic when her hands and eyes seize on something that ought to have been totally expected when reaching so low, so deliberately. Are these people thirteen? Out of nowhere – apart from the kidnapping - Carey brings up the question of sex, querying Elvis “I’ll bet you’re a marvellous lover,” challenging him to offer proof. She proceeds to ask him, “Would you like to make love to me?,” which plays not so much as a question as a demand. But before there's even a hint of him coming to act upon the request, she pushes him away. The film has pretty severe boundaries for a sex comedy, in other words. It soon becomes clear that the film would never and could never deliver on its premise. A waste of time in other words. And another waste of Elvis' talent. Elvis had started the film in happy mood singing “Wonderful World” on the beach, but his kidnapping by Carey turned him angry, and his mood was made all the angrier as a result of encounters like this. That's not a good atmosphere for successful romanticizing.
Working within constraints such as this, the story could go nowhere, which is precisely where it went. It was a decent enough premise, but a hugely botched operation. Once you realize that the film raises expectations that it can't and won't deliver on, then the shenanigans just get repetitive and boring, setting you up for a punch that will never be delivered. You are just left wondering whether the delivery boys and milkmen ever got any further.
The Variety review of October 9, 1968 described “Live a Little, Love a Little” as one of Elvis' “dimmest vehicles.” That's harsh, because it does at least intrigue where the cars/boat/planes films merely bored. If those latter films were more coherent, that was because they were unambitious and undemanding. At least “Live a Little, Love a Little” attempted something above the mundane. It failed, though. The Variety review continues: “Story peg—why has Michele Carey effectively kidnapped him?—is sidetracked in banal plotting and trite dialog until the answer not only doesn’t matter, it is barely noted at all … Songs are dull, physical values are standard, and mediocrity prevails … Below average b.o. prospects loom for Metro on general duals.”
That reference to an intriguing premise being sidetracked by the banal and the trite says it all.
It could actually have been far better, and I'll give quite a few marks for the attempt at a sophisticated sex comedy, knocking one or two off for the failure in execution. The film is irritating, but that is still something that that raises it a few levels above the tedious vehicles that Elvis had recently been putting us through. And the songs are very far from dull. More than three decades later, “A Little Less Conversation” was resurrected to become a global number one smash.
Nevertheless, I have to further withdraw some of the marks I gave for attempting something new. Because the film was not really committed to new artistic directions, only to searching for new ways to market the Elvis film brand. Movie goers had had their fill of the old brand, tasking the movie makers with having to discover a new brand that would tempt people to part with their money? So, yes, it's an attempt at something new. What else were the movie makers going to do? The 'sun'n'fun' romantic comedies were long played out at the box office. Had those films still been successes at the box office there would have been no change at all. But they weren't, so new elements were added and new direction, very tentatively, were taken. Films like “Easy Come, Easy Go” and “Double Trouble” had been the start of attempts to add new, avant-garde, elements to Elvis' films. “Live a Little, Love a Little” cuts back on the music (there are only four songs, one of which is sung over the opening credits) and marks an attempt to revive Elvis' flagging film career with a different approach. It didn't succeed, and it didn't deserve to given the narrow parameters that were imposed – a sex comedy without sex.
The film years had been wasted. Rather than staying fresh and developing, all involved were content to keep taking the money by making the same film. That was the only consideration. The wonder is that it took people this long to get tired and turn away, never to return. The loyalty of the fans had not merely been taken for granted, it had been cynically abused. “Live a Little, Love a Little” did poorly at the box office. Elvis' days as a film star were now numbered. So studio executives went in search of another, more lucrative, way of marketing Elvis in the films. But their searches smacked of commercial desperation rather than artistic endeavour. They were really looking for a device or gimmick that could trick the fans out again rather than produce anything of any substance. So they moved from sophisticated sex comedies to the new breed of westerns ...
Charro!
