Beach boy... Elvis and Ursula Andress in Fun in Acapulco.
My first job in journalism was a semi-illicit post ghosting film reviews for a TV listings magazine. Looking back, it seems as though we divided our day between concocting fictional critiques of unseen TV-movies starring Cheryl Ladd and slapping bizarre health warnings on every picture that played past the watershed ("contains foul language and breasts"). For good measure, we also regularly sent Elvis Presley fans into a blue funk of fury.
Most of this fury would end up spraying the publication's bemused and hapless editor. A two-star review of Blue Hawaii, for instance, would trigger a blitz of hate mail to his office. An equivocating verdict on Girls! Girls! Girls! prompted demands for his head on a stick. The reasoning of all this correspondence appeared to be that Elvis was so self-evidently great that everything he touched must therefore be great as well. If the "Elvis Wart" can now have pride of place at an American museum, then surely the scheduling of an "Elvis Film" should be greeted with high hosannas, or at least be somehow commemorated on the magazine cover.
It's not hard to have some sympathy for these fans, if only because Presley was so spectacularly ill-served by the movies. There is a curious irony to the fact that a performer whose appeal was at least partly forged by his live screen appearances (that hip-swivelling debut on the Ed Sullivan show) should then find himself eaten alive by the Hollywood machine.
It's not even that Presley had little interest in acting and only did it on Colonel Parker's orders. The singer was a big admirer of Marlon Brando and James Dean (and, weirdly, Peter Sellers) and reportedly longed to find the sort of hard-edged, angst-ridden drama that would allow him to properly prove his mettle. Instead, he found himself shoe-horned into a gaggle of gurning, cynical musical cash-ins, with titles like Girl Happy, Fun in Acapulco and Contains Lots of Breasts (although I may have made that last one up).
In later years Presley apparently claimed that the vast bulk of his 30-odd pictures made even him feel physically ill (and this from a man who was bingeing on junk food and prescription meds at the time). Even the mass revisionism-verging-on-deification that followed his death seems to have drawn a veil over his acting career. Yes, I know that some generally sane and rational creatures contend that a few of the earlier outings - King Creole, Jailhouse Rock - are really very good. But be honest: are these really good films per-se, or just really good for an Elvis Presley vehicle (as in, more fun than Fun in Acapulco)?
Maybe the very qualities that made Presley so appealing to producers (that prodigious fanbase; that unschooled, eager-to-please air) made him wary of demanding better scripts and more challenging - and potentially damaging - roles. And possibly he would have floundered had he actually been given them. But it's surely not such a leap of faith to imagine that Presley might have been able to translate just a fraction of the energy and abandon of his stage performances to a screen performance, if only someone had been prepared to take the chance. It might not have been Brando. It might not have been the Sun Sessions. But surely it would have been better than all those racing-driver-meets-cute-girl-on-the-beach fripperies that he leaves us with today.