National General Pictures
Producer: Harry Caplan
Director: Charles Marquis Warren
screenplay: Charles Marquis Warren from a story by Frederic Lewis Fox
98 minutes
Opened: March 13, 1968
To this day, the effect of being confronted by Elvis in “Charro!” is still something of a shock. It's as if Elvis had suddenly been plucked out of his endless sun'n'fun beach party and dropped smack in the middle of the unforgiving terrain of the spaghetti western. I think Elvis had a fight in every one of his films, and I'm sure he chased – and was chased by – girls in all those films too. But, of course, it was all pretend for the most part, and you always knew it was. No one ever got hurt, and there was no sex, either. There are exceptions, true, such as “King Creole,” “Jailhouse Rock,” and “Flaming Star.” Of course, pretend is the point of films, but you are not supposed to be so consciously aware of the mechanics involved. Long before the end came you knew the score and it had long since become very tedious. But now, with “Charro!” Elvis had been plunged into the new world of the spaghetti western, a world characterized by a pervasive sex and violence. That makes for a unique role in Elvis' film career. It could, really, have marked a departure had there been any serious intent to involve Elvis in an actual spaghetti western, and not a pale imitation. Someone seems to have had the idea to try this out as a new vehicle, only for someone else to wimp out on the sex and violence. The result is a half-hearted venture that falls far short of any real punch. Which is not exactly how Clint Eastwood, Eli Wallach, and Lee Van Cleef do it. All involved must have known that the film would suffer in comparison.
This is the only film in which Elvis doesn't perform any songs. He is heard singing the title song over the opening credits, but that's it, there are no more songs. And, to his credit, Elvis does actually convince in the role, offering final proof that he could carry a film on his acting rather than his singing abilities. Just about. For years, I offered this film as evidence that Elvis was a serious actor in serious films. “It's a western,” I would say, as though that constituted sufficient argument in itself. Well, it's a fact, “Charro!” is indeed a western. And it is true that there are no songs, so “Charro!” is a “serious” film rather than a musical. Elvis sports a beard, and the film has the hints of the violence of the new era of westerns, with Elvis being tied up, tortured and branded. I'll bet that made his eyes water! Many more violent scenes were cut, which leaves the film something of a wimp-out, threatening toughness but cutting back the action to leave one long and extremely boring storyline. The story would have benefited from a lot more action, real action. Watch the Clint Eastwood films in the genre. It's not my scene, but films like this require a visceral quality if they are to convince. Variety says it well when it writes that “Presley strolls through a tedious roll that would have driven many another actor up the wall.” And truth to tell, Elvis does seem remarkably laid-back in the film. I'm not sure if that represents his attempt to play the strong and silent type, a man whose actions speak louder than his words, or whether he really is plain bored. It could simply be that he is not anything like a good enough actor to pull such a role off, or that this is not a good role for his acting abilities. When there is precious little action to keep us interested, you need strong words and character. It's not here. The film just drives me to switch over or nod off.
If people were bored by the Elvis film by this stage, then there's no sympathy to be wasted. Elvis' film career had had more second chances than pretty much anyone ever gets in this business, and they had been spurned by yet another installment in cars, boats, girls and money. They did that theme to death, and it was Elvis' film ambitions that died the death. I'll give decent marks for trying something different at the end, but it was too little, too late. It would be amiss not to draw attention to the weaknesses, the deliberate decision that was taken to temper the realism for fear of upsetting popular expectations of Elvis. You can't do too much that is different within the narrowest of parameters. As with “Live a Little,” so with “Charro!,” the film-makers promised something different only to back down when it came to acting on it. I can't in all honesty claim that sex and violence necessarily make for great art, but if you are going to take the decision to try out the new era of westerns for size, then don't do it in a half-hearted and timid way. It will be noticed and treated with scorn and ridicule.
In making these criticisms, I'll give full marks to Elvis for his keenness and for his trusting nature. He really did continue to think that those whom he employed, the people who made a lot of money on his back, would actually come, one day, to deliver the serious role he craved. He thought he had it here. He initially expressed great enthusiasm for the film, seeing it as a chance at last to take on a serious acting role. When he arrived for the first day of filming he discovered that the script had been completely rewritten and gutted in the process. What remained was only a pale shadow of what Elvis had signed for, but he was contractually obligated to fulfil the role and so couldn't back out. Being as good as his word and a good pro to the end, Elvis turned up for work and made the film. Let's remember to make those points in Elvis' favour when criticizing these films. The faults lay elsewhere. It is worth making these points to direct the harsh criticisms of the Elvis film away from Elvis and toward their true targets.
This film could have been very different. Whether good or bad or better or worse, we can't know. A lot of violent scenes were cut, as was the intention to open the film with a lot of bare breasted women – who'd have thought all those girls in bikinis would have had something like those things hidden away?! The things you learn. The nude women in the opening scene were dropped in favour of a predictable bar scene. Also cut was a nude scene involving Ina Balin. I say cut. I distinctly remember seeing this scene when the film was shown on British television some time between 1981-1983. This scene is rarely seen, I read, but I saw it on British TV. I can date it exactly because those were the years when I was in the Sixth Form. Has it been restored? What difference does it make? I remember being shocked as the family sat round to enjoy another Elvis film. The incident passed without comment, and the family survived the sight of female buttocks as Ina Balin climbed out of her bath. I just find the 'controversy' over this the most significant thing of all. It was as if Elvis films really were for innocent little girls (as Ursula Andress claimed as Elvis' main audience) and morons (as Jack Good and many more said). OK, the Elvis film was pitched to all the family, and there's a certain 'innocence' in that. In fact, it is a noble ambition, so long as it is not done merely for the cynical purpose of covering all bases.
Most revealing of all, when “Charro!” was released for home viewing, the MPAA gave it a “G” rating for “General Audiences:” “All ages admitted. Nothing that would offend parents for viewing by children.” Elvis' other films of this period were given a PG rating, which also makes me scream with laughter, given the pretensions of sex comedy with “Live a Little, Love a Little,” not to mention the borderline soft porn from the likes of “Tickle Me” and “Kissin' Cousins” to “Double Trouble,” Clambake” and “Stay Away.” I'm sorry, I am now engaged in open ridicule, when I promised to say something positive rather than predictable. But it is difficult to be uncritical.
“Charro!” is “the film that got away.” I won't disagree with critics that the film is bad and boring (although I will say that that is the norm for westerns, as far as I can tell, and I've seen a lot of them. Westerns are not my thing. "Where's the money? Whose got the money? How do we get the money?" All questions must be backed up by a pointed gun). At last, Elvis doesn't sing any songs and tackles a straight acting role. Unfortunately, the results are not significantly better, if better at all, than the formulaic musicals within which Elvis had been trapped. The problem lies not the attempt at a serious movie but its execution. There was a massive wimpout here from the start, which hobbled the film. Let's do a Spaghetti western, folks, they are the big thing, it's a great idea for marketing Elvis and reviving his film career! We may get to hit the till again! But on second thoughts, we'd better cut all that upsetting sex and violence out. Oh, and we'll have Hugo Montenegro instead of Ennio Morricone. That'll work. When Elvis hit the world with his rock'n'roll in 1956, we got a number of pocket Elvises as record companies tried to cash in. They were puny, pale imitations that were laughable, but were clean-cut, safe for the kiddies, and made a few dollars here and there. Here, we see the Elvis operation offering Elvis up as a pale Clint Eastwood impersonator, the strong and silent man with no name. Laughable, and very far from being lucrative.
It's the lack of vision and ambition that disappoints. I may have missed something here, but wasn't Elvis a million selling recording star with a string of hit singles as well as the highest paid star in Hollywood? Yes. So why were his films always cost cutting and cheap, going for the second hand?Were there no ideas? Was there no one around who could think as big as, or even bigger than, the big money that Elvis drew? Go big, pay big, splash some cash, get Morricone and take it from there.
It seems redundant to say that “Charro!” made a decent but not a massive profit as Elvis' film career idled its way to its end. Still, Elvis earned $850,000 for his efforts in growing a beard and withstanding the sight of female buttocks. He got 50% of the profits too.
The Trouble With Girls (And How to Get Into It)
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Producer: Lester Welch
Director: Peter Tewkesbury
screenplay: Arnold Lois Payser, adapted from a novel by Des Keene
97 minutes
Opened: September 3, 1969
“The Trouble with Girls (and How to Get Into It)” is a little known and little seen film. With a title like that, it summed up a lot that was wrong with the Elvis films. The problem he had now was how to get out of the trouble that endless 'sun'n'fun' had landed him in. It seems that pretty much everyone had lost interest in the Elvis film by this stage. Ironically, the disinterest and relative commercial failure of the films seems to have allowed a little creative space to open up in the Elvis film operation. It may not have always been successfully exploited (“Stay Away, Joe,” “Live a Little, Love a Little,” and “Charro!” exhibit flaws a mile wide, but have varying merits, if not exactly saving graces (see above)). I won't go so far as to say originality and innovation had entered the Elvis film world, because such things require more than a mere deviation from the sun/sea-cars/boats/planes-children/morons-girls/girls/girls formula provoked by commercial necessity. But in an idle moment I often speculate as to what would have happened had the films with which Elvis ended his career been the ones with which he had started his career – so long as they were done properly and not half-heartedly. By 1969, disillusion and disinterest had become too hard wired for things to have been turned around. In these latter films, Elvis seems at ease with himself, confident, mature. It's not that he knows that he has done good work and has earned critical recognition: he knows that he is about to break free from his Hollywood prison, and there is a certain liberation in being freed from false expectations, one's own as well as those of others. Elvis could have been a serious actor, but not with the management he had, not with his passivity, and not in the film world of his day.
Elvis was co-star rather than the lead in his very first film, “Love Me Tender.” Here, in “The Trouble With Girls,” his penultimate film, he is so laid-back and at ease with proceedings that he is effectively a genial host happy to share the screen with others. He lets a rich and varied cast containing Sheree North, Dabney Coleman, Marlyn Mason, Joyce Van Patten, Vincent Price, John Carradine, and Nicole Jaffee (the original voice of Velma is the “Scooby Doo” cartoons) make the running.
The film is set in 1927 and is part variety show, period comedy/drama, and murder mystery. Elvis is very comfortable in the role of a smooth-talking manager of a travelling Chautauqua company - a travelling tent show in the days before talkies, radio, and television. He is tasked with keeping calm during an eventful engagement in a small Iowa town, having to unravel a murder whilst weighing the charms of two leading ladies of equal charm and completely contrasting character (which alone raises it above the bulk of the Elvis films after 1963). He sails through it all, the epitome of grace under pressure. Either Elvis is the brilliant actor he had always wanted to be, or he really is at ease despite the mayhem around him, an ease born of seeing the end of his Hollywood nightmare in sight. Indeed, there are times when Elvis is so laid back that he effectively disappears from the film, becoming a support player in his own film. That may be why, when fans come to judge what their favourite Elvis films are, “The Trouble with Girls” seldom gets a mention. I'm not sure how many people have actually seen it, a lot more than actually remember it, I'd say. It is actually well worth catching if you can.
One of my most favourite horror stars, Vincent Price, puts in an appearance as a preacher big on moral rectitude. And John Carradine too! (Grapes of Wrath, Dracula). We are truly honoured. Witty lines, strong characters, the film offers another glimpse of the film career Elvis could have had. And I still say that “Clean Up Your Own Backyard” has the potential to be a worldwide smash hit in the manner of “A Little Less Conversation.” It has a strangely compelling video, too, antique and modern, with Elvis in a white suit playing blue eyed soul in a revivalist tent. It doesn't get more hip than that, although Elvis had one more try.
Change of Habit
Universal Pictures and NBC
Producer: Joe Connelly
Director: William Graham
screenplay: James Lee, William Schweitzer, Eric Bercovoci from a story by John Joseph and Richard Mor
93 minutes
Opened: November 10, 1969
Elvis' very last film, and therefore either completely ignored or simply dismissed as the last knockings of a desultory film career. It is actually a very good film, and I have no hesitation at all in listing it as among the best eight films of Elvis' career. *
*I say eight instead of a nice ten for a reason – having given the matter more thought than is healthy over the years, I am confident in saying that Elvis Presley made precisely eight fine films that I would have no hesitation in recommending to others. After eight, there are certain clauses and qualifications that need to be added. How high is your tolerance level with respect to songs sung to puppets, for instance? I'll say that Elvis made eight very fine films. That may seem few relative the very many, and all too memorable, bad films he made. But eight is still a decent number. And it's worth making that point given the tendency to dismiss Elvis' film career as such as generally appalling. It wasn't. The truth, as ever, is much more nuanced.
“Change of Habit” is a serious film with serious roles for all concerned. The film may contain songs, but they are few, and very much in keeping with the storyline and characterization, Elvis as idealistic young physician in an urban slum, working with three hip and socially aware nuns. Before you raise your eyebrows and allow the cynics to sway you here, give the concept a break. It fitted the social idealism of the age. In time, we may come have learned that the world is not so simple as to bend to good intentions, but those intentions were and remain worthy all the same. And the plot isn't untrue to life, either. In the seventies we had a RE teacher at our senior school who was an ex-nun. She'd bring her guitar to lessons and lead all the boys, aspiring punk rockers one and all, in a sing-song. And it was well received. (It was better than the normal lessons, for sure). Our deputy head would also take us for RE. He'd issue regular invitations to the guitar players and rockers among us to come along to his after hours religious get-togethers. There was a theme of religion with a social conscience well to the end of the seventies at our school. He also played Elvis' album of religious songs, “You'll Never Walk Alone” in one class. Far from provoking abuse and rebellion, the class seemed most content as they carried on with their work.
So I am never going to join those critics who deride the characters and their motives in “Change of Habit” to be impossibly idealistic. Is such idealism enough to overcome deeply-seated social and racial divisions? Most probably not. So the film's 'realism' has its limitations. But the ideals are no less worthy than that (and make a very welcome change from the tawdry themes of money and girls and gadgets in too many of the other films). And I'll take idealism over cynicism any day, so long as we remain open to others and prepared to learn from hard experience rather than succumb to it.
Of course we get a story which explores sexual tensions, too: that's obligatory in a film containing nuns (it never ceases to amaze me how many people obsess over the sex lives of nuns). It's God or Elvis, girls! I'm being facetious, of course, because this film offers a sympathetic reading of doctors and nuns and their vocations, and deals with the need to choose between the religious and the secular very sensitively indeed (see the scene with Mary Tyler More at the end and name me a film that does it better). Director William Graham was known for his experimental street theatre, and that real life approach comes over here. The script is excellent, too. Elvis delivers one of the very best performances of his career. Can you name one better? You might be able to name a better film, “King Creole” for instance. But can you actually name a better acting performance from Elvis? His co-star Mary Tyler Moore is also excellent. In fact there are quality performances all round in the film.
All that remains to be said is that Elvis' last film is lazily dismissed by film critics to be one of Elvis' worst film, and too many people accept that view. That view is wrong. It seems that no one was paying attention any more. Long suffering patience had finally snapped. Ironically, as a result, one of Elvis' very best films suffers the scorn that ought rightly to have been heaped on the films (and those responsible for those films) that had brought his career to an ignominious end. Interest was so low that the film wasn't even given cinema release in Britain, being shown for the first time two years later on BBC TV (August 1971), and that probably in response to Elvis' highly successful and long overdue return to live performance.
The first time I saw the film was also on BBC TV, as part of its season of Elvis films over the Christmas of 1977. This was as a tribute to Elvis, who had died in the August of that year, an end that had come far too soon but which, in retrospect, was long in preparation. The film was shown in the first week of January, 1978. I didn't like the film. I thought it soppy, with all its social issues and religious issues. And I thought it 'serious' rather than 'fun.' But I was twelve, and didn't want to think too much. I got this kind of sermonizing at school. And I was half right. The film is serious. But it has its fun moments, too. It is heavy, it is light; it is earnest, it is joyous; it is idealistic, it is gritty. It's flawed, yes, but its heart is in the right place, and in the end a good heart is about all we can ask for. With that, one day, all problems will be resolved. I'd suggest that we remember Elvis the film actor this way, and rather than focus on the bad that was done, think of the good, and in a sad moment think of the missed opportunities and alternate possibilities. But instead of lingering long in what might have been, appreciate the much good that there actually was. It could have been different, it could have been better. There are still good things to like.
"Let's Be Friends" is another of those simple songs that gets overlooked by the wider world. It was from Elvis' very last film, "Change of Habit" from 1969, which wasn't even released in the UK at the time, so low had the stock of the Elvis film fallen. That was a shame, because this was a film which expressed an idealism and a social conscience far removed from the silly sexploitation flicks he had been doing for the best part of a decade. It's one of his best five films, in my expert view. I've seen them all, and many of them several times. The best that I can say of most of them is that they are idle and undemanding and pass an hour or so if you are feeling down and need a little escapism. That's an underappreciated quality. From over thirty films, I say that there are five that count as good, and another three that are worth the time of non-fans. The rest of them fall within the category of "sun'nfun'n'girls'n'cars/boats/planes" (delete as appropriate). Taken on their own, as isolated examples, such films could be defended as a little light relief. Taken as a whole, they are a waste and embarrassment. Their very volume indicates an industrial scale betrayal, a production that betrays systematic intent and purpose. They are not 'fun,' they are exploitative.
It would have been good had Elvis changed his habits; it would have been good had those flashes of sheer brilliance that Elvis did display at his best really come to have been developed so as to express the wholesome quality I know for sure he had in spades. That's not what I see represented in these films. I really wish that Elvis could have find the nerve to change the stupid, exploitative, cynical management he had, that used his name to dip the pockets of Elvis fans like me, working him to death in the process. Elvis was treated like a moron, and the fans, too, were treated like morons. From this many conclude simply that Elvis was indeed a moron and that his fans, too, must have been moronic. Who but a moron would keep buying the same shoddy goods in expectation of something better, despite having been fleeced time and again? I'll plead guilty to wanting to hear the voice of my favourite singer. That's not actually a crime. People are not morons for simply wanting to hear Elvis sing something good, forever buying in the hope of hearing something that conforms to high expectations born of past achievements. It needs to be born in mind that even the worst of soundtracks contained at least a little gem that made all the frustration worthwhile. And if you were Elvis, knowing that people liked the sun'n'fun more than his serious records (“G.I. Blues” and “Blue Hawaii” from 1960 and 1961 sold in millions, whilst the immense "Elvis is Back" from 1960 sold a mere 200,000 copies). Elvis would get anywhere between $750,000 to $1 million up front plus a share of the profits for these films. Who would turn it down? Where does the balance between art and commerce lie? It takes some nerve for people from backgrounds of sheer poverty, people designed for a life of oblivion, to be eaten up as cheap labour, to turn money like that down. It can be done. But Elvis patently had little idea how to run his career, hence he let others mismanage it, and paid them handsomely for it. In truth, Elvis had little idea how to run his life, too. He went from poverty and obscurity to fame and fortune in a flash, cut off from any process of personal and social growth. He was a 'King,' of whom Shakespeare wrote "my presence like a robe pontifical, ne'er seen but wondered at." Elvis was separated from the world the rest of us inhabit, his fame and fortune destroying his art and music and finally his life. There was no space for development in his world, no real connections to others. So no wonder he came to live in a bubble. I hear a haunting quality in the voice, a lost and lonely figure compensating for a series of lacks and absences. It was there at the start, mind, long before the fame and fortune that came his way (listen to "Blue Moon" from 1954). It was there at the end. Fame and fortune can never fill the cracks in a broken soul, that needs material of much greater substance. So, of course, he ended his days as a bloated, inflated caricature of his oversized ego, a monstrous inversion of all that had been healthy and vital in his music. Some take an obscene delight in Elvis' demise, indulging an unpleasant taste for revenge and resentment. I see it as a tragedy. Because I know the story from the inside. How else could he have ended, cut off from all the things that create a sense of belonging and identity and meaning? That's the lesson for me.
If Elvis fans think I'm being harsh on the films, then I say my view that there are quite a few decent Elvis films would be considered overly-generous by many critics, who are inclined to dismiss the entire lot. In fact, the critics think the Elvis films so appalling – strictly for Elvis fans only – that they merit barely a mention. The critics are wrong, there are some good films here. The Elvis fans who say they are all good, as light entertainment, are wrong, too. It's not just fun, it's cheap and nasty, a waste of Elvis' talent and abuse of the fans' loyalty. Elvis fans don't help by saying everything Elvis did was great. Because it wasn't. I am the voice of reason on this! (never trust anyone who claims to be the voice of reason, mind, they are most usually precisely the opposite)).
In sketching out the ideas for this article, I did think of cutting the critical comment to simply focus on the good. But such a gloss would have been utterly false, continuing the delusion that kept Elvis on the false path for too long. I could have made the Elvis films look so good as to beg the question as to why they anyone could have ever found fault in them. The worst could even be defended as a little idle fun. It depends on what level of expectations you have for an artist. I think Elvis was better than this. Critics can respond by saying that we judge an artist by what he or she actually does, not by estimations inflated by adulation as to what he or she could have done. If Elvis was serious about his artistic ambitions, then he should have learned to say 'no' early on. His fans should have learned to say 'no,' too. "It's come to this!" Elvis screamed to his wife upon learning that he would have to sing "Old MacDonald" in the film "Double Trouble" in 1967. How could it never have finally come to some such thing, given the exploitative approach that was taken to film and music in the career of Elvis Presley from the first? Elvis was used as a vehicle to empty the pockets of Elvis fans, it's as simple as that. Complain to management, Elvis! Better still, get management to manage properly. Failing that, fire your manager! Be proactive and take the initiative in your career, and don't expect those driven by the bottom line to give a damn about art.
So the views I have expressed in this piece could be considered outspoken. I'll be blunt and say that most of these films were cheap and nasty, not fun at all but sexploitation, borderline soft porn at times, utterly fake and an affront to all that is decent and true. Coming from a Catholic background, I heard certain elders condemning all things Elvis as an abomination. The mother of my best friend at school was genuinely shocked when she learned that I was an Elvis fan. She was in charge of literacy at the primary school, worked with young people, and thought that Elvis was a bad influence who represented all that was wrong about modern society. (To balance that up, I have read many examples of girls at Catholic schools who experienced Elvis as a liberation, an invitation to express themselves freely without fear of censure). I smiled nervously, thinking her criticisms extreme. But she was deadly serious, warning of serious consequences attendant upon immoralism, sex divorced from relationships and reduced to physical impulse. Elvis was denounced in the fifties for being crude and vulgar, for eschewing a genuine romanticism for the flagrant exploitation of sex. He was denounced, too, for promoting violence and aggression for mere commercial gain. And such critics were referring to the material that we now consider to represent Elvis at his best and his most liberatory, the rock'n'roll of "Loving You," "Jailhouse Rock," and "King Creole."
It may seem laughable to criticize the Elvis film for sex and violence. The issue seems to have been mainly over the Elvis as the leader of rock'n'roll in the fifties. The Elvis of the sixties seems incredibly tame compared to much else that went on in that decade. The exploitation is there, but it is lame. There is violence to the extent that most Elvis films contained a fist fight or a few. But no one ever seems to get really hurt, it's cartoon violence without consequences. There is sex, too, to the extent that Elvis is surrounded by girls, but it's all pretty juvenile chasing and being chased. It is exploitative, and it conveys some pretty poor messages with respect to behaviour.
'Beware false freedom' is the message, and beware a self-absorbed egoism that panders only to physical flesh and desire. That way lies not freedom but enslavement to empirical necessity. Elvis found that out the hard way.
In my work on 'rational freedom,' I express the views of the moral philosophers here, eschewing the libertarianism and individualism of doing as one pleases, through false notions of natural goodness.
Bereft of God, human beings curve inwards on themselves and corrupt from within. When that false view of freedom prevails in society, that society too corrupts from within.
Let's Be Friends, I say, true friends. A Society of Friends.
And that concludes my brief ruminations on the films of Elvis Presley. I say ruminations rather than reviews, for the simple reason that I've presented merely personal views based on my own likes and dislikes rather than attempting any dispassionate and objective analysis. I've simply written on whatever has struck me as important or interesting as an Elvis fan of many years. I'm not a film buff in any case. I have a few films that I love, and I tend to watch them over and again rather than explore new films. I'm struck by how many times I have watched a film only to be deeply disappointed. I get tetchy watching films, I don't have the patience for them. And the truth is I'm not remotely interested enough in Elvis' films to even want to review them in detail : I just don't find the storylines very interesting – boys and girls at play in different settings with different toys. As I say, I'm a long standing Elvis fan, and I have to confess that the Elvis films have long been something of an embarrassment to me. I continue to make the case for Elvis as an exceptional artist. I dread people I talk to confronting me with any number of scenes from the Elvis films. I dread certain films ever coming to be seen again on television. I'm only amazed that they didn't sink Elvis first time round. I still think that they still have the potential to sink his reputation in the future. I'll not give examples here (I gave a few above), but if certain scenes and/or songs from these films ever came to prominence, then the Elvis world could have an awful lot of explaining to do – there is stupidity, there is shallowness, there is racism, there is sexism, there is even worse (I'll not elaborate, I did hint in the main text). I prefer to treat them as ephemera that will sink into oblivion in time. So you can call me critical.
So why did I bother to write at all on the Elvis films? Because the Elvis films are not all of a piece, and that to dismiss all Elvis films as bad is mere lazy generalisation, echoing the sheer prejudice and bigotry that Elvis suffered at the hands of critics from the first. A lot of the Elvis films are bad, and there are enough of them to support the sweeping generalisation that all the films were bad. That's not true; a detailed analysis reveals a very different story. I have shown above that it is only after the tenth film that standards start to drop, and then plummet. This is the point at which Elvis' manager Tom Parker instigated his cost-cutting policy, putting his plan for the quick and the cheap into overdrive. From here we were 'treated' to a flood of formulaic films and collapsing standards, with the odd exception.
I say that eight of the Elvis films count as very fine films, films that I would have no hesitation in recommending to non-Elvis fans as films worthy of their attention. I can offer these films to anyone without fear of shame or embarrassment. Maybe I should expand this to a top ten, just to fit in with normal standards.
1. Follow that Dream
2. King Creole
3. Wild in the Country
4. Change of Habit
5. Loving You
6. Flaming Star
7. Viva Las Vegas
8. Jailhouse Rock
9. The Trouble with Girls (and How to Get Into It)
10. Live a Little, Love a Little
HaHa! I'll bet that last selection gave you all quite a jolt after I had gone to such great lengths panning the film in the article. I couldn't in all honesty recommend the film to folk, but the choice for the last two films in this list is really any two from a dozen, depending on taste and mood (and whether you have any taste). Safe choices would be “G.I. Blues” and “Blue Hawaii,” it's just that many others fall in that neutral category (“Fun in Acapulco,” “World's Fair,” “Frankie and Johnny.”) It's not that they are good so much as not quite as irritating or objectionable as others. I really don't know, it depends on your own taste, and how tolerant you are of casual sexism. Some films are so bad as to hold a certain curiosity. You suffer their obvious faults because they attempt to deliver something above the usual.
I'm struggling when it comes to offering selections that would impress or, at least, entertain the non-Elvis world. I should put “Kid Galahad” in there, for all lovers of boxing musicals. There must be one or two. It's a decent enough film, which raises it several levels, leagues really, above “Kissin' Cousins.” In all honesty, though, I can't get past the eight good films. Many consider “King Creole” to have been Elvis' best film, but note the criticisms of the violent nature of the film that were made at the time, with Elvis' various criminal acts that go unpunished, setting a horrible example to the youth. And many may not like the surly and thoroughly unpleasant character Elvis plays in “Jailhouse Rock” either. Come to think of it, many may not warm to the charms of Ann-Margret in “Viva Las Vegas,” which ends up reducing that film to another of Elvis' racing car vehicles. And if you don't care for westerns, then “Flaming Star” may be a stretch, although I will defend it strongly as a serious film addressing racism and division. “Loving You” has its longueurs, too, the 'serious' emotional bits in the last half hour really dragging. But the music is fab! Some may say the same about “Wild in the Country,” the only difference here being that there is next to no music to liven proceedings up.
But seeing as I'm not really a film buff, I will probably come over as overly-harsh in my judgments on the Elvis films. I think I can justify the view that the top eight here are fine films. You will have to watch them all in order to make your own selections in order to make the number up to ten.